The Cold War ain't over... it's not even cold.
In today's NYT:
President Saakashvili compared Georgia to Czechoslovakia in 1938, trusting the West to save it from a ravenous neighbor. “If Georgia fails,” he said to me darkly two months ago, “it will send a message to everyone that this path doesn’t work.”
While we find the 1938 analogy a bit of a reach, how about the same country in 1968? Or Hungary in 1956? In both these cases, the people took the tacit encouragement of the US as meaning that their backs would be had by the military might of the US.
They din' have it then, and they don' have it now.
Despite all the encouragement for democratic freedoms, in the end, at least in the sort term, soft power is no defense against hard power. Think of it as butter vs. hot knife... or, to stretch the analogy even further, hot sicle.
