Paying the Piper

Monkey diplomacy is expensive

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Excerpt:

Well, it has finally happened. The crisis born of unilateralism, strategic overreach and bravado
has come to pass. With U.S. forces tied down in two protracted wars, American credibility
at a record low and our dependence on foreign oil painfully obvious, a revitalized Russia is
on the move. And the blow has fallen where most analysts expected it would: on America's
closest ally in the Caucasus, the tiny Republic of Georgia.

Conciliation, not confrontation, should have guided American foreign policy in Eastern Europe
during the past decade. Instead, Washington continued to poke the Russian bear with a stick.
If the U.S. could act unilaterally to invade a sovereign state, why couldn't Russia?