As days go by, the Georgian puzzle starts to make some sense. No one can obviously say whether the sides had this scenery in mind on starting the game or not, yet a scenery is coming into focus.

The first important detail is that the Georgian President did not like what the USA came to tell him. Let alone the usual smiles and embraces, the BBC site reports the talk between Sakhashvili and Condoleeza Rice as "difficult". Whatever the nature of the troublesome process, one thing is clear: in the end Sakhashvili could only acknowledge that whatever the EU (main side, not the rebel eastern countries) and Moscow had agreed is to be the Bible. There is a lot of propagandistic smoke from both sides of the front, but this is the one and only factual result.

Now why did NATO fail to help Georgia? As earlier said on these pages, NATO can hardly help itself, nowadays. Our wars are being lost, we have no more soldiers to deploy and (which is much worse for an army) no more money to spend. I'm pretty sure that the one and only reason why we keep showing the Ukraine and Georgia the NATO admission carrot is that we need all the low cost soldiers we can get, while our smiles, handshakes and moral support are basically for free.

Yet we now reached the point in which it is clear that some memberships are not just a risk, but rather a formal declaration of war. No general will tell you that we can afford going out and out against Russia. For the simple reason that we don't even have the resources for us to confront Iran (let alone keeping our grip on Afghanistan and Iraq). Besides, the Bush administration is struggling to end its not very popular service by at least not harming too much McCain's chances for election. Even the stupidest advisor will surely tell them that a new war is the last thing they need.

Sure enough, that same stupid advisor should have told the same things to Sakhashvili, shouldn't he? Why was Georgia left free to make such a suicide attack? Is our intelligence so poor that we could not even get to know and manage a plan by our wannabe members, when it was 100% obvious that it would damage our interests in the region? Well, as it sadly turns out, it probably is. Reality is that we either missed the intelligence to evaluate the risk or we missed the influence on Sakhashvili that would have avoided such a diplomatic defeat. Because it definitely looks like a defeat and also like one that could have been very easily avoided, by using just a tiny bit of common sense. But is it really a defeat?

There is no such thing as a universal tool, and NATO is but a tool, as anything else. When the Roman Empire reached the barbarians it could not expand any further, because the Roman order was not fit for them. It was fit for places based on urban life, and the barbarians simply had another life-style, one that the Romans could not integrate with theirs. Mind you, I'm not saying any of the two was better than the other. The Romans surely built lots of wonderful things, but they eventually lost their war, so both sides must have had their practical pluses.

Here we face pretty much the same level of cultural discontinuity. NATO was born to team up western democracies, which it did pretty well. Just like all empires it needs constant expansion, yet now it has probably reached its natural limits. It may be objected that in the past we surely DID integrate entities that were not easily classified as western democracies, like Turkey (once again, I don't mean that a place is better than another). This is true, but Turkey had no outstanding military quarrel outside NATO. Its two military vectors of action were Greece and the Kurds, both of which were not in the position of starting a huge international war. In that case NATO worked remarkably well, eventually stabilizing the relations between Ankara and Athens (while the Kurds went largely ignored as an internal problem).

Here the situation is different. If we manage to accept the request of association by the Ukraine and/or Georgia we are going to be drawn into open conflict with Russia. What would happen then? Can anyone being unable to manage Iraq and Afghanistan expect to manage Russia as an additional front? Napoleon and Hitler thought so, and you can search your history book to read how it all ended. We cannot fight Russia, from a military point of view it would be as stupid as the Russians trying to occupy the EU or the USA. But if we cannot fight and Georgia is attacked, what happens when we refuse to assist her? Well, the answer should be quite clear, shouldn't it? Not helping Georgia is not much of a defeat NOW, because Georgia means nothing to us, from a normative point of view. Refusing to help a member... means NATO is dead.

In the end this incident can eventually be the greatest present ever made to NATO. We now have a good reason to refuse membership to both the Ukraine and Georgia at least until they learn that these kind of adventures must be discussed with partners first, and this means until forever, because they'll both never ever give a damn about our interests. In the meantime, we can keep smiling and showing our carrot for the next century. They'll be upset, so what? Do they have any alternative apart from saying "yes sir"? Who can they join? The Marsians?

Reality is that if we play it swift we will have all the soldiers and guns we need from both countries anyway, because we can always say that we are not even going to smile anymore, if they misbehave. And hopefully this is what we are doing, behind all the handshakes and public shows of worried support. Over 1.000 people died during this adventure. Probably 10 times more have lost all they had. Are YOU willing to be in their place just to make Sakhashvili happy? I'm not. And as a NATO tax payer and a potential father of NATO soldiers I'm not going to have my kin risk their lives for him. Let's keep the troublemakers well out of our club.

Sure, Russia definitely over-reacted. So what? We bombed and starved hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians when we needed oil. We all over-react, sooner or later. They will do it again, we will do it again, everyone will do it again. Politics means evaluating actual risks and assets, not mumbling Big Words about Principles. Because when you open fire it's not principles being targeted and damaged, it's people, buildings and money. If we do not start to make proper risk assesment, sooner or later it's going to be OUR people, OUR buildings and OUR money. I know many people will hate me for these words, yet... this is capitalism, my friends. The one thing NATO is bound to defend. OUR people, OUR buildings and OUR money.