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A forthcoming European Union summit will at least discuss sanctions against

The city itself is prosperous and modernizing. On its centralboulevard the old Institute of Marxism-Leninism is beingredeveloped as a Kempinski Hotel. The winding streets and squaresof medieval Old Tbilisi are now home to smart restaurants and bars.And these are full of seemingly carefree people enjoying themselveswell into the small hours.

As for political life the Georgian government is in place andfunctioning normally. President Mikheil Saakashvili addresses largecrowds and hosts distinguished foreign visitors. Its ambassadorslaunch legal suits against Russia at The Hague. As I walked into aminister's office for an interview, I crossed with a seniorofficial of the European Union emerging from it.

There is an eeriness about such normality when only a hour's driveaway Russian soldiers are systematically destroying Georgia'smilitary (and some civil) infrastructure, occupying towns andvillages, establishing "buffer zones" in "Georgiaproper" to add to their annexation of South Ossetia andAbkhazia, and arresting Georgian soldiers.

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All in all this is a very postmodern kind of war. The Russians haveplainly won the military outcome (though as yet we know littleabout how the actual battles went, the losses in the air war, andso on.) Equally plainly, however, they are losing the propagandawar. Almost no impartial observer believes their claims of"genocide" and "ethnic cleansing" by theGeorgians. The figures for the civilian dead and wounded inhospitals and morgues are far below the original Russianallegations of "thousands" that served to justify theirmilitary intervention. And the Georgian refugees tell horrifyingstories in their turn of murders and ethnic cleansing by SouthOssetian militias that Russian troops failed to halt. Now, theRussians may be losing the diplomatic and economic wars too.

Poland has already signed the U.S. missile defense deal that Putinhas been vehemently opposing. NATO has agreed that there cannot be"business as usual" as long as Russia occupies Georgia.Western Europeans are becoming nervous about their dependency onRussian energy. China and the Central Asian countries at theShanghai Cooperation Organization summit expressed disquiet aboutthe Russian intervention and recognition of the breakaway Georgianprovinces. A forthcoming European Union summit will at leastdiscuss sanctions against Russia. And nervous investors took $16billion out of Russia in the week following its military success.

So far these reactions have been mild -- too mild in the opinion ofcritics such as Charles Krauthammer. All the same they haveprevented the Russians marching to Tbilisi and"suiciding" Saakashvili. So far.

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Georgians are well aware of these postmodern realities. TemurIakobashvili is their minister for national reintegration -- whichsurely must be the most optimistic ministerial title in history.But he is bleakly realistic when I interview him for RFE/RL.

His first point is a concession -- yes, there was a"miscalculation" by Georgians when they launched theattack in early August. But Georgians were not the only people whomiscalculated:

"When I was at a press conference in Brussels in May of thisyear and I said we were on the brink of war, I saw a lot of worriedfaces coming to me and saying: You are using very strongconnotation. War is a very, very strong connotation for theEuropean virgin ear."

It is so strong a connotation that the Europeans simply avertedtheir eyes from the gathering storm. But as Trotsky remarked: Youmay not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.

Now that the war has taken place, it is forcing the WesternEuropeans to revise all their pre-war assumptions about the role ofRussia, the superiority of soft power over hard power, the dominantrole of economics in international relations, and much else.

Iakobashvili was also realistic about how this postmodern war wouldbe fought: "I don't see that there is any military componentof pressuring Russia, but there is a political component...showingthem the political price of not complying with an agreement."

Here the problem is neither military nor economic butpsychological: the cultural pessimism and even defeatism of theWest. My Hudson Institute colleague, Charles Fairbanks, who liveshalf the year in Georgia, points out that "the United Statesis far more powerful than Russia, which has an economy in the rangeof South Korea's, and that superiority has multiplied vastly sincewe strove successfully against the Soviet Union. Only the tunnelvision that comes from immersion in a crisis can conceal thisdominant reality."

Georgian officials, Western businessmen, and locally baseddiplomats feel exactly the same thing, sometimes very impatiently.On my final night in Tbilisi, one Western diplomat outlined thestring of financial and economic measures that the West couldimpose either to alter or frustrate Russian policy. Some positivemeasures -- aid and investment programs for Georgia -- were alreadyin the pipeline. The eventual package might be so generous thatGeorgia would be half-integrated into the EU. A prosperousindependent Georgia, still outside Russian control despite the war,would significantly weaken Russia's influence throughout theCaucasus.

The stakes of this new great game were very high, as an energycompany executive said over the same dinner. If the Russiansremained in Georgia proper, they would exercise de facto control ofall energy pipelines going from Central Asia to Western Europe. Ifthey then forged an alliance with Iran on the Gulf as well, thesetwo anti-Western powers would have a chokehold on Europe's mainenergy supplies.

For the moment, however, the Russians had limited ability todisrupt and were vulnerable to economic and diplomatic penalties.The country was weaker than it looked -- over-dependent on energyprices, needing foreign capital and management skills, facing ademographic crisis that ultimately threatened a shortage ofRussians. The West had at its disposal a series of negativeincentives -- expulsion from the G8, etc. -- that could be veryeffective for the immediate future.

Both positive and negative incentives, however, required a unitedWest to back them. If Europe and America or different Europeancountries split into different camps, then the Russians could winthis postmodern war. And they saw it in such terms. Did the West?

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Outside my hotel in Freedom Square is a tall marble column thatused to be the pedestal for a statue of Lenin. It now supports agolden piece of statuary that depicts St. George spearing thedragon. Outside the world of Georgian myth, however, the dragon isstill ahead on points.


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