BERLIN: The Russian tanks rumbling across parts of Georgia are forcing a fundamental reassessment of strategic interests across Europe in a way not considered since the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the subsequent collapse of communism.
Washington and European capitals had encouraged liberalization in lands once firmly under the Soviet aegis. Now, they find themselves asking a question barely posed in the past two decades: How far will or can Russia go, and what should the response be? The answer will play out not just in the European Union, but along its new eastern frontier, in once-obscure places like Moldova and Azerbaijan.
Already, the United States has changed tack toward Moscow. There will be no U.S. military action in the Caucasus, but by dispatching Condoleezza Rice to Georgia and insisting that Russia withdraw, Washington underlined that the Russians should not move on the capital, Tbilisi. French leaders, acting on behalf of Europe, had already firmly told the Russians they could not insist on the ouster of Georgia's president, Mikheil Saakashvili, as precondition for a cease-fire.
Farther west in Poland, American negotiators Thursday dropped resistance to giving the Poles advanced Patriot missiles in exchange for stationing parts of a missile defense system there. That system, the Americans insist, is intended to deflect attack from Iran.
The Russian ambassador to NATO, Dmitri Rogozin, was not the only member of the Russian military and political leadership who saw things differently. "The fact that this was signed in a period of a very difficult crisis in the relationship between Russia and the United States over the situation in Georgia shows that of course the missile defense system will not be deployed against Iran but against the strategic potential of Russia," he told Reuters.
The Poles, indeed, had their own security in mind. "Poland wants to be in alliances where assistance comes in the very first hours of - knock on wood - any possible conflict," Prime Minister Donald Tusk said.
"The reality is that international relations are changing," said Pawel Swieboda, director of demosEUROPA, an independent research organization based in Warsaw. "For the first time since 1991, Russia has used military force against a sovereign state in the post-Soviet area. The world will not be the same. A new phenomenon is unfolding in front or our eyes: a re-emerging power that is willing to use force to guarantee it interests. The West does not know how to respond."
At stake 20 years ago was whether the Kremlin, then under Mikhail Gorbachev, would intervene militarily to stop the collapse of communism. But Gorbachev chose to cut Eastern Europe free as he focused - in vain - on preventing the collapse of the Soviet Union itself.
Communist bloc lands from the Baltic States in the north to Bulgaria in the south have since joined the European Union and NATO - a feat, despite flaws, that in the Western view has made the continent more secure and democratic.
But Russia never liked the expansion of NATO. In the 1990s, it was too weak to resist; today, in the Caucasus, Russia is showing off its power and sending an unmistakable message: Georgia, or much larger Ukraine, will never be allowed to join NATO.
The implications of Russia's action reverberate well beyond that, from the European Union's muddled relations with its key energy supplier, Russia, through Armenia and Azerbaijan in the south, to Ukraine and Moldova.
This region has everything the West and Russia both covet and abhor: immense reserves of oil and gas, innumerable ethnic splits and tensions, corrupt and authoritarian regimes, pockets of territory which have become breeding grounds or safe havens for Islamic fundamentalists. As a result, the region has become the arena for competition between the Americans and Europeans on the one hand, and Russia on the other, over how to bring these countries into their respective spheres of influence.
The EU - as ever, slow and divided - has offered few concrete proposals in order to bring the countries of what Russia calls its "near abroad" - Belarus, Ukraine, the Caucasus and the Caspian - closer to Europe. Russia insists it should protect ethnic Russians and Russian citizens in those countries - a point that President Nicolas Sarkozy of France seemed to concede this week in a Kremlin appearance alongside President Dmitri Medvedev.
The emergency meeting this week of EU foreign ministers showed just how divided they were. Analysts say it is because the 27 member states have not been able to separate their view of Russia from adopting a clear strategy towards the former Soviet republics on the EU's new eastern borders.
"The Georgia crisis shows that Russia is in the process of testing how far it can go," said Niklas Nilsson of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute in Stockholm. "This is part of a much bigger geopolitical game. It is time for the Europeans to decide what kind of influence it wants in the former Soviet states. That is the biggest strategic challenge the EU now faces."
NATO, led by the U.S and several East European countries, has reached out more actively. At a summit meeting in Bucharest in April, Georgia and Ukraine failed to get on a concrete path to membership as they had sought, but did secure a promise of joining eventually.
Georgia and its supporters say that NATO membership would have protected Georgians from Russian tanks. West European diplomats by contrast note with relief that Georgia is not in NATO, and thus could not invoke the Article V of the alliance charter that stipulates that an attack on one member justifies other alliance nations coming to its defense.
The newly resurgent Russians, buoyed by oil and gas wealth and the firm leadership of Vladimir Putin, have played their hand with less hesitation.
Tomas Valasek, the Slovak-born director of foreign policy and defense at the Center for European Reform in London, says Russia has used the ethnic and territorial card in order to persuade some NATO countries that admitting Ukraine or Georgia would prove more dangerous and unstable than keeping them out. Georgia's incursion Aug. 7 into South Ossetia, a territory that fought Georgia from 1990-1992, serves both these Russian arguments and Moscow's passionate objections to the West's support for an independent Kosovo.
Recognize Kosovo's break with Serbia, Putin warned last spring, and Russia will feel entitled to do the same with South Ossetia and Georgia's other breakaway enclave, Abkhazia - where Putin needs stability in order to realize his cherished project of the 2014 Winter Olympics in nearby Sochi.
Ukraine, bigger than France and traditionally seen by Russians as integral to their heritage and dominion, has been conspicuously quiet over the past week. President Viktor Yushchenko flew to Tbilisi with the presidents of the three Baltic states and Poland to show support. But he later failed to join them at the side of President Mikheil Saakashvili. Both Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko have been measured. "They are very concerned about the Crimea and the energy situation ahead of the winter," said a spokesman who requested anonymity.
In the case of Crimea, Yushchenko signed a decree that would impose further controls over access to the port of Sevastopol, where the Russian Black Sea fleet is based. Russia has insisted it would keep the fleet there despite a 1997 agreement between Moscow and Kiev to end the lease in 2017.
Senior Ukrainian officials say that the weak EU response on Georgia will only embolden Russia to focus even more on Ukraine, where many inhabitants speak Russian and, particularly in the eastern half, look to Moscow, not Kiev, for leadership.
"The crisis in Georgia has clear implications for regional security, and of course Ukraine," said Hryhoriy Nemyria, deputy Prime Minister of Ukraine who is responsible for European integration. "This crisis makes crystal clear that the security vacuums that have existed in the post-Soviet space remain dangerous.
"After Georgia is Ukraine," said Swieboda. "The EU and U.S. cannot take their eyes off Ukraine now. Russia will do everything possible to ensure that NATO will not offer Ukraine the chance to start accession talks in December."
As for Georgia's eastern neighbor Azerbaijan, energy and ethnic tensions provide ample fodder for strategic dispute. Georgia and Azerbaijan are crucial for EU plans to build the Nabucco pipeline that would bring gas from Central Asia and Azerbaijan via Georgia to Europe. That would weaken Europe's dependence on Russia; it is hard to see investors lining up to bankroll Nabucco if Georgia remains in military conflict. Azerbaijan also has Caspian oil, which must again travel west via Georgia.
But it is the unresolved status of Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan, which explains why President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan has been measured in his response to the crisis in Georgia.
After a bloody war in the early 1990s, Nagorno-Karabakh functions as a part of Armenia, supported by Russia.
"Aliyev has adopted a different style than Saakashvili," said Leila Alieva, director of the National Committee on Azerbaijan's Integration in Europe. "We know that Russia is involved in Nagorno-Karabakh. Aliyev does not want to provoke Russia by trying to change the status quo of the enclave. If he tried to do so, it could cause a big Russian reaction."