All I know is that China is looking at this situation, as well as the world’s, and our response and biding it’s time until it does the same to Taiwan.
As Russian forces crossed South Ossetia into Georgia, the moment arrived for inescapable acknowledgement that Putin revoked the Cold War armistice. Russian military justifications contains too many parallels to list to Hitler’s concern for Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia. This extravagant attack examples traditional Russian ruling elite neurotic insecurity; neurosis requiring rival power destruction, and never allowing political compromise.
Genetic, multi-millennial paranoia infects the current cabal to regard NATO, former Warsaw Pack countries, and former Soviet republics as encircling enemies. Such perceptions, not shared by Russian people, repudiate years of Western support for emerging Russian representative government, political security, and economic stability.
There can be no permanent peaceful coexistence with a totalitarian Russia, but neither is war inevitable. Illogics lead this cabal onto unacceptable paths, but these Russian elites remain highly susceptible to logics of force with determination to use it. Forceful initiatives require immediately curtailing efforts to integrate the former Soviet Union into the economic, cultural, and political life of the Free World. Next initiatives require increasingly serious discussions of cooperation between NATO, and former Warsaw Pack countries and former Soviet republics. Finally, the United States must update Cold War plans through cooperative military exercises in Europe and the Mediterranean.
Such progressive, consecutive initiatives establish negotiating positions Putin must consider. Effective containment will reveal the fragility of a totalitarian rule needing solidification within a disaffected, cynical population. The West must not reject this opportunity to make the cruel subjection of Georgia become Putin’s undoing.
South Ossetia is also close to the Russians since almost all South Ossetians are Russians and fought a bloody war for independence from Muslim Georgia.
Then there's the rest of Ossetia. North Ossetia is still part of Russia.