All we can and should be doing is massively building up the defensive capability of all the remaining border states, esp. Poland and Ukraine, and enlarging our own military, which is spread thin and tied down in the Middle East. We don't have the manpower and resources to fight Russia, Iran, and possibly N. Korea all at once.
There is nothing, in principle, to stop the Russians from repeating their Georgian game plan in places like the Baltic states, which are tiny and have large Russian minorities.
Utter rubbish.
Russia was eaten up during a decade of Afghanistan...eaten up again during a decade of war in Chechnya...and Georgia has a larger economy (and similar remote mountain topology) than either.
Georgia has lost no means of Defense that can’t be replaced by *better* armaments.
In contrast, the Russians can only draw down their forces in other regions so far (for an assault or occupation on parts of Georgia) without inviting even more groups/regions to break away.
Strong-arm tactics are a Kremlin legacy, but they only work to a point, and don’t work if Russia ever shows weakness.
In contrast, had Russia been using its new oil wealth to fund lucrative trade deals, their former client states would have been *volunteering* to rush back to become ex-Soviet Vassels again.
So Russia used the wrong tool.
This will cause them to extend their forces into a remote region, where newly armed Georgian uniformed military forces will bloody them and Georgian paramilitary forces will make Chechnya and Afghanistan terror tactics look like amatuer hour.
Further, Russia’s aggression will serve to end all serious European opposition to U.S. missile defenses in Czech and Poland.
It validates President Bush’s strategy of expanding NATO against Russia, as well.
Bush is now a visionary, accurately predicting the Russian future (e.g. Rusky-expert Rice as SecofState) and proactively having acted to expand NATO and deploy missile defenses against it...none of which “just happened overnight” but were in fact in motion for years.