The past week's ugly little war in the Transcaucasus appears to be over, with Russian forces having scored a decisive victory over the Georgians and, in the process, sending a sharp note to the West that Russia's Government will take whatever measures it feels necessary to defend its commercial, strategic and sovereign interests, particularly in the regions abutting its extensive frontiers.
It matters little who ultimately initiated the conflict or that it was such an undignified and one-sided contest cloaked in hypocrisy and opportunism: what is of greater consequence is that the West, principally the United States, misjudged the mood of Russia when it sought to draw Georgia, once part of the Soviet Union, into NATO's orbit.
This, of course, is not the first time Russia has acted forcefully, or tested the limits of propriety, in furthering its domestic and international agendas. In recent years it has manipulated oil and gas supplies, imposed trade blockades, forcibly prevented ethnic minorities from obtaining their independence, launched cyber-attacks, and assassinated its enemies abroad.
Why, then, America might have supposed Russia would passively accept Georgia being drawn into its orbit and becoming a full NATO member is hard to fathom. But then the US has often misread the mood of Russians and their political leaders since the collapse of the USSR in 1991.
The fall of communism in that year was greeted universally as a positive development in modern political history, not least because it brought the expensive Cold War to an end.
The US, as the leader of the free world and the principal foil to communism, might have played a leading role in embracing the nascent democratic Russian Federation and bringing it closer to Europe economically, politically and strategically. Instead, it continued to act as though it regarded Russia as a defeated enemy.
A sense of political triumphalism was understandable, at least in the short term, since it was the Reagan administration that had forced the Soviet Union to undertake defence spending it could not afford, thus winning the Cold War by default. But foreign policy-makers in the administrations of George Bush the elder and Bill Clinton made a serious mistake by allowing that self-congratulatory narrative to influence their relationship with Russia.
They failed to appreciate that victory for one side does not necessarily mean the other side welcomes the stigma of defeat. Worse, they began to treat Russia as irrelevant to American geopolitical considerations. George W. Bush's foreign policy doctrine predicated on the assumption that the US, as the world's sole superpower, answered to no one doubtless added to the sense of a loss of power, prestige and influence felt in Russia. But Bush compounded the error by becoming an enthusiast for NATO enlargement, openly encouraging the governments of former Soviet satellites to seek membership. Later, he sought agreement with some of these governments to base US Interceptor missiles and radar stations on their territory in return for military aid and promises of US support in their bids to secure NATO membership.
Responding to objections by Vladimir Putin that these were intended to isolate Russia and were a threat to Russian national security, Bush claimed that they were instead part of a missile defence system intended to protect Europe from attack by rogue states such as Iran. A wiser president might have concluded that Russia's objections about US missiles on its doorstep were not without foundation, and paused, but Bush continued his duchessing, particularly of Ukraine and Georgia's pro-Western leaders, seemingly oblivious to the growing anger of Russia's then president, now Prime Minister, and his well-publicised efforts to rebuild Russia's military capabilities.
If a succession of US presidents correctly judged that Russia was a failed communist empire in 1991, they failed to recognise that it was still a great power in the traditional sense and that there might be considerable benefits to be had not least touching the security of western Europe by helping it to make that transition. They may have been blind-sided to this realisation by the apparently rapid decline of Russian morale after the tumultuous overthrow of communism in 1991 (and by the rise of China and India as economic superpowers) but it was always apparent that Russia would be sidelined for only a short time.
And it was always likely, given Russia's long history of autocratic rule, that a post-communist government there would evolve into a model somewhat removed from the European democratic tradition, and that Russians would be comfortable with this model. By its swift action in Georgia this week, Russia has demonstrated in stark terms the reality of its military and economic power. And, by its muted and ambivalent response, the West has shown that it now recognises this fact.