I've been way too lazy to write, lately. Once in a rare while, that works in my favor. Three separate people today have asked me if the Russian invasion of Georgia means that they should be worrying about the risk of a nuclear war between the US and Russia. I spent a couple of hours, off and on, trying to knock together a good backgrounder on the subject, but really didn't have all that powerful an urge to write it down. And then, just as I was about to give up and go to bed, I found out that BBC diplomatic correspondent Bridget Kendall has done most of it for me, so start here: "Russia actions confound allies," BBC News, 8/12/08.

All I want to add is this. Georgia got conquered by the long-gone Russian Empire one holy heck of a long time ago. As a propaganda move, it was declared a separate "republic" in the old Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, with its own borders, but no actual independence was intended or implied, let alone achieved. Actual independence came in 1991, when in the midst of a total military and economic collapse, the Soviet Union ceased to exist, and what was left of a Russian government grudgingly conceded freedom to a whole bunch of places that the Russians really did feel belonged to them, never mind that nobody else thought so, like Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Belarus, the Ukraine, and yes, Georgia. And Russia's current extra-constitutional dictator-for-life, Vladimir Putin, has never accepted that.

Nor, it turns out, did some people who really didn't want to be in Georgia, no matter where the old Soviet Union had drawn the borders, the Abkhazians and the South Ossetians. Who fought their own war of secession from Georgia. Scant years after Georgia won its own independence, they got a weird sort of de facto independence, and an even weirder sort of de facto annexation by Russia. That is to say, they forced the Georgian military and government to withdraw completely, and got Russia to issue Russian passports to everybody in their regions, while the Georgians and the whole rest of the world pretended that they were still in Georgia, in some way.

By way of comparison, imagine if you will that, say, Texas and New Mexico had attempted to secede from the Union 15 years ago, and had not entirely failed. Imagine that while they were technically still part of the US, for 15 years everybody in those states had been given Mexican passports, and no US soldiers or federal agents were allowed in. Now imagine the US finally gotten confident enough to try to retake those states, which is pretty much what Georgia just tried to do to South Ossetia and Abkhazia a couple of days ago. Now imagine that Mexico was dozens of times our size. And that Mexico had nukes, and we didn't. And imagine that we had somehow gotten the impression that neither our inferior military nor our lack of nukes would matter, because we mistakenly thought that if Mexico tried to stop us from recapturing Arizona and Texas, Europe would nuke them. Now you're caught up.

The US is not going to nuke Russia. Although to be fair, Putin (and his puppet president) took a minor gamble there. As part of our support for Georgia, the US had 130 "military trainers" in there as a trip-wire force. Had they come under direct attack by Russian troops, under old Cold War "rules," the US would have been forced to retaliate with everything up to and including nukes. But, as must come as a horrible surprise to our Georgian allies, we're pulling those troops way, way back from the front. And as far as Putin is concerned, we're taking one heck of a risk, by Cold War "rules," flying Georgia's soldiers who were fighting in Iraq back home to defend their homeland; if our planes had looked like they were going to drop them inside or near the front lines, the Russians could technically have counted that as a US attack on their troops, and would have been obligated, technically, to retaliate with everything up to and including nukes. But it's not going to happen, because as Putin has entirely correctly guessed, the US is not going to risk nuclear war over Georgia.

In fact, the fair comparison isn't to the Cold War, but to the OPEC crisis; this isn't the Berlin Airlift, this is the 6-Day War or the Yom Kippur War all over again, only the Georgians aren't nearly as prepared as the Israelis were. Just as in the late 60s and early 70s when the US military was depleted, our currency in shreds, and our federal budget a weeping sore of red ink, and for just the same reason, an expensive and unsuccessful land war in Asia that was financed through deficit spending rather than Americans' voluntary financial sacrifice, we are once again facing a petro-state, Russia, that knows what Egypt and Saudi Arabia knew back in 1973: they can do pretty much whatever they want, including credibly threaten to wreck our economy by shutting down oil exports like the Egyptians and Saudis did back in '73, and we can't do anything about it but sputter, then whine, and then do what President Carter did, which is to say, surrender and agree to pay danegeld forever. (And, by the way, yes, we're still paying Carter's danegeld to the Egyptians and the Saudis. I suppose some of it financed 9/11, indirectly. Your tax dollars at work.)

But given that Russia isn't just a petro-state but a nuclear state, while this in no way even plausibly threatens World War III, it could quite conceivably be a return to the Cold War. Which would kind of suck. Although as I've pointed out three other times, to various people, in the last 24 hours, we did survive the Cold War. Well, "we" did. Tens of thousands of American troops died in several proxy wars. And hundreds of thousands of people all over the Third World who died in those wars plus various civil wars stirred up by the US and the USSR didn't exactly survive, as such, either. Sucked to be them, just as it sucks to be Georgia now.

If you're reading this anywhere outside of the Caucuses or the Baltics, or maybe if worse comes to worse eastern Europe, and you manage not to get drafted into another stupid war somewhere much farther from Russian borders than this war, you're probably just as safe as we were during the first phase of the Cold War. Maybe safer, if somebody manages to persuade Putin that a renewed Cold War wouldn't actually work out so well for the Russians, not any better than the last one did. That'd be an uphill battle, though, since he apparently thinks that what happened in 1991 was us taking advantage of a temporary setback of theirs, not the inevitable result of Russia's inability to keep up with the rest of the world in Cold War spending without wrecking their economy. If he can't be persuaded to pull back from re-igniting the Cold War, and you're anywhere near Russia's borders? Sucks to be you.

(As an aside: I've also been too lazy to properly screen comments lately, so I see that I'm more than 100 comments behind. I hope that none of you have been abusing my hospitality in my absence. If you've posted something ban-worthy in the last week or so, maybe you better be smart and go back and delete it before I get tempted to block you from commenting. Don't make me work hard at managing comments to this blog when the weather's so beautiful outside, or I may get crabby and over-react.)