Teepen: Pooty-Poot gives democracy the boot

It was no great surprise to discover, from Russia's thuggish invasion of Georgia, that the 20th century is not over yet. It was a bit more startling to find that we're not quite done with the 19th either.

With Russian troops, armor, air force and navy ganging up on the small democracy on Russia's border, the 21st century was rudely tumbled back into the world of dangerous big-power gamesmanship and sphere-of-influence scheming.

With a few new wrinkles, we're having anew The Great Game, as the decades-long tussle between Russia and the European powers for position and influence in the Central Asia of the 1800s came to be known.

Russia is over being communist. It is not over being Russia. The wonder is that much of the West, and especially Washington in recent years, has seemed to think it was.

Most Russians were happy to off-load communism but nonetheless dismayed by the accompanying loss of power and empire.

Vladimir Putin — never the Pooty-Poot of President Bush's puerile nicknaming — has played to that sentiment with increasingly blustery nationalist bullying abroad. And thanks to a treasury overflowing with oil and natural gas swag, he has rebuilt the military. The Russians love it.

With Russia's post-Soviet democracy strangled in its cradle, the briefly free press stifled, the public happily on a retail romp, and unsolved political murders successfully substituting for the gulags, Putin needn't fear dissent.

The Russian prime minister has a free hand and is using it to restore Russian intimidation along its western border.

The target is Georgia, but the lesson is for Ukraine and other adjacent former satellites and captive nations with illusions of any freedom greater than one to do right as the Kremlin sees right. The collateral damage is to Western naivete.

Washington has been especially obtuse about Putin's Russia when it has had every reason to know better from our own history.

We asserted intervention privileges throughout the Western Hemisphere in 1823 with the Monroe Doctrine and have never withdrawn the claim. We have invaded Cuba at least six times, not counting President Kennedy's Bay of Pigs debacle with anti-Castro emigres as our cat's paw.

President Reagan invaded Grenada and the first President Bush invaded Panama, neither with so much as a by-your-leave.

To acknowledge that we often act as great powers typically do is not to draw an equivalency with Russia's obviously staged overreaction. Just as the Kremlin had hoped it would, Georgia rashly took the bait of Russian provocations without either the popular support or the military means to back its own play.

A little honest self-knowledge should have tipped President Clinton not to start extending NATO memberships eastward and even more should have cautioned President Bush against dangling the temptation right up to Russia's borders, as he has done with Georgia and Ukraine.

Bless Bush for promoting democracy as a core theme of his presidency. But failing to heed our own history, much less Russia's, his ideology-driven hyperactivism has given the Kremlin a chance to expose the hollowness at its core.

The potential for cautious democratic advance has been set back by democracy recklessly asserted beyond our willingness or ability to defend it.

Tom Teepen is a columnist for Cox Newspapers. He is based in Atlanta.