A shrunken empire strikes back

RUSSIA'S recognition of independence for South Ossetia and Abkhazia, announced Tuesday by President Dmitry Medvedev, was the Kremlin's crude way of answering Western encroachments on Russia's sphere of interest. It is an answer meant to show that if the United States and NATO disregard Russian security concerns - as they have done in the Balkans, in expanding NATO to Russia's backyard, and in deploying a notional missile defense in Central Europe - the Kremlin also knows how to conduct a dialogue of deeds.

Rather than becoming intoxicated with their own rhetoric of outrage, Western governments and particularly the Bush administration need to reconsider how their own actions led to the current crisis. Its origins go back to the 1990s. Promises made to Russia by the first President Bush about the limits of NATO expansion were broken first by the Clinton administration and then by the current President Bush, who also scrapped the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty.

The current conflict centers on efforts by South Ossetia and Abkhazia to break away from Georgia, but the stepping stones to it were the 1995 Dayton accords ending the war in Bosnia and the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, which set the stage for Western recognition of Kosovo's independence in February. The Dayton accords enshrined the principle that national borders must remain unaltered, that Serbs in Bosnia could not secede and would have to live as a minority within that state. This was a principle Russia accepted.

Four years later, Russia played a key role in mediating an end of NATO's 1999 war to protect Albanian Kosovars - 90 percent of Kosovo's population - from Serbian forces conducting a vicious counter-insurgency campaign under orders from Slobodan Milosevic. Envoys from Moscow persuaded Milosevic to stop fighting.

Subsequently, the Russians felt betrayed. The cease-fire agreement they helped forge gave them a peacekeeping role in Kosovo that NATO disregarded. And then, in February, Bush and the Europeans recognized an independent Kosovo without agreement between Serbia and the Kosovars, without United Nations authorization, and against the fervent objections of Russia's then-president, Vladimir Putin.

Putin, who remains the true decider in Russia, warned Bush against this dangerous precedent. Bush, who has a lamentable history of refusing to bargain with allies and adversaries alike, foolishly paid no heed. Putin obviously concluded that Bush would go on ignoring Russia's interests unless the Kremlin pushed back.

Exploiting Bush's failure to grasp how much of the West's deterrent power he had frittered away, Putin pushed back this month in a place where Russia had the military advantage. Recognition of South Ossetia's and Abkhazia's independence was justified on the principle of a mistreated minority's right to secession - the principle Bush had established for Kosovo.

Putin may perform like a shrewd mafia don. But that is no excuse for a US president to disregard the godfather's admonitions, to disdain Russia's historic anxieties about its periphery, and to risk a new Cold War with a wealthy petrostate that has no ideological reason for conflict with the West.