Carlos Alberto Montaner has a new piece on PostGlobal:

Among the reformists close to Kozyrev there was a certainty that the conquest of the world had been too costly and counterproductive an enterprise. And another key idea had blossomed: the West should not be fought but embraced, imitated and invited to invest. Russia should compete within the rules of the game of market capitalism. Those diplomats understood that Russia did not have to become anybody else’s counterweight, or play into a bipolarity that could only bring the nation conflict and poverty. After all, Russia was the largest nation in the West, the third Rome (the second had been Constantinople) and it made no sense to adopt an attitude of hostility toward a world that was as much theirs as it was France’s or England’s. All this is apropos Russia’s attitude in the conflict between Georgia and South Ossetia. It is very probable that Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili acted rashly when he attacked South Ossetia in an effort to reconquer that territory, but it seems evident that Moscow had been waiting for an opportunity to strike. The attack on Georgia began on Aug. 8. On July 20, 19 days earlier, the Russians already knew Saakashvili’s plans and had unleashed a cyberwar intended to dismantle the communications of their ill-tempered neighbor via the Internet. It was a magnificent moment to teach a lesson to the Georgians and the rest of the world, most especially the United States, who were sponsoring Georgia’s admission to NATO.