Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman just got back from a trip to Georgia, and didn’t hesitate more than a few moments to drop the K-bomb in describing the crisis there:

Russia’s invasion of Georgia represents the most serious challenge to this political order since Slobodan Milosevic unleashed the demons of ethnic nationalism in the Balkans. What is happening in Georgia today, therefore, is not simply a territorial dispute. It is a struggle about whether a new dividing line is drawn across Europe: between nations that are free to determine their own destinies, and nations that are consigned to the Kremlin’s autocratic orbit.

We happen to think that things are infinitely more complex than Putin = Milosevic, and that all separatism issues can only be considered in their respective independent political contexts. Furthermore, one would be hard pressed to find a country more critical of the international recognition of Kosovo’s independence that the Georgian government itself, so I’m not quite sure what Graham and Lieberman are getting at. I think that this other article by J. Victor Marshall is much more convincing with regard to Moscow’s instrumentalization of the Kosovo precedent, as well as an illustration of Washington losing its moral high ground by “selectively turning principles into propagandist slogans for scoring points.”

As Richard Weitz at the Hudson Institute noted at the time, Russia could seize upon Kosovo as a precedent for fomenting separatist movements in the former Soviet republics, including South Ossetia’s drive for independence from Georgia in the Caucasus.