In that sense, the war between Georgia and Russia really is ideological, and not merely national in origin. Of course Russia retains “great power” instincts, and of course some of the disdain the Russian media shows for Saakashvili represents nothing more than a large country’s dislike of defiance from a small one. But the Russian leadership’s dislike of Georgia also reflects hatred - and fear - of the kind of democracy that Georgians have chosen. Georgia’s “Rose Revolution”, like Ukraine’s “Orange Revolution”, is precisely the kind of popular uprising that the Russian elite fears most deeply. Putin’s paranoia about Georgia is - unlikely though it may sound - at base a paranoia about Russia itself. What this means, of course, is that any Western support for the Georgian cause will only increase Russian paranoia. And yet, at another level, we have no choice: Western credibility is on the line here, too. Any outright abandonment of Georgia to Putinist domination will be correctly perceived - not only in the post-Soviet world, but also everywhere else - as an abandonment of an ideological ally, of a country that has chosen, at great cost, to join the West. What we are left with, then, is not exactly a new Cold War, but an unavoidable, possibly very long-term ideological battle with Russia, above and beyond the normal economic and political competition. We need to start thinking again about what it means to be “the West”, and about how Western institutions - not just Nato, but also the BBC World Service, say, or the British Council - can be brought into the 21st century, not merely to counter terrorism, but to argue the case for Western values, once again.