CNN reports:

Georgia's president said Friday that his country is under attack by Russian tanks and warplanes, and he accused Russia of targeting civilians as tensions over the breakaway Georgian region of South Ossetia appeared to boil over into full-blown conflict. "All day today, they've been bombing Georgia from numerous warplanes and specifically targeting (the) civilian population, and we have scores of wounded and dead among (the) civilian population all around the country," President Mikhail Saakashvili told CNN in an exclusive interview.

Please share interesting links to analyses in the mainstream media and blogosphere or write your own analyses on this escalating situation in the comment section. I am most interested in policy recommendations for the European and US governments.

Kyle Atwell has already asked the the big question "Will Europe and the US come to Georgia's aid?" in an Atlantic Review post in May 2008, when NATO membership for Georgia was discussed: Georgia Conflict: Should NATO Marry the Small Kid on the Playground?

UPDATE from Nanne Zwagerman: This AP analysis by Jim Heintz, on the Moscow newsdesk, is the best I've seen so far:

Behind the hostilities in South Ossetia are two nations that have long been spoiling for a fight, with Russia eager to show it's boss in the region and U.S.-backed Georgia determined to prove it can stand up to its huge neighbor.  With Vladimir Putin in Beijing for the Olympic opening ceremony and the world's attention fixed on China, Georgia may have been betting it could pounce on an opportunity to quickly wrest control of its breakaway province. But the gamble may backfire: Washington hasn't endorsed Georgia's power play, and Moscow's counteroffensive has brought the two sides into a fight it will be hard for Georgia, a former Soviet state, to win.

My best guess would be that Russia will not go far beyond South Ossetia and will then only escalate further when Georgia launches a counterattack. This is looking more and more like a major miscalculation by Saakashvili.

While many US (and European) pundits criticize the European countries for a lack of military hard power or even ridicule German and other soldiers as armed social workers, the Pentagon is increasingly focusing on humanitarian missions, writes The Boston Globe:

Having learned the limits of force in Iraq and Afghanistan, US military strategists are rewriting decades-old military doctrine to place humanitarian missions on par with combat, part of a new effort to win over distrustful foreign populations and enlist new global allies, according to top commanders and Pentagon officials. The Defense Department is implementing a series of new directives to use the American arsenal for more peaceful purposes even as it prepares for war, including a little-noticed revision this year to a document called "Joint Operations," described as the "very core" of how the military branches should be organized. The effort illustrates a growing recognition that, to combat radical ideologies and avert future wars, the Pentagon must draw more heavily on its deep reserves of so-called soft power.

Dan Drezner notes that the US military does not want this responsibility, but is stepping up because no other agency possesses either the resources or the willingness to act. He also blames this development on how the foreign policy budget is authorized:

Congressmen are happy to authorize more defense spending, because that's easier to justify to their constituents, particularly those constituents whose livelihoods are tied into the military.  Authorizing civilian spending on foreign policy, however, just looks like a handout to other countries - it's much easier for Congress to say no to that authorization, and look fiscally prudent in the process.

The majority of Germans support Barack Obama for the US presidency, not because they believe he will radically change US policy, but because he is expected to return it to the familiar pre-Bush trajectory. This is the conclusion from my colleague Ben Heine over at atlantic-community.org

Ben and I have interviewed German, American and other attendees of the Obama rally in Berlin yesterday. We have asked some of the questions that you suggested on Atlantic Review. Here's our video with their responses:

What do you think of the opinions expressed by the interviewees?

Finally, Serbia is back in Europe. Stephen Castle and Steven Erlanger write in the NY Times:

Europe on Tuesday welcomed the arrest of Radovan Karadzic not just as a victory for international justice, but as a vindication of the Continent's favored political doctrine: soft power. (...)
In the last few months the European Union has helped bring a pro-Western political party to victory in Serbia's elections while ensuring that it has powerful incentives to hand over war crimes suspects. The arrest of Mr. Karadzic demonstrates how effective the union's leverage can be, particularly with neighboring countries that have ambitions to join it.

Yeah, it only took a bit more than a decade...

But then again, how successful (and how costly) is hard power? Milosevic and Karadzic were not arrested during the many Balkan wars... (Well, obviously, without the wars, they might still be in power.) And capturing Saddam was much more expensive and demands from the US to a strong commitment to Iraq of at least a decade...

Do we have to apologize to The Wall Street Journal for not covering this?

The most remarkable aspect about the German economics minister's trip to Baghdad Saturday [July 13, 2008] was how unremarkable it was. The "surprise visit" by Michael Glos to Iraq, which only last year was deemed irrevocably lost, hardly made the front pages even in his own country. "The security situation has improved," Mr. Glos said, "and democracy is progressing." [...] "I have numerous companies with me," Mr. Glos told a German radio station from Baghdad. "They are practically the advance party for others who will hopefully soon come to Iraq to participate especially in the privatization."

Berlin is abuzz about Senator Obama's upcoming speech on Thursday 7:00 PM local time. How many folks will come to see the messiah? Many press outlets quoted a city government official's estimate of 10,000 to one million people. Wow, that is so precise! It seems that nobody else dares to publish an estimate. This will be an exciting event. It could be huge or quite small...

It is unprecedented. Anne Applebaum writes that Obama's world tour indicates a change in America's political culture: American voters are aware of the damage the current administration has done to the US image and are not indifferent to how their country is perceived abroad: "The Most Popular American in Europe Since Elvis"

I will attend his speech and try to capture the mood in the audience with my video camera. I will also conduct random interviews with ordinary folks in the audience.

What questions shall I ask? Is there anything you would like to know from German Obama fans and critics? (I will also ask American Berliners and others.) I guess, one of the obvious questions would be: Will you support sending German troops to southern Afghanistan, if President Obama asks for it? What else? I'd appreciate your input! Thanks.

The G8 used to be criticized as an evil capitalist group of powerful countries that determines world politics and economics without legitimacy like the UN. There has not been much of such criticism at this year's summit in Japan.

This time, lack of effectiveness was the most common criticism. The G8 is increasingly seen as a Western talking shop that is doing photo-ops with rock stars and third world leaders, but fails to act on its past promises on development aid and is increasingly incapable to shape international economic affairs.

Besides, Senators McCain and Obama recently had a dispute as to whether Russia should be excluded from the Group of Eight.

Consequently, there have been several reform proposals to make the G8 more effective:

L20: upgrade the existing G20
G13: G8 + the "outreach 5"
G9: leading market democracies
G3: US, EU & China
G3: US, EU & Japan

The Atlantic Community explains these proposals and asks: "Should the G8 be enlarged to include new major international players or contracted to ensure effectiveness?" If you register on Atlantic Community, then you can vote on the above options.

The Daily Telegraph interviewed Former Assistant Secretary of State Susan Rice ahead of Obama's world tour:

Europe will be challenged by a President Barack Obama to contribute more to global security and will no longer have the "easy out" of pandering to anti-Bush sentiment, according to a top adviser to the Democratic candidate.

Many German pundits have said the same many times before, but the wider public is still in love with Obama.

So many people over here are thrilled that Obama is coming to Berlin. Many of my friends tell me that they will try to attend his speech at the Siegessäule (Victory Column), where the Techno "Love Parade" used to culminate. It is quite close to the Brandenburg Gate.

I am pretty sure that Europe's current love for Obama will be over within half a year of his presidency, should he be elected. More realism will prevail. And that is okay.

The Coca-Cola executive shall "retool NATO's brand," reports the NY Times (HT: Benjamin from Anglofritz):

Less than a year before its 60th anniversary, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is determined to revamp its image, establishing a media operations center for Afghanistan and hiring an executive from Coca-Cola to manage the way the alliance is seen around the world. (...)
Michael Stopford, has spent two years guarding Coca-Cola's image and will join NATO as deputy assistant secretary general for strategic communication services in August. Mr. Stopford, a British-born American, is a specialist in managing reputations. Before working at Coca-Cola, he also held jobs at the United Nations and the British Foreign Office.

I doubt whether such a branding will be enough. NATO needs to reinvent itself. Has Coca-Cola done that recently? Nope, it still tastes the same.

Madonna, however, has reinvented herself extremely successfully several times. And Peter van Ham of the Clingendael Institute in The Hague has even published an article in the NATO Review on NATO and the Madonna Curve: "Businesses use Madonna as a role model of self-reinvention. Now it's NATO's turn." Okay, okay, NATO is trying to do both: retooling its brand and reinventing itself by working on a new strategic concept.

Related posts on Atlantic Review:

• "Maybe It's Time for NATO to Die"

• Bumper Stickers Slogans: What is the Purpose of NATO?

• Trans-Atlantic Cooperation: Are Europeans Unwilling to Share the Burden?

Wow, the German press, incl. the pro-American Die Welt, is very critical of the US embassy, which was reopened on July 4th. Gregory Rodriguez writes in the Los Angeles Times:

The daily Süddeutsche Zeitung called it "Ft. Knox at the Brandenburg Gate." Der Tagesspiegel pronounced it a "triumph of banality." Particularly offended by the embassy's windows, the critic at the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung contended that they "look as if a bankrupt homeowner had bought them in a home-improvement store near Fargo in order to get his house ready for winter." Die Welt, meanwhile, stated simply that "only the Chinese Embassy is uglier."

While some Americans consider this criticism as part of the Anti-Americanism, I would like to point out that none of the German government buildings garned any approval from architectural critics, when they opened in Berlin. The chancellery is still called "the federal washing machine" by many Berliners. And the beautiful glass dome of the Reichstag was not appreciated in the beginning either.

More important than the architecture of the embassy is its outreach to the policy community, the media and the wider public. Many ambassadors are described as more active than the US ambassador.

Douglas Muir found an interesting NY Times article that describes why birthrates vary so much across Europe and how some East German cities to handle population decline. See his post in A Fistful of Euros.

Crazy: Several German journalists used the term "assassination" to describe the damage to the Hitler wax figure on the opening day of Madame Tussauds's new Berlin museum.

It is easy to predict, what the Wall Street Journal wrote about the "killing" of the dictator and Germans' lessons from the Nazi past.