THE psychodrama playing out in the Caucasus is not the first act of World War III, as some hyperventilating politicians and commentators would like to portray it. Rather, it is the delayed final act of the cold war. And while the Soviet Union lost that epic conflict, Russia won this curtain call in a way that ensures Washington will have to take it far more seriously in the future.

This is not just because, as some foreign-policy “realists” have argued, Moscow has enough troops and oil to force us to take into consideration its supposedly irrational fears. Rather, the conflict in Georgia showed how rational Russia’s concerns over American meddling in its traditional sphere of influence are, and that Washington had better start treating it like the great power it still is.

This decision will give Americans the lived experience that ending exclusion from marriage helps families and harms no one,” said Evan Wolfson, executive director of Freedom to Marry, who noted that same-sex marriages were legal in Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, South Africa and Spain.

California Republicans are hoping that history will prove instructive. After Massachusetts became the first state to codify marriage equality in 2003, the G.O.P. spent the ensuing general election wielding the issue as a potent weapon. Thirteen states passed ballot initiatives to ban same-sex marriage — including Ohio, the battleground that tipped the 2004 election in George W. Bush's favor. Opponents of gay marriage in California have generated more than 1 million signatures to place on November ballots an initiative amending the state's constitution to prohibit same-sex marriage.

The challenge of securing Europe’s eastern border from the Baltics to the Black Sea has been replaced by the need to extend peace and stability along the southern rim of the Euro-Atlantic community—from the Balkans across the Black Sea and further into Eurasia, a region that connects Europe, Russia, and the Middle East and involves core security interests, including a critical energy corridor.  Working to consolidate democratic change and build stability in this area is as important for Western security today as consolidating democracy in central and eastern Europe was in the 1990s.

We are convinced that there is no security for Europe without the US, but we also dare to submit that there is no hope for the US to sustain its role as the world’s sole superpower without the Europeans as allies.

Helle Dale argues in the Washington Times that the elections in Russia were not legitimate, and Russia should face consequences for this.

Autocrats like Mr. Putin are trying to take back the reins of power carefully and one piece at a time. By international standards, Russia cannot be called a democracy anymore - as German Chancellor Angela Merkel remarked to her credit. She knows something about political repression, having grown up in East Germany. There should be consequences.

While most in Europe and the US have spoken out against the Russian elections, other countries (notably those in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, or SCO) have argued that western countries have no right to judge Russia's democracy. From the Washington Post:

"There is not just one category of democracy in the world. You cannot import, copy or buy democracy," said Gao Yusheng, a Chinese citizen who headed the [SCO's] observer mission in Moscow. Observer groups from other republics of the former Soviet Union reached similar conclusions.

So, who has the right to decide whether a democracy is legitimate or not? I certainly have trouble believing the SCO, with a membership composed of non-democracies to include Uzbekistan, Iran, and China among others, is a better arbiter of open government than European countries and the United States.

I also agree with Helle Dale that Russia should face consequences. Democracy is more than an abstract concept; as a form of governance it has important tangible implications for the internal and external peace of a country. Researchers have found substantial evidence that democratic governments have better human rights policies, and are significantly less likely to go to war. Knowing the merits of democracy, it is both a moral and practical objective to encourage democratic governance in other states.

The need for democracy is exceptionally relevant when it comes to Russia, because the world already knows how dangerous a nationalistic and centralized Russia can become-especially a Russia that seeks to exert influence over its former client states, as Putin does.

Kyle Atwell has joined the Atlantic Review. This is already his third post. All of his posts are here in chronological order. Kyle will introduce himself later. Let's have him get right into discussing the Russian elections, in particular France's reaction:

The topic of last Sunday's elections in Russia has flooded my news aggregator the past couple days, and what I originally intended to be a brief news summary on the elections has blossomed into several distinct thoughts. To keep to the short blog format, I have broken down my thoughts into three posts. This is the first.

The disingenuousness of the Russian elections has been almost comical at times.  For example, the Washington Post reports that in war-torn Chechnya, Putin's United Russia party won 99.36 percent of the vote with a turnout of 99.5 percent. Not laughing yet... here is where it gets really funny:

"It's a normal result. I'm pleased," said Ramzan Kadyrov, the strongman president of Chechnya and a Kremlin loyalist who has pacified large parts of the war-torn republic in southern Russia. "The most important thing to me is that people were voting with pleasure. Almost all people came to the elections. It shows the level of trust in the power."

These numbers are clearly inflated. I am pretty sure that you could not get 99.5 percent of Russians to a free vodka giveaway, much less the polling stations.

While many in the west (Corriere della Sera) have questioned the election's legitimacy, Sarkozy of France spared no time in calling Putin up personally to offer his "warm congratulations" (Le Monde). Sarkozy was the only western leader to congratulate Putin at the time this article was written.

Sarkozy's action took me by surprise. For a French president who has taken pains to demonstrate his affections for the US, I expected Sarkozy to speak out against Putin's power abuse, or at least keep mum about it. I wonder if a chance to boost strategic bilateral interests with Russia was too tempting to pass up for the French leader, even when it meant breaking western unity in opposing the dubious election results.

For regular readers: props to Joerg and his recent post, How to be a Good Ally of the United States? Just Smile: He must be having one of those 'I told you so' moments after having teased that an ally's smile and sweet talk (of which Sarkozy has plenty for the US) can be used as a better measure of its commitment to the US than its actual policy actions.