PRESIDENT BUSH’S visit to Georgia may be dominated for ever in memory by the image of his jig to the sound of a folk band.

The New York Times, offering the verdict that the Georgians were “taken aback although pleased” by his efforts, sounded taken aback itself, sombrely recording the fact that the President stayed up beyond his normal bedtime of 9pm by an hour, having eaten a large amount of traditional cheese bread.

Georgia was always set to be an exhilarating, even giddy, stop for Bush on this tour. Mikheil Saakashvili, the young pro-US President, is a model ally. He was always going to give Bush a flattering welcome.

Then, too, Georgian troops have been loyal to the US in Iraq. The 2003 Rose Revolution stands as a symbol of the Bush Administration’s aims.

Above all, Bush’s embrace of Georgia’s 18-month-old Government, in Russia’s backyard, was a way of delivering a ruder snub to President Putin than he could have done face to face in Moscow a day earlier.

Where now, though? The five-day tour through Latvia, the Netherlands, Russia and Georgia was Bush Mark II, more delicate in tone than it might have been before.

It reflected the Administration’s awareness that it needs to make an effort to keep allies on its side, and — with an eye on the British elections — of the political costs which supporting the US can bring.

Bush went out of his way to say that the US should not be overbearing. While encouraging Georgia to join Nato, he said it must resolve on its own the disputes with pro-Russian separatist regions South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

But his language also showed the profound muddles that the pursuit of democracy abroad has created in US foreign policy, behind the confident words.

“The world has marvelled at the hopeful changes taking place from Baghdad to Beirut to Bishkek,” Bush said, trying through alliteration to establish a similarity that is only partially there.

“Freedom is advancing from the Black Sea to the Caspian to the Persian Gulf,” he declared, counting his way through the “Purple Revolution in Iraq”, the “Orange Revolution in Ukraine”, the “Cedar Revolution in Lebanon”, and the “Rose Revolution” in Georgia, like a tableau on a nursery school wall. But joining up the dots in this way ignores the different causes of these upheavals — and other, worsening threats in those regions.

True, there may well be an element of the uprisings that was contagious. The impact of television is undeniable. The overthrow of the first Ukrainian election result aroused intense attention in some countries with no obvious connection, such as Lebanon, China and Iran, apparently because of the encouragement it gave to critics of those governments.

But there the contradictions break into the open. The US’s desire to keep on civil terms with Putin’s increasingly authoritarian regime is at odds with championing liberty.

Bush’s claim that freedom is advancing across the “Caucasus, Central Asia and the broader Middle East” is simply untrue. In Central Asia, the US faces some of its toughest dilemmas: whether to back unpleasant regimes with no interest in freedom for fear that the replacement might be worse. In Chechnya, which warranted a routine mention, the conflict is turning from a local insurgency against Moscow to a bitter regional fight and a magnet for Islamic terrorists.

In sidestepping these points, Bush undermined his message, but that does not mean the trip was vacuous. It covered an interesting span of countries. He handled the themes well.

But in chanting out a list of “revolutions” with slender relevance to each other, he is claiming credit for changes where, bar Iraq, the US was as much observer as agent. It does not solve the question of what to do next.

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