The Nato chiefs who gathered yesterday in Brussels have reason to be dismayed — but only if they make the mistake of blurring tactics and strategy.

With a thoroughly old-fashioned tank charge, Russia has won a tactical coup in the Caucasus. It has rubbed salt in Georgian and American wounds by blindfolding Georgian troops in American Humvees in the port of Poti and forcing US officials to demand their vehicles back.

Farther east yesterday, Nato suffered another tactical setback with the loss of ten French soldiers to Taleban fighters.

The casualties were tragic and the timing unfortunate. But the two conflicts are separate. More importantly, the newer of the two, in Georgia, makes Nato expansion more likely rather than less. This is precisely the outcome that Russia had hoped to avoid. Two weeks ago Nato was divided not only on the question of Georgia’s headlong bid for membership, but also on the broader issue of whether it was worth antagonising Moscow with further expansion into the former Soviet Union. Germany, France and Italy argued against. At their request, Nato pointedly refrained from setting a timetable for Georgian membership at its summit in Bucharest in March.

Vladimir Putin's mastery checkmates the West

Michael Binyon says Russia has been biding its time - but its victory in Georgia has been brutal and brilliant

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BACKGROUND

• Hellraising for the rich: how Osborne met Rothschild

• Oleg Deripaska - oligarch at centre of storm

Related Links

• Moscow says pullback underway as troops dig in

• US and Poland sign missile deal in Warsaw

• Russia dismisses Nato's 'empty words' on Georgia

What a difference a short war can make. By sending its 58th Army through the Roki tunnel into South Ossetia, Moscow hoped at the very least to deepen Nato divisions.

The opposite has happened. Instead of arguing that the crisis proved her point about the need for restraint, Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, has explicitly endorsed Georgia’s bid for membership. France may still have its doubts. If so, they remain private. There are two main reasons for Nato’s newfound unity. First, there is a strengthening consensus that Moscow would have acted with more restraint had Georgia already been in Nato, protected by its principle of collective security.

As one expert with long experience of the region put it yesterday: “The thought of the US Air Force on its way would have deterred even Vladimir Putin.”

Secondly, the “frozen” conflicts in South Ossetia and Abkhazia that stood in the way of Georgian membership have, rightly or wrongly, unfrozen.

Moscow’s coup is to have seized de facto control of these two tiny provinces. It has done so at huge cost to its diplomatic standing and may yet suffer serious economic isolation as a long-term result of the conflict.

Nato was wrongfooted but not substantially weakened. It may have struggled to gain the upper hand against the Taleban but, as the Cold War showed, nothing unites the West’s otherwise quarrelsome democracies quite so effectively as a nuclear superpower.

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