The chief chair-warmer in the White House is getting spun up for the big NATO conference in Bucharest, Romania, and the event is already interesting to nerds like me. The main event, is Bush going head to head with the two powerhouses of Europe, France and Germany, over NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia, and Russia has made it very, very clear that this is not an option that would behoove anyone.

White House press secretary Dana Perino, has espoused what is either boat loads of moxie or thundering ignorance by saying , “The last time we checked, Russia didn’t get a vote. And this is a NATO discussion, a NATO exercise, and it will be a NATO decision.”

This blithe little statement is nothing short of the White House saying to Russia and West Europe, “Let’s you and him fight.” America might be more or less insulated and isolated from the geopolitics in Europe, but France and Germany don’t have that claim. It gets bloody cold up on that fertile plain, and a whole lot of Russian fuel goes into heating German and French homes.

Russia is also likely hedging bets that Europe wouldn’t like to see the simmering conflict in Serbia and the faux-state of Kosovo blow up. Kosovo, being primarily Muslim, is really and truly an outlier in the European world, which for the last long stretch of history has been divided into Orthodox (east) and Catholic/protestant (west). Russia has the gasoline to pour on the Orthodox fires in Serbia, and given the general instability that lingers in the Balkans, no one is willing to write off a reignition of the ethnic fires of the 1990s.

This dolts at the cable news, of course, are missing the broader picture here. Bush is making an unprecedented attempt to redraw the political lines of Europe, and his failure or success is going to be important for generations.

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