But NATO's new warning to Russia over the looming crisis with the former Soviet republic of Georgia puts the Bush trip into an ominous new context.

NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer has demanded that Russia pull out the troop reinforcements it deployed in the disputed Black Sea province of Abkhazia last week. He warned that Moscow was threatening Georgia's sovereignty and "contributing to instability in what is already a volatile area."

This may have been an overreaction. Russia says the 300 troops in question were unarmed and specialist railway troops, supposedly deployed to repair crumbling communications routes. But Georgia is worried, claiming that Russia is trying to provoke a military clash and find an excuse to annex the small enclave of Abkhazia, which used to be part of Georgia until it broke away in 1991. Abkhazia, with Russian support, claims in turn that Georgia is planning to regain control with force.

One key feature of the problem is that Russia has a new, civilian and untried president in Dmitry Medvedev, who does not want to be seen backing down in his first foreign crisis. His predecessor, Vladimir Putin, remains a very powerful prime minister, and Medvedev's administration is packed with Putin loyalists who tend to come, like Putin, from the old KGB Soviet intelligence agency. Like Putin, they tend to be tough-minded Russian nationalists who see Georgia and the Caucasus region, like most of the rest of the former Soviet Union, as Russia's natural sphere of influence, and they agree with Putin's statement that the breakup of the Soviet Union was "the greatest political catastrophe of the 20th century."

The second key feature of the problem is that on Bush's last European trip, he failed to overcome German objections to giving Georgia a green light to join the NATO alliance as a full member and thus entitled to NATO protection. The Kremlin has evidently taken this as a sign that NATO will not push back if Russia intensifies its pressure on Georgia.

"This has become a litmus test for NATO," argues Ron Asmus, the U.S diplomat who led the NATO enlargement process during the Clinton presidency. "The West could be sleepwalking into a war on the European continent."

Bush's trip was not supposed to be defined by a sudden crisis like this. It was to be his farewell attendance at the annual U.S.-EU summit in the former Yugoslav province of Slovenia, now an independent state and a member of both NATO and the EU. It was in Slovenia seven years ago that he first met Putin, and memorably said he had "looked into his soul" and found Putin to be a man he could trust.

The Bush trip, which includes a call on the pope in Rome, and return visits to President Nicolas Sarkozy in Paris and Prime Minister Gordon Brown in London, was supposed to focus on the celebrations of the 60th anniversary of the Berlin airlift and the Marshall Plan. These are two key dates in the origin of the Cold War, marking U.S. resolve to withstand Soviet pressure on Europe and to rebuild Europe's war-torn economies with generous American aid.

All that was supposed to be distant history, but the steady deterioration of U.S. relations with Russia and the renewed confidence of an oil-rich Russia have brought some of those old Cold War tensions back to life. Russia has consistently opposed NATO's enlargement and lately has focused on Georgia, which has broken the Russian monopoly of oil pipelines from Central Asia to the West with its own new pipeline from the Caspian Sea to Turkey.

Bush will not find it easy either to rally the European NATO allies behind Georgia, nor to put much pressure on the Kremlin, whose support or at least acquiescence he needs as he seeks U.N. backing to tighten the sanctions against Iran. The Europeans, deeply conscious of their growing dependence on Russian energy exports, are wary of any open confrontation with Moscow, despite the latest highly critical report on Iran's secrecy over its nuclear ambitions from the International Atomic Energy Agency.

As a lame-duck president who is presiding over the troubled U.S. economy and a highly unpopular war in Iraq, Bush has relatively few cards to play. He is a Republican president with rock-bottom approval ratings and facing a Congress controlled by the Democratic Party. He may reign in the White House, but he hardly rules. The Europeans are already looking to Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain, the presidential contenders for the election that is just five months away.

But the issues at stake in the crisis over Georgia are profound, embracing the future credibility and relevance of the NATO alliance, the U.S. role in Europe and the degree to which Russia will be a partner or adversary in the future. And Asmus argues that they are also about the fundamental rules of international behavior.

"Ultimately the stakes in this crisis go well beyond the Caucasus," Asmus maintains. "The escalation threatens to make a mockery of the principles on which the West has worked to build a post-Cold War peace -- principles that transcended spheres of influence and that gave all countries, big and small and irrespective of their geography, the right peacefully to determine their own future. Moscow agreed to those principles in the 1990s but now, flush with nationalism and petrodollars, it flouts them. The West should not."

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