Trying to grab a piece of someone else’s land has always been a favorite trick by rulers in domestic difficulty to divert attention from their own incompetence or worse.
It is, therefore, no surprise that as international order begins to break down for lack of an authority to enforce it and with the United Nations an empty shell, old irredentist dreams return to haunt more and more nations.
This back-to-the-future through the past episode started with the Russian invasion of Georgia in August 2008. Moscow’s argument was that South Ossetia, a Muslim-majority enclave in Georgia was, in fact, a part of Ossetia, which had been annexed by Russia in the 18th century. It mattered little that Russian Ossetia had converted to Orthodox Christianity.
