A Little War is a great candid account of the distant days of 2008, from a very Washington D.C. perspective. Asmus describes a reactive, divided, and unstrategic Washington-European diplomatic apparatus that failed to defuse a situation as it arose, precipitated a crisis by failing to understand Moscow, and left Georgia in the lurch in its moment of need.

Ultimately, blame for the war rests on Moscow, which maintained an untenable ceasefire over the status of Abkhazia and South Ossetia for over a decade, resisted efforts at mediation, and then moved in with over a division of troops with armor, air, and naval support. However, the trigger for the war was very much the independence of Kosovo, which NATO and the EU saw as a one off event, and which Russia saw as the political dismemberment of a close ally by a unilateral and expansionist alliance which indicated that the rules had fundamentally changed, and the start of a process for admitting Ukraine and Georgia to NATO.

Georgia, a much smaller country, had little that it could do to meaningfully defend itself, yet still managed to be caught entirely off guard. President Saakashvili took the worst of all possible actions, a counter-attack that brought international opprobrium and played into Russia propaganda, while failing to meaningfully disrupt the actual attack. He was forced to act, because accepting the dismemberment of his country would be political suicide, on par with the 1921 submission to the Bolsheviks.

In the end, President Sarkozy of France managed to broker a tenuous and unsatisfying ceasefire. Russia started on a course of opposition to the West. The incoherence of Washington and Brussels was revealed. and Georgia and its separatist provinces probably suffered most of all. So yes, this book is biased, but it wears its bias on the sleeve, and a detailed and coherent account of significant events from the invaluable perspective of a diplomatic insider.