I had a wide-ranging interview last week at the Republican convention with Randy Scheunemann, John McCain’s director of foreign policy and national security. We had to slim down the text for the print magazine, but the director’s cut would have included a few other sections. Here are some noteworthy excerpts:

(1) I asked Scheunemann to respond to the critique that McCain helped egg Mikheil Saakashvili on.

It’s been suggested that Saakashvili, although he’s victim, felt emboldened to goad the Russians because of the support he heard from Washington and McCain. Is there any culpability on this side of the pond?

This is the classic blame-America first argument. I disagree with the premise of the question—that existing tensions in South Ossetia could suggest culpability on the part of the Georgians. The reality is that in cases of naked cross-border aggression, the aggressor will always seek to blame the victim. The Sudeten Germans had real grievances, too.Is Georgia at fault because it had the audacity to hope to join the NATO alliance? It has become clear in the aftermath of the Russian invasion that this wasn’t about what happened on August 6 in South Ossetia. This is about the nature of the democratic regime in Georgia that the Russians want to bring down. They’ve called Saakashvili a political corpse, they’ve refused to deal with him, and if the international community tolerates that behavior, it will only embolden the Russians in other places. That’s why the Poles, the Baltic states, and the Ukrainians are worried.

Put it this way: would the Russians have been as eager to take down Saakashvili on the day he was inaugurated as in the week before they invaded, by which point his rhetoric toward Russia had changed? And did the West help change his rhetoric?

Almost from the beginning of the Saakashvili administration, Putin’s Russia has sought to undermine his regime. Among the actions that the Russians have taken is cutting off energy supplies, cutting off electricity, not allowing the import of Georgian products—wine, water—and putting a trade embargo on Georgia, supporting the separatist regimes that were unrecognized until recently in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. They do not really recognize the independence of Georgia. They are trying to create a past historical era—not the Soviet Union, but the tsarist empire. Putin doesn’t want the 20th century, he wants the 19th century, and he’s been quite explicit about his goals. And to blame the victim for the actions of the aggressor shows a fundamental misunderstanding about what happens when aggression goes unpunished. It emboldens aggressors.