WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Two weeks ago, it seemed the most pressing foreign policy problem for the next occupant of the White House would be extricating the United States from Iraq, or deciding how many troops to move to Afghanistan.

Russian soldiers are seen sitting on an armoured personnel carrier on the outskirts of Gori August 19, 2008. REUTERS/Adrees Latif

Now a resurgent Russia, its tanks and troops humiliating U.S. ally Georgia, has propelled itself to the top of the next American president’s agenda.

“It’s not the relationship we would have wanted to inherit,” Stephen Biegun, a foreign policy adviser to Republican candidate John McCain, said of ties with Russia.

“It’s going to be in pretty bad shape for the next president of the United States,” said Biegun, who was executive director of the National Security Council in President George W. Bush’s first term.

Democratic Sen. Barack Obama’s advisers expect him to inherit a weaker negotiating position with the Russians if he wins the November election.

“American leverage is much weaker after the invasion,” said Michael McFaul, Obama’s adviser on Russia and a political science professor at Stanford University.

Since the conflict in Georgia erupted on August 7-8, McCain and Obama have offered similar ideas on how Washington should respond, but their positions before the crisis offer clues about the strategy each would pursue in the Oval Office.

For supporters of the 71-year-old Republican, the invasion of Georgia is a vindication of McCain’s years of warnings about the deterioration of democracy in Russia and Moscow’s attempts to bully its neighbors.

For Obama’s campaign, events in Georgia have produced a different kind of “I-told-you-so:” Look what can happen elsewhere while the United States is tied down with an unnecessary war in Iraq. The Illinois senator opposed that war from the start.

“There is a reason why they (the Bush administration) were not focused on Abkhazia and South Ossetia (Georgia’s separatist regions), because they were focused on Iraq,” McFaul said.

ENERGIZED

While Bush said in 2001 that he had looked into Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s eyes and got a “sense of his soul,” McCain quipped in October that “When I looked into Mr. Putin’s eyes, I saw three letters: a K, a G and a B.”

McCain a former Vietnam war prisoner of war and four-term Arizona senator who touts his national security credentials, appeared energized by the crisis. He wrote an opinion article in The Wall Street Journal headlined “We are all Georgians” and announced he would send two fellow senators, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman, to the former Soviet republic.

In the wake of the Georgia violence, the Bush administration is considering something McCain has long urged: ousting authoritarian Russia from the Group of Eight nations. The other seven members are all western-style democracies.

Obama, 47, is part of a younger generation with a different Cold War experience. He was just one year old during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and far too young to serve in Vietnam.

On August 7, Georgian forces tried to recapture South Ossetia, a pro-Russian province that threw off Georgian rule in the 1990s. Russia responded with its biggest deployment outside its borders since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

While McCain may have been prescient in warning about Russian bullying, McFaul says Obama was prescient in warning both sides against a slide to war in the Caucasus.

On July 23, two weeks before Russian tanks invaded Georgia, Obama urged Russia to “roll back the aggressive actions it has taken in the last three months” against its southern neighbor.

Obama added this warning: “The Georgian government must resist the temptation to be drawn into a military conflict.”

In April, Obama called on Tbilisi’s government and regional leaders, backed by international organizations, to hold talks about Georgia’s separatist regions. “Had we done that, this would not have happened,” McFaul said.

“Working with allies, working with international institutions to prevent the crisis, that is Barack Obama’s approach to this issue and others,” he said.

Now the invasion has taken place, Obama and McCain appear to share some ideas about how to respond. Both have warned Russia of severe, long-term consequences.

Both still favor offering Georgia and Ukraine a path to NATO membership despite misgivings in Europe that such western support helped spawn the crisis in the first place.

“There’s no virtue in mollifying a resurgent imperial Russia,” Biegun said. “The appetite will only grow with the eating.” Still, he said, it should not be a U.S. objective to have a bad relationship with Moscow. McCain, he said, also had urged Europe to wean itself from energy dependence on Russia.

Obama on Tuesday criticized Russian actions and called for another $1 billion in U.S. reconstruction aid for Georgia.

“We must help Georgia rebuild what has been destroyed,” Obama said in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, a major U.S. veterans organization.