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The snap visit this week of veteran U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke to Georgia - ostensibly to discuss Georgian participation as a supply route to the Afghanistan battlefront - underscores an unsettling new development in U.S.-Russian relations. At the ragged edge of the old East-West divide, a new battle is taking shape: this one for influence over - and under - the Black Sea.

For much of the Cold War, the Black Sea was bounded by territory under Soviet control - the Georgian, Ukrainian and Russian Soviet Socialist Republics on the eastern shore, Warsaw Pact members Romania and Bulgaria on the west - with Turkey providing NATO its sole, albeit geo-critical position at the throat of the Black Sea.

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With Romania and Bulgaria's...