Michael Cooper, New York Times

HARRISBURG, Pa. — The intensifying warfare in the former Soviet republic of Georgia has put a new focus on the increasingly hard line that Senator John McCain has taken against Russia in recent years, with stances that have often gone well beyond those of the Bush administration and its focus on engagement.

Mr. McCain has called for expelling what he has called a “revanchist Russia” from meetings of the Group of 8, the organization of leading industrialized nations. He urged President Bush — in vain — to boycott the group’s meeting in St. Petersburg in 2006. And he has often mocked the president’s assertion that he got a sense of the soul of Vladimir V. Putin, who was then Russia’s president and is now its prime minister, by looking into his eyes. “I looked into his eyes,” Mr. McCain said, “and saw three letters: a K, a G and a B.”

His hard line has been derided as provocative, and possibly dangerous, by some so-called realist foreign policy experts, who warn that isolating Russia would do little to encourage it to change. But others, including neoconservatives who deem promoting democracy a paramount goal, see Mr. McCain’s position as principled, and prescient. Now, with Russia moving forcefully into Georgia as Mr. McCain seeks the presidency, his views are being scrutinized as never before through the prism of Russia’s invasion.

For Mr. McCain, the conflict came after months of warnings about the situation in Georgia. Mr. McCain befriended Georgia’s president, Mikheil Saakashvili, over the course of several trips there, and even nominated him for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2005 (in a letter that was co-signed by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York).

Mr. McCain’s top foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, lobbied on behalf of the Georgian government until March, and Mr. McCain has long embraced Georgia’s efforts to move toward joining NATO, which has been seen as part of a broader strategy to contain Russia by admitting its old satellites and former Soviet republics into the alliance.

“NATO’s decision to withhold a membership action plan for Georgia might have been viewed as a green light by Russia for its attacks on Georgia,” Mr. McCain told reporters on Monday in Erie, Pa., “and I urge the NATO allies to revisit the decision.”

While Mr. McCain has long called for excluding Russia from the Group of 8, and isolating it on the world stage, his probable Democratic opponent, Senator Barack Obama, has made clear he favors more engagement with Russia (even as he speaks of reviewing relationships with Russia, including its interest in joining the World Trade Organization).

The question of how to handle a Russia that is rich with oil revenues and increasingly independent has divided the foreign policy establishment.

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