Russia

The West has really got to get its act together in its dealings with Russia. It is simply not credible for us to pretend that we are confronting a threat on the scale posed by the USSR throughout the cold war. Of course, President Putin is dangerous – any charismatic, nationalist strongman with expansionist ambitions and a nuclear arsenal is worth worrying about. But Russia is also Europe’s largest failing state, a country riven by corruption that permeates every aspect of its civil and public life. Its oligarchs have not built their fortunes through honest endeavour. They have plundered their nation’s natural resources aided and abetted by a governing class

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/Untitled_2_AAC_audio.mp3″ title=”Anne Applebaum and Matthew Parris debate how far we should let Russia push” startat=81] Listen [/audioplayer]It is always tempting, in the field of foreign affairs, to suppose we are led by dupes and fools while our opponents enjoy – or endure –  leaders of boundless cunning. We are over-matched; they are playing three-dimensional chess. We are weak, they are strong. We are easily distracted, they are single-minded. We compromise, they are implacable. It is easy to over-estimate the opposition while under-estimating our own capabilities. Sometimes this has unfortunate consequences. Saddam Hussein, for instance, had to be hiding something. The Iraqi dictator – notoriously full of dark cunning – would not be

In Ukraine, the West has played—quite disastrously—into Vladimir Putin’s hands. The mistakes go back almost a decade. But the most recent one occurred when protesters took to the streets to oppose the Yanukovych government. The West, by which I mean Nato and the European Union, should have made clear that whatever sympathies they had with the protesters’ aims, the right way to change the government was by the ballot box. The failure to do that has provided Putin with the pretext he needed to have Russian forces seize control of Crimea. Putin’s motivating factor is his desire to avenge, what he sees as, the humiliation of Russia at the end

I’ve seen and read an awful lot of criticism about how weak and pathetic the West has been in responding to the developing crisis in the Ukraine, but scarcely a single word offering advice as to what it SHOULD do. It may well be that making vague threats about the Sochi G8 Summit and a few muttered threats of economic ‘isolation’, whatever that is, may fall a little short of say, Operation Barbarossa as a statement of intent. But none of the pundits I have read come close to suggesting that the West should take any form of military action (or ‘World War Three’, as it used to be known),