Mick Hartley

I've lost count of the number of articles I've read in British newspapers recently on the folly of provoking the Russian bear, and how the demands of realpolitik mean that we must allow Russia its sphere of influence. Here's the latest, in today's Times, from Christopher Meyer, former UK ambassador to Washington:

What is to be done, as Lenin once put it? The first thing is to sweep away any rose-tinted illusions left from the Blair-Bush era. For the democracies of North America and Europe, relations with Russia are always going to be awkward and bumpy, at best co-operative and adversarial in equal measure.

The fall of the Soviet Union did not wipe the slate clean. The Russia that we are dealing with today, with its fear of encirclement, its suspicion of foreigners and natural appetite for autocracy, is as old as the hills, long pre-dating communism. It is a Russia that will never be reassured by the West's protestations of pacific intent as it pushes Nato and the EU ever eastwards.

Most important of all, Russia and the West need to draw up rules of the road for the 21st century. Mr Miliband and others have condemned the notion of returning to the geopolitics of the Congress of Vienna which, in 1815 after the Napoleonic Wars, divided Europe into spheres of influence between empires and nations. They perhaps forget that what was agreed at Vienna held at bay for almost a century a general European war.

Something similar is needed today, based again on spheres of influence. Nato must renounce the provocative folly of being open to Georgian or, worse, Ukrainian membership. This strikes at the heart of the Russian national interest and offers no enhanced security to either Tbilisi or Kiev.

By "rose-tinted illusions" he means, presumably, the notion that we can offer any help to the people of the Caucasus or Eastern Europe in their struggle for a liberal democracy, as they watch with apprehension an increasingly fascist-nationalistic Russia start to exercise its muscles again after the break-up of the Soviet Union. They are, after all, these Georgians and Ukrainians and the like, far-away people of whom we know nothing.

It's difficult not to think back to the early Nineties and the Balkans, when the voices of those like Sir Christopher were in the ascendant in Britain, and the general opinion of experienced and wordly Europeans, as opposed to naive Americans, was to lift not a finger to help the Bosnians. It's a mindset that was superbly catalogued and demolished by Brendan Simms in "Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia".

And here's that old US-Europe divide opening up again: this Washington Post editorial, for instance. Hardly a Bush-supporting neo-con paper, the Washington Post, but they can recognise a threatening aggressor when they see one:

There was a telling juxtaposition of headlines from Russia yesterday. On one side you had President Dmitry Medvedev claiming a "sphere of influence" outside Russian borders and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warning the West not to arm Georgia. On the other side, you had the murder of Magomed Yevloyev, a journalist whose independence had angered the government [see here – MH]. He was arrested, shot in the head by police while riding in the back of a police car, and dumped by the side of the road.

This is a moment for clarity in thinking about Russia, which is forcibly occupying sizable chunks of a neighboring country and claiming it has every right to do so. Some in the West are tempted to agree. After all, the United States and its allies invaded Iraq and attacked Serbia; why can't Russia do the same to Georgia? Why can't it have a NAFTA of its own?

Here's why. The United States, Britain and other nations deposed the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein because he repeatedly violated his promises to the United Nations, after his earlier invasion of Kuwait, to rid himself of weapons of mass destruction and prove that he had done so. They invaded Serbia to protect the people of Kosovo from mass ethnic cleansing and destruction. In both cases, reasonable people can argue that it was wrong to act without U.N. authorization; they can make a case that the campaigns were unwise on many other grounds.

What they can't argue is that the allies were motivated by a desire for conquest or occupation; as the presidential campaign has shown, the American people can hardly wait to pull their troops out and leave Iraqis to manage their own affairs. NAFTA, meanwhile, was freely entered into by three democratically elected governments. If Canada wants out, the United States will not seize Ottawa.

Russia, on the other hand, is seeking to overthrow a democratically elected government precisely because that government does not want to be subjugated to Moscow. Mr. Medvedev's claim of a Georgian genocide, after his own government published casualty figures of 200 or so, is deliberately preposterous; he is mocking the very idea of humanitarian intervention. As Russia under president-turned-prime-minister Vladimir Putin has become less and less democratic, it has become increasingly aggressive toward neighboring democracies. The more democratic those neighbors become — see Ukraine, Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia — the more hostile Russia becomes.

The brave Mr. Yevloyev, who returned to his hometown in the province of Ingushetia despite ample warning that Mr. Putin's thugs were waiting for him, may seem like a footnote to all this. But his death — like the deaths of Anna Politkovskaya and so many other journalists and liberal politicians before him, like the death of the free press and open debate — is at the heart of the story. Mr. Putin is turning Russia into something very like a fascist state, and its natural inclination will be to replicate itself abroad. "The Cold War was clearly about ideologies," Russia's ambassador to the European Union, Vladimir Chizhov, noted yesterday, and then claimed: "We are living in a different world today. There is no ground for talk about a second Cold War."

Judging by the E.U.'s feckless response yesterday to Russia's aggression, many European leaders still want to believe Mr. Chizhov. But what is happening in Georgia is very much about ideology, and the longer the Europeans pretend otherwise, the greater the damage they will have to contain.