For years I have been saying and writing that with the collapse of communism and the Soviet Union, Russia should be accepted by the West and is no longer, and should not be seen as, an enemy. America has consistently refused to accept that notion and has during Obama’s second term done much to build Russia up into a threat. The supine British Foreign Office has backed this ignorant appraisal. Using it as a basis of making judgement on world affairs since 9/11 has led to the biggest string of intelligence misreadings, military misjudgments and diplomatic blunders in Western history since the fall of Napoleon. I have often felt that the maintenance of Russia as an ogre on the rampage was critical to avoiding a wing or two of the Pentagon being made redundant. Anyway now everything has changed. More than that it has been turned on its head. Diplomacy, the military, the works, even the world view.
President Elect Trump has told the whole world via Twitter that anybody who does not see that Russia and the US need to work together to sort the current problems in the world is STUPID. Hear! Hear! Brilliant! I love it! This is going to be a presidency which reshapes the world as we know it. Because Trump is a visionary (with lots of faults over misogyny, groping and other stuff too) who sees up ahead something much better. And there is a chance he will get us all there.
Because he knows that Russia is the largest country in the world which is in many ways an unfathomable enigma, which does not even value many the the jewels of the American psyche, yet has been critical in the defeat of threats to the survival of all the West holds dear in every conflict for more than the last 200 years. Without Russia we would today live in a world shaped by Napoleon or the Kaiser or Hitler or some combination or output of them all. And even the stupid would not have wanted that.
As for the British Foreign Office, I would close it down and turn it into a (Trump?) hotel. I would open a Ministry of External Affairs tasked with looking to the future, informed by, but unshackled to, the past. And with a completely new team down to the doorman. Boris does not even come into my plan. Anyway he is far too busy with his own.