It depends how you look at it. Sir John Sawers, ex-head of MI6 said some very wise things in his interview with BBC Radio 4, which makes it all the more inexcusable for the blighted foreign office to have got it so wrong. Among Sir John’s comments were his disappointment that the West and Russia had not drawn together at the end of the Cold War. I have been saying exactly this for years, but the West made no real effort and made the fatal assumption that they should wait until Russia became a western style democracy. This was never going to happen.
Russia became a democracy for the first time in its history, but a democracy in its own style with a good deal of autocracy and state coercion in the mix. Russians, most of them anyway, do not see democracy as a road to political freedom; they see it as a route to a strong state which can provide reliable services, jobs and above all security from attack by enemies. There is a type of mysticism about Mother Russia and about being Russian which few other nations emulate or share. Its culture leans west and copies a lot that the west does, but it is not and never will be western.
As soon as the mob took to the streets in Kiev and overthrew the properly elected government by violent protest, having been encouraged and egged on by western politicians, Russia saw a serious threat to its security. It looked around the chaos caused by western military interventions and decided to give up on a bad job. From now on Russia will conduct itself as on its guard and a rival in the political arena of the world to what has become the tarnished leadership of the US and the German dominated diplomacy of Europe. It is engaged on a programme of updating its armed forces and of reminding the world that its nuclear forces are more than a match for those of the US. That we have blundered into this state of affairs at all is a signal defeat for whatever it is that diplomacy is supposed to do. It is every bit as much the fault of the West as Russia.
But it is not too late to talk and work out a settlement which will last. The common interests of Russia and the West far outmeasure the issues of disagreement. It is not too late but there is no time to waste. It should be a priority of any incoming government in May.