Anatole Kaletsky today gives us a lesson in how to be intimidated.

His article describing why Russia is justified in opposing NATO enlargement is everything an Op-Ed should be: urbane, perceptive, even a dash or two of wisdom.

It also is Wrong, or at least Unbalanced.

He depicts NATO as "an unstoppable politico-military juggernaut, advancing relentlessly towards Russia’s borders and swallowing up all intervening countries". Help!

Russia is according to Kaletsky quite right to be worried about "Nato’s explicit new vocation to keep expanding until it embraces every “democratic” country in Europe and central Asia, with the unique and critical exception of Russia itself"; this "becomes hard to distinguish from previous expansions into eastern territory by French and German heads of state whose intentions were less benign than those of the present Western leaders".

Huh? NATO is like Napoleon or Hitler? Or Russia is right to make this comparison?

Note also Kaletsky’s sly use of the inverted commas: NATO seeks to "embrace every "democratic" country in Europe …".

Kaletsky makes some fairish points about why Georgia and Ukraine might want to join NATO for specific domestic reasons, which might not be worth our defending.

What Kaletsky fails to do is point to the deeper upside of NATO membership for the countries concerned.

That upside consist of making a strategic national commitment in favour of a completely new way of doing things, actively supported and reinforced by NATO allies and processes.

NATO membership brings with it unyielding civilian control of the military. Far greater transparency in everything, including budgets and procurement. No more GRU-style military secret police subverting and spying on their own political processes. Reasonable good faith attempts to work together to look back into history to cast full light on possible past abuses (Katyn). No more bombastic obnoxious military rhetoric shaping public life.

Not all this is perfect or implemented overnight or at all. But much of it is. That compounds up over time into a powerful package, with deep policy and moral implications for the way society as a whole is run.

It represents a sense of respecting Limits on Power, the far opposite of what these countries experienced under Soviet rule.

This is why Polish democrats were so keen to get Poland into NATO, in the face of energetic former communist objections. The Poles opted for Democracy against Communism. And good grief, how right they were to do so.

Imagine what modern Europe would look like now if Poland had the political status of Georgia, lying in some sort of political-moral twilight zone with former Soviet interests linked to the KGB having a far freer time to penetrate into that society and play games with Polish assets.

Does Kaletsky think that Poland’s NATO membership was a mistake? If not, why not roll out NATO values to those other European countries actively seeking to implement them? How else can they hope to bed them in? If they indeed are not fully "democratic", what precisely is holding them back?

The Russian government knows what is at stake. It rightly sees NATO values as a challenge to its quasi-Soviet claims to influence and legitimacy which it is making such heavy and explicit efforts to fortify – see Edward Lucas’ book The New Cold War, especially Chapter Five ("What Makes Russia’s Leaders Tick"), for a powerful description of this process in action.

So the question is, if we go along with Kaletskyism what is our message to European-minded Georgians/Ukrainians and to the Russians, and to ourselves ?

Our message to the Russians: "The worse you behave, the more we hold back. You stare; we blink. Aggressive sulking pays off."

Our message to the Georgians/Ukrainians: "Sorry, when facing neo-Soviet bullying you are mainly on your own, even though you want to sign up to our values, not theirs."

Our message to ourselves: "Be weak. It’s easier."

All that said, is there is something in Russian concerns? Following the end of the Cold War why is NATO still there?

The answer to that lies in different chickens and eggs. Because Russia has not embraced democracy, NATO is still needed as a non-trivial symbol of unity and defence of Western values. But because NATO is still there Russia finds itself threatened and so does not embrace democracy.

Kaletsky takes it for granted that the way out of this dead-end is in NATO doing nothing to promote and reinforce democracy elsewhere in non-NATO Europe. That can not be right, or at least not the full story.

If Russia changed course and started again to implement full Western/European values at home and started exporting them to the rest of the former Soviet Union as happened a decade ago, the whole atmosphere would be different.

Transdniestria would be solved. Other frozen conflicts could be dealt with in a comprehensive fair-minded way. That would open the way to a quite new spirit of partnership across the board, maybe even an eventual redefinition of Western security to include Russia too, if Russia wanted to be part of that. The very idea of Europe would be redefined. Hard choices for us all in how eg the European Union and NATO fit into that new scenario. Fine by me.

Russia can not contemplate this. It implies that Russia becomes an ordinary albeit big and influential member of the Western club, one among many. Its market niche as an independent global challenger to the United States would look far more like France’s: noisy, not unimportant, but ultimately effete? Its Options would be Reduced.  

And above all the power and methods of the post-KGB elite running Russia now would have to be diluted and even over time disappear, in favour of a substantively pluralist, open way of running Russia.

So maybe Russia under current management is right to be paranoid. But not all paranoids are right – or deserving respect.