More on Russia, always a rich seam for foreign policy First Principles.

Thus Max Hastings gives us a striking Russia metaphor:

The Russians yearn for respect, in the same fashion as any inner-city street kid with a knife. They will become willing to play with the west by western rules only if or when they no longer perceive those rules as disadvantaging themselves. Today they cannot compete on the EU’s terms, still less those of the US, so they make up their own.

It is unnecessary for the west silently to acquiesce in the Russians’ excesses, but it must tread cautiously in the face of their sensitivities.

Maybe the fact that we in the UK tread cautiously in the face of the sensitivities of street kids with knives accounts for this?

More from Max:

America must stop pretending that democracy is, of itself, the answer to all the world’s ills … US policy towards Moscow for almost two decades has been based upon the assumption that since the Russians were losers, their wishes could be ignored or defied on every front. No useful business could result from such a posture.

Blimey.

Democracy may not deal with the world’s ills but it makes a good step in that direction. Indeed, the problem in Georgia is that the Russian leadership want to send a profound anti-democratic signal that Might is Right – that what Russia wants or needs is the uber-value in that part of the world. See this latest outburst from the reportedly mild-mannered President Medvedev.

Plus the USA in fact has spent large sums of money in and with Russia on all sorts of common projects, aimed at building a new sense of partnership. The problem is not that the Americans treat the Russians as losers. It is that the Russians behave like losers, unable to make do with their sprawling eleven time zones of territory and hankering after regaining former imperial lands elsewhere.

One recurring theme in Russian and some Western analysis is the deterministic but weird idea that Russia has to behave differently (ie badly) because it is ‘surrounded by enemies’.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin once said that the fall of the Soviet Union was a geopolitical disaster. This didn’t mean that he wanted to retain the Soviet state; rather, it meant that the disintegration of the Soviet Union had created a situation in which Russian national security was threatened by Western interests.

As an example, consider that during the Cold War, St. Petersburg was about 1,200 miles away from a NATO country. Today it is about 60 miles away from Estonia, a NATO member. The disintegration of the Soviet Union had left Russia surrounded by a group of countries hostile to Russian interests in various degrees and heavily influenced by the United States, Europe and, in some cases, China.

If a country occupies such a vast land mass as Russia does, it necessarily has plenty of neighbours and all sorts of complex questions to deal with. The Russian problem is that it tends to see anything it does not like as ‘hostile’. And that attitude extends even to the Bambi-ish spread of EU values and processes into eg Ukraine.

Because, of course, the point is not that ‘Russia’ has a problem with that. Rather the Russian post-KGB elite have the problem, since the spread of Western democratic values brings with it new transparency and reliance on open rules rather than shadowy power-plays. And that threatens both their biznes interests and their world-view.

Above all, the Western democracy which is sneered at so much in the West brings with it a sense that political behaviour has (and depends on) Limits – limits of law, of convention, of personal self-restraint..

Here is the profound cultural/philosophical difference between Russia and the West.

‘The West’ sees Limits as a source of strength. ‘Russia’ sees Limits as a form of weakness.

Max does not seem to get this:

… the west (sic) will find it easier to coexist with this tormented, intransigent, melancholy and oil-rich neighbour when Russia feels comfortable with itself, not when its nose is rubbed in its long history of failure.

This has to be mainly wrong. No serious community policy can be based round the idea that we all wait for the inner city street kid with knife to ‘feel comfortable with himself’, if his idea of being comfortable is to slash away at smaller kids who disagree with him.

If we are not brave enough to take away his knife and haul him off to therapy, we at least need to limit his room for slashing and to do a lot more to help defend themselves those he threatens ?