The Times has two noteworthy pieces on Georgia and its ramifications today.

Bronwen Maddox weighs in on the EU’s defiant chihuahua-like stance:

… even though the EU should rightly settle for the lowest common denominator on such important questions of its own identity, the proposals were weak beyond parody. “The Union will remain vigilant,” a version of the text said yesterday, adding that the review “may lead to decisions on the continuation of discussions on the future of relations between the Union and Russia in various areas”.

Yap!

Sir Christopher Meyer (formerly HM Ambassador in both Bonn and Washington) throws in some provocative if not eccentric observations, arguing that the best way forward for Europe is to go back to ‘spheres of influence’ of the sort agreed at the Congress of Vienna in 1815.

Christopher (as befits a distinguished former FCO Press Secretary) has some excellent lines:

The supreme fallacy in foreign policy is to take the world as we would wish it to be and not as it actually is. In Britain’s case, the delusion is compounded when we are powerless to effect the outcome we desire. This has been particularly the case with Russia, where we have managed to be both impotent and provocative.

If we really want to put a halt to bad Russian behaviour, let us do so where we can make a difference, and where it is justified – starting with the expulsion of the vast nest of Russian intelligence officers in London, as Labour and Conservative governments did not hesitate to do in the 1970s…

…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. As for Russia, it must be made unambiguously clear where any revanchist lunge westwards would provoke a military response by Nato.

Oh dear.

Next year is the 70th anniversary of the most recent attempt to divide Europe into ‘spheres of influence’, ie the Molotov/Ribbentrop Pact. That did not work out so well.

More generally, why do intelligent Western commentators emit as if on autopilot the cliché about Russia’s ‘fear of encirclement’?

Goddamit, Russia sprawls across 11 time zones. Its 17m square kilometres  ‘encircle’ much of the planet.

A country that size has a lot of neighbours, many of whom have good reason to be uneasy about the weight of Russia bearing down on them. Why oh why do the alleged anxieties of Russia mesmerise us more than those of everyone else, especially when history shows Russians dumping mercilessly on smaller nationalities and not the other way round?  

Keep an eye too on absolute economic weight.

Thus EU and USA GDPs combined amount to some 70 million million US dollars (nominal).

Russia with all its oil wealth has a puny 1.3 million million or so of GDP, notably less than Spain.

Scary, huh?

The problem with the Meyerish analysis is that ‘Russia’s national interest’ (as assiduously choreographed by generations of Communists and now Putinist Communists-Lite) defines itself as including a right to subjugate/humiliate/oppress anyone in the neighbourhood.

So, with whom do we side?

The bully swaggering round a big corner of the global schoolyard? Or the little kids he duffs up on his rounds?

Does that bully really deserve his own ‘sphere of influence’ which he himself chooses?

The EU appears to find that question All Too Difficult.

Here is a foreign policy classic moment:

"We have to find a balance. The balance is between tough talk and economic consequences. My stance is yes to tough talk. No to economic consequences," said Alexander Stubb, Finland’s foreign minister.

The point, of course, is that tough talk backed by no consequences (economic or otherwise) is not in fact tough.

It is merely a passing silly noise.

Full of sound, but no fury. And signifying nothing much.