Is Putin one of life’s good guys? Absolutely not, but foreign policy is (or ought to be) about national interest not warm feelings in the pulpit or good-hearted self-congratulation in some Washington think-tank. In the end, Russia’s long-term strategic interests are aligned with the West (a West, incidentally, that includes the Ukraine, the Baltics and a number of the other countries that emerged from imprisonment within the old USSR), but for now its ability to make mischief has been allowed to emerge as yet another of the foreign policy disasters of recent years. George W. Bush’s claim that he could find the soul lurking in the dead eyes of a secret policeman was one high point of absurdity, but, compared with the snarls and vitriol of the current approach it looks like a rare, shining moment of commonsense.

Simon Jenkins has more:

Putin is hardly seeking a return to the certainties of the cold war. He has no more interest than the west in stirring the hornet’s nest of Islamic nationalism, stretching as it does deep into Russian territory. His desire for “ever closer union” with Europe and Nato after 1997 was sincere and was surely welcome. While Putin appears to have been conducting his diplomacy over the past decade from weakness and the west from strength, the reverse has been nearer the truth. Britain and America have been led by essentially reactive politicians with no grasp of history. A terrorist outrage or a bombastic speech and they change policy on the hop. When Bush and Blair go, they will leave a world less secure and more divided in its leadership than when they arrived. Their dismissive treatment of Russia’s recovery from cold war defeat has been the rhetoric of natural bullies. Russia and the west have everything to gain from good relations. Putin has struggled to modernise his economy while holding together a traumatised and shrunken Russian federation. The west may feel he errs towards authoritarianism, but second-guessing Russian leaders is seldom a profitable exercise. This is a huge country, rich in natural and human resources. It is hard to think of somewhere the west would be better advised to “hug close”. Instead, Putin will hand his successor an isolated and bruised nation. Under a less confident president, it could retreat into protectionism and alliances the west will hate. To have encouraged that retreat is truly stupid.Read the whole thing.