The Economist’s Edward Lucas, an old friend, and a long-standing and highly perceptive analyst of the post-Soviet space (and thus someone very early to appreciate the direction in which Putin was going), has written his final column for European voice. Read it all, but here’s an excerpt:

The big question was always Russia. As an old cold warrior (the last journalist to be expelled from the Soviet Union, in 1990, and Moscow bureau chief for The Economist when Putin came to power in 1998), I had long feared that old Soviet bad habits were merely buried, not dead.
I have a fair claim to be the first to see the current crisis coming. I wrote a book in 2007 called “The New Cold War” [I reviewed it for NRODT]. It was widely mocked as scaremongering when it was published; fewer people do that now. Since the Ukraine crisis broke, I have written the column exclusively (some might say monotonously) on the grim topic of European security.
It is grim because we are losing. We are not willing to spend money on defence. We are not willing to take risks. We are not willing to use force. We are not willing to accept economic pain. We are not willing to deal with Kremlin information warfare. Worst of all, we are not yet willing to accept even that Russia is a revisionist power which wants to change the rules.
This is not an east-west split. Some of the countries falling fastest into Putin’s orbit, such as Hungary, are those which suffered greatly at the hands of Soviet occupiers. Some of those that are his most stalwart opponents, such as Sweden, are not even members of NATO.
The European Commission has emerged as a formidable adversary for the Kremlin, particularly on energy, just as the disastrous administration of Barack Obama seems set on America’s eclipse as a European power.
I hope still that we are in the darkness before dawn. It is not too late to bolster the Baltics, to save Ukraine, and to punish the Putin regime with real sanctions—directed at the money looted from the Russian people, and the Western bankers, lawyers and accountants who helped launder it.
But I’m not optimistic. Perhaps Putin is right, and the West’s heyday is indeed over. We may have to get used to a world in which rules don’t matter and might is right.

Edward is right to worry, and he is right to be concerned that the West may be losing, but I cannot say that I agree with all that he has to say. Thus he observes that the EU Commission has “emerged as a formidable adversary for the Kremlin, particularly on energy,” a reference, presumably, to action that it may be taking against Gazprom. But take a step back, and we see that the EU’s role has been more of a mixed blessing than Lucas suggests.

In the 1990s, the goal of EU membership, and the internal reforms (and growing financial support) that went with the process did a very great deal to anchor those countries in the West. It’s an achievement of which the EU can be proud.

On the other hand, overreach by Brussels has done much to create the current conditions in Europe that Putin is playing to his advantage. The financial devastation that the euro has left in its wake has not exactly encouraged increased defense spending. It has also left Greece in the grip of a pro-Putin government and created an opening for nationalist parties elsewhere, notably in France, as has Brussels’ unconcealed disdain for national sovereignty, something that is, for example, a partial explanation for what’s going on in Hungary. In the context of Putin’s ambitions this matters: The fact that he appreciates the nation-state (or at least his nation-state) has led too many of Europe’s nationalist parties to believe that they have a friend (or an enemy of an enemy) in Putin, an association that has, in some cases, been reinforced by Russian cash. This has been a bad mistake on many levels (it’s also given Europhiles a very handy talking point), but whatever one thinks of it, it has undeniably given Putin much more influence in Europe than he would otherwise enjoy.

There is also the broader question as to whether the EU’s own military and diplomatic ambitions have weakened NATO. I’d argue that they have.

Finally, Edward is too kind about Sweden. Yes, Carl Bildt, the foreign minister in Sweden’s last center-right government, has talked the talk about Russian aggression, but talk was all his government did. Both that government and its leftist predecessor neglected Sweden’s defense to such a degree that the country’s weakness has become a menace to the security of its Baltic neighbors. Sweden’s new leftist government may now (amid all its inane chatter about a “feminist” foreign policy”) be starting to correct that, but at a leisurely pace, and with no plans of NATO membership.

As to what to do, that’s too big a topic for this post. Sanctions have a part to play, but so (and Lucas would not disagree) does hard power. A permanent (de facto or de jure) and substantial NATO force in the Baltics would be an excellent next step.