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Ignoring the mood of the Russian Bear

Alistair Horne, writing in The Guardian in "We mistake the mood in Russia at our peril", reflects on how the West may have been more than a little responsible for the mood in which we now find Russia. Bottom line, rubbing people's noses in the grind isn't a smart thing to do.

"Civilisation is right to be appalled by the brutish excess of the Russian attack on Georgia. It was clearly well-planned in advance; a cunning trap laid not just for a rash Saakashvili, but for George W Bush in his expiring presidency. America's share of the blame goes back, however, to the Clinton administration – and his ill-named Secretary of State, Mrs Albright.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, Reagan and Thatcher displayed Churchillian magnanimity towards Gorbachev's broken nation. Relations were never better. There was no triumphalism. Then came Madeleine Albright, with all the inbuilt prejudices against Russia of her native Mittel Europa. Moscow's nose was rubbed in the dirt. With a little more understanding of Russia's pan-Slavic pride, the war in Kosovo might have been contained.

Under the present US administration, the humbling of Russia continued by ringing her former territories with ABM radar sites, and advancing NATO to her very frontiers. Just across the Russian border in North Ossetia, in 1990 I was struck by an imposing monument which marks the high tide of Hitler's invasion, on the way to Stalingrad; you don't need to be a Russian of my generation to resent the possibility of German NATO forces installed a few miles away.

Has Dick Cheney forgotten US reactions to Soviet missiles 90 miles across the way from Florida in 1962? Pushing NATO eastwards into Poland might have been just alright; but into Slovakia and Romania, a bridge too far; to Georgia and Ukraine, far too far. Russia's historic fears of "encirclement" were being thrust at her."

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