Russia is on the rampage, and the world has forgotten how to deal with that

Putin is reasserting his nation’s global influence by interfering in Syria and the US elections. How did we not see this coming?

Here’s a quiz question for the holiday family entertainments: what is the “peace dividend”? I’m betting that nobody under the age of 35 will have a clue, even though that deliriously optimistic phrase was the received wisdom not so very long ago. The peace dividend was expected to be a natural consequence of the end of the Cold War. The collapse of the Soviet Union – which had been bankrupted by a relentless arms race led by Ronald Reagan’s Pentagon, and fatally weakened by a loss of internal credibility – would produce unprecedented bounty for the triumphant West. The vast amounts of national wealth that had gone into military spending would now be available for home comforts.

Modernised public services and welfare provision of untold generosity could flourish without stint. Truly, we had arrived at an age of international goodwill and prosperity in which we could be sure that local skirmishes would never again become global power struggles. After all, the great ideological argument of the past century was over. Free markets and democratic government had conclusively won out over command-and-control economics and totalitarianism. The prospect of a Third World War – which had once been thought inevitable – was now out of the question: when “little conflicts” erupted, they would not be manipulated (and escalated) by opposing superpower blocs. No more puppet regimes. No more proxy wars. Well, we all know how that went. It turned out that the global chess game, with its ruthless players, had very little to do with ideological argument. This wasn’t really a high-minded debate about how men should live or the best way to organise a just society: it was all about the old-fashioned, down-and-dirty matters of rabid nationalism, imperial spheres of influence and revanchist political leadership.

What drives Russia now is not the (half-pretended) belief that its system of government is the moral solution to all social problems. It is the naked desire to reassert its control over areas of the world where national pride dictates that it must not be eclipsed. Vladimir Putin may be presiding over a dying population and a failing economy, but if he can annex the Crimea and intimidate former satellite states in Eastern Europe without fear of Nato reprisal, as well as maintain the hideous Assad regime (with the help of his allies in Iran), then he is on top of the world. Indeed, he is, as Forbes magazine decided last week, for the third year in a row, the most powerful man on the planet.

The big question is: how on earth did we not see this coming? Did nobody understand that the loss of the Soviet empire – the disintegration with a whimper, not even a bang, of what had seemed an invincible great power – would be a devastating existential crisis for the Russian nation? How could this not have ended badly? The Communist system fell, not just into disrepute, but into chaos. So eager was the country to divest itself of the old Soviet institutions that it made a fire sale of its national assets, selling them off to a handful of oligarchs who became obscenely rich. The public services and many of the ordinary transactional arrangements simply ceased to exist, so that people were left in helpless poverty, often selling their possessions in the streets.

The West, or the parts of it that bothered to watch, may have been surprised by the degree of nostalgia for Communist rule but, in truth, it was scarcely surprising, given the disorder and outright kleptocracy that came after.

So here we are. The Western governments have made their promises to their own populations about all that money that could now be spent at home. They have encouraged the expectation that it is their own people’s domestic problems that will be the centre of attention, rather than a constant contest for the hearts and minds of emerging nations in Africa and Asia. But while they were beating their swords into welfare programmes, Russia was on the move. In order to distract from a stagnant economy dependent on the price of oil and a society still enamoured of the Western lifestyle, Putin took the traditional path of re-establishing his country’s power abroad.

Aleppo is the grotesque outcome. It is agonisingly clear that nobody has any sort of strategy for dealing with this. At the UN last week, the US ambassador, Samantha Power, hurled insults at the Russian Federation (“Is there literally nothing that can shame you?”), which Russia’s ambassador returned (“[It is] as if she was Mother Theresa herself ”). Where does that get us? And how hollow does it sound, after the President whom Ms Power represents withdrew from intervention in Syria after his own red lines were crossed, and has since singularly failed to make any move that would stop the Assad-Putin homicidal rampage. Putin can laugh in the face of any leader who claims the moral high ground while retreating from the battlefield.

There is a fresh dimension to this in the cyber-scandals that are now creating political havoc in America. It is almost certainly true that Russia hacked the emails of the Democratic Party leadership during the election campaign. What is less clear is that they did this with the specific intention of damaging Hillary Clinton’s prospects and thus getting Donald Trump elected president.

In fact, it seems to be generally believed that they hacked both parties, but only handed over the Democratic emails to Wikileaks, which would appear to give credence to the helping Trump theory. But there is another plausible explanation: that what they found in the Democrats’ exchanges was dynamite (that the Democratic National Committee had deliberately set out to undermine Bernie Sanders, and that the campaign managers sometimes despaired of Mrs Clinton’s performance), while the Republican material was less surprising and newsworthy.

I think it is highly likely that the intention was not so much to help determine the outcome of the election as to discredit the whole process and so destabilise the democratic institutions of the United States. If that was the aim – to cause the US electorate to distrust its own political leadership, at a time when Russia desperately wants to re-assert its global influence – then it was stupendously successful. The doubt that it has created about the causes of Hillary’s shocking defeat has egged on the tireless campaign to review the result. There is now a video from the inevitable collection of Hollywood celebrities demanding that members of the Electoral College defy the votes cast in their states and switch their support to Mrs Clinton: a move that would create a constitutional crisis which would conveniently (from the Russian point of view) distract America from international events for the duration.

So what about the coming Trump administration? Is he really going to be Putin’s ally and apologist? His characteristic leap into Twitter motor-mouth mode would suggest it. He is defying, in a quite unprecedented way, the assessment of his own security agencies in declaring the accusations of a Russian hacking operation to be groundless nonsense. He has also appointed a secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, who is reputed to be a “friend” of Vladimir’s.

But on the other hand, it is widely believed that he will put John Bolton, who is very hawk-ish indeed, into the number two spot at the State Department. And he has recruited a few generals who are known to be hard line, too.

Is the White House going to play hard cop, soft cop with the Kremlin? Is there a cunning plan beneath the contradictions? Or any sort of plan at all?