For all its terrors, the Cold War did at least maintain a certain geopolitical certainty in which West and East knew roughly where they stood. The end of history was declared when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, the final triumph of liberal Western values over the impoverishment of communism.

But in taking advantage of Soviet collapse and pushing East, the West humiliated a proud and resentful nation, rather in the same way as the Allies did to Germany at Versailles after the First World War, and in so doing they gave birth to Putin.

Globalisation was meant to usher in a whole new world order of geopolitical stability. Instead it has ended up backfiring, bringing grief both at home and abroad.

What’s so extraordinary about the predicament we now find ourselves in is that Russia is in economic terms a nation of relatively little significance, just 11th in the hierarchy of economies by size of GDP with a per capita income roughly the same as Romania. If proof be needed that you can have as much economic power as you like, but when push comes to shove, it is no match for hard-headed military heft, this is it.

For the thing about military power is that it is only useful if you’re prepared to deploy it. In terms of hardware and expertise, the West is collectively more than a match for Russia, more than a match indeed for Russia and China combined, but from Vietnam onwards, virtually every military deployment embarked on by Western nations has ended in abject disaster. The Balkan wars were a rare exception. There followed Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, all now failed states despite the trillions poured into so-called nation building.

Given this experience, there is a marked reluctance to use it again, and Putin knows it. It’s not so much that the liberal West has lost the plot as that it’s proving a lot more difficult to convince the rest of the world that it should adopt our freedom-loving ways than imagined. Globalisation was meant to usher in a whole new world order of geopolitical stability based on law, market economics, international trade and cross border integration. Instead it has ended up backfiring, bringing grief both at home and abroad.

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The recent public trialling of Russia’s nuclear arsenal was a deliberate shot across Western bows. The idea of nuclear deterrent as a guarantor of peace through the certainty of mutually assured destruction has terrifyingly transmogrified into the threat of a hardman autocrat who might actually be prepared to use it if he doesn’t get his way. Putin’s belief that he can do what he likes without meaningful Western resistance is thereby further strengthened. First Georgia, then Crimea, then eastern Ukraine; one step at a time he pushes forward and finds that mere condemnation and the minor inconvenience of his oligarchs is the worst he can expect by way of retaliation.

All this makes for grim reading, but it is also a call to arms. International integration has not worked as intended; in globalising, Western economies have traded the inherent risks of long, internationally based supply chains for the efficiencies and cheaper prices they are capable of delivering. But consequent reliance on others for key supplies is now proving unsafe and insecure on multiple fronts. The importance of maintaining a degree of self-sufficiency, from energy to clinical masks and even food stuffs, has rarely been more evident.

I’m not saying that the backlash against long and complex international supply chains is necessarily a good thing, for it will carry a heavy cost in terms of duplication, lost efficiencies, reduced comparative advantage and increased prices. It is also possible to imagine a bifurcated world in which some of the benefits of free trade and integrated supply chains are preserved through continued close association with like-minded, economically equivalent English speaking and European nations.

But that the tectonic plates of history are shifting again, perhaps returning us to a semblance of the pre-1989 world order in which Russia and China, together with their satellites, were a world apart, seems all too possible. Some might say that such a correction is long overdue.

Telegraph, London

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