Taking Ukraine would finish Putin

‘Never interrupt your enemy,’ said Napoleon, ‘when he is making a mistake.’ A Russian invasion and occupation of Ukraine would prove (perhaps, by the time this Spectator is published, ‘will’ prove) a terrible mistake. Were it not for the death and despoliation such a mistake would bring — an outcome one could never welcome — the response to Vladimir Putin’s implicit threats should surely be: bring it on! When we told Russia they’d only be hurting themselves, did we not mean it?

For the free world, an invasion would be a dark cloud; but, though I hate to speak of silver linings, the ultimate downfall of Putin, the severing of prospective Russian gas supplies to Germany and the kicking of Westminster into finally squaring up to the City’s dirty trade in money-laundering would be a silver lining. This column would not welcome the cloud, but reminds you of the silver lining for the rest of the world, if not for the poor Ukrainians.

I’m very far from being the first to remark that a Russian invasion would be against Moscow’s own interests: leading political, military and media voices in Nato’s member countries, including our own, have been shouting this from the outset. But I’ve yet to hear the cold logic taken forward: if invasion is so obviously against Putin’s interests, might it not be in our own? On the West’s part, huge diplomatic effort has been put into saving Putin from himself. Why? Why should Nato pay — through the offering of any concessions, of ‘ladders for Putin to climb down’ — to save Putin’s face?

We often overestimate our rivals’ and enemies’ intelligence. We assume they are behaving rationally. Until the 1980s, all through my life in politics I watched, at first approving then increasingly puzzled, as we bigged up the potency and prospects of a doomed ideological experiment: Soviet communism.