Soon after I arrived in Moscow as a correspondent at the start of 1993, Andrei Kozyrev, the then Russian foreign minister, made a speech warning that if the west continued to ignore Russia's vital interests and publicly humiliate the country, there would one day be a Russian reaction that would sweep away the new partnership with the west that he and other Russian liberals were trying to build. A western colleague scrawled on a transcript of his remarks: "More of Kozyrev's ravings." Thus were dismissed out of hand the reasonable concerns of the most pro-western foreign minister that Russia has ever had.
Western policymakers therefore need to understand that the attitudes set out by President Vladimir Putin in his speech in Munich will define Russian approaches to the west for the foreseeable future. This is not only because the basic form of Russia's ruling order now seems set for a long time to come. It is also because Mr Putin's remarks reflect those of a large majority of Russians - and indeed, a great many other peoples around the world - and because the US has recently suffered serious blows to its power and prestige.
As soon as Russia recovered a measure of its economic strength, it was always going to seek to regain a measure of its international influence. However, this will remain vastly more limited than that of the Soviet Union. Russia is also bound to the west by dependence on foreign investment and the global economy. This should be a deterrent to reckless moves by Moscow.
Nonetheless, we are living in a world very different from that of the 1990s, when the west expanded Nato and launched the Kosovo war. Then, westerners argued that Russia could be transformed into a free-market democracy that would be subservient to the US; and that Russia was so weak that even hostile western actions would bring no effective Russian response. Today, western moves against what Russia sees as its vital interests will bring very severe retaliation indeed.
In these new geopolitical circumstances, the main guidelines of western governments and organisations in formulating strategy towards Russia should be: to reduce potentially dangerous western dependencies on Russia; to avoid clashes with Russia except where these are essential either to the vital interests of the west or to international law and morality; and, on the territory of the former Soviet Union, to draw up common rules of behaviour with a view to maintaining peace and stability.
The first principle requires reducing European dependence on Russian energy exports, which is also desirable as part of the struggle against global warming. This requires both serious action and moral courage on the part of European governments; above all, as Tony Blair, British prime minister, has argued, when it comes to recognising the unavoidable importance of nuclear energy in this regard. What Europe must not do is infuriate Russia by talking publicly about the alleged Russian energy threat, without doing anything to reduce it.
The second and third principles require abandoning Nato enlargement to Ukraine and Georgia in favour of mutually agreed restraints on western and Russian behaviour on the territory of the former Soviet Union. Nato membership for Ukraine is opposed by a large majority of Ukrainians. Nato membership for Georgia would commit the west to one side of unsolved and probably insoluble ethnic conflicts, with Russia irrevocably committed to the other side. Both moves would ensure very damaging Russian attacks on vital western interests elsewhere.
Instead, the west should seek to create with Russia the kind of relationship that the US has sought with some success with China: one based on respect for both sides' vital interests with a common commitment to the stability of the world economy. This is what John Hulsman and I have called "the great capitalist peace".
In east Asia, these mutually agreed constraints and commitments have been developed in recent years to deal with potential crises over Taiwan and North Korea; but their foundations were laid down many years ago in agreements between Richard Nixon and Mao Zedong. Surely, if the US could achieve a mutually beneficial set of international ground rules with the fanatical architects of China's monstrous Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, it ought to be capable of doing so with a Russian administration as tough but also as pragmatic as that of Vladimir Putin in Russia?
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