The most senior US officials, including President Joe Biden himself, refer to US alliances with individual or groups of countries in the Indo-Pacific as benign and defensive in nature. These references contrast with warnings about the possible “knock-on” effect of a Russian victory in Ukraine which, it is said, could encourage China to seek to incorporate Taiwan by force. However, an examination of the situation in Europe provides a different lesson for our part of the world; that is that building an alliance system which excludes the most important country in a region can have disastrous effects.

I refer, of course, to the war in Ukraine which, inspite of Ukraine having been part of the Soviet Union until its collapse, Russia — and Vladimir Putin in particular — came to see as “the tip of the NATO spear” pointed at it, with the aim of, and giving NATO the ability to, permanently relegate it to second-tier status.

There has been much discussion of whether the West deceived Russia over the possible future eastward expansion of NATO after the end of the Cold War and the re-unification of Germany. However, there is little doubt that at that time Russia was looking to full participation in a new Europe-wide, or Atlantic-wide, security organisation, but was snubbed. And years later, that led to Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine which has already had disastrous consequences for both Ukraine and Russia. We can only hope the disaster does not spread to involve the rest of Europe, or even the wider Western world. In hindsight, it would have been a much more positive course to fully involve Russia — the world’s second strongest nuclear power, resource-rich, technologically advanced, with a history of a major role in........

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