Almost a decade has passed since Barack Obama teased the Republican Mitt Romney for his vigilance towards Russia. “The 1980s are now calling,” he said, in a joke that even then was shopworn, “to ask for their foreign policy back”.
But then successive UK premiers have waved Russians with fortunes of dubious provenance into Belgravia and Highgate. French president Emmanuel Macron has had a fanciful notion of himself as the west’s Kremlin-whisperer. As for Angela Merkel, it is hard to know if her turn against nuclear energy will age worse than her failure to lead Germany out of its postwar tentativeness abroad. She only had 16 years.
Over the course of this young century, the liberal centre has borne out its reputation for softheadedness. Stunning, then, that populism comes out of the present crisis in yet worse shape. Obama’s naiveties about the Kremlin are awkward for Democrats; Donald Trump’s active flirtation with it is much tougher for Republicans to live down. As polls favour Macron for re-election, his wilder rivals have to explain away past flattery of Vladimir Putin. Even online, an entire class of bumptious contrarians, apt to wonder if the US would put up with a communist Mexico and so on, has become tongue-tied of late.