Europe and Russia's Dangerous Failure to Talk

It is the Russian president who faces the worse predicament. Russia’s creaking economy can no longer deliver the rising living standards that were once the basis of the compact between state and citizen, and the Kremlin’s adventurism abroad has a limited shelf life. In cheap action films the bad guy is taken out by force. In the better sort, he falls victim to his own hubris. The great risk, though, is that Europe and Russia find themselves in a film noir, where the villain’s plot fails but takes everyone down with it.