The 2014 crisis in Ukraine finds Britain's reputation at risk yet again. With Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin, Sir John Major signed the Budapest Memorandum in 1994, guaranteeing Ukraine's territorial integrity and also prohibiting the use of economic power (such as energy pipelines) to interfere in Ukraine. This "political agreement" may not have the legal status of a treaty, but it does impose a moral obligation on all the signatories. Putin's decision to tear up the memorandum does not mean Cameron or Obama may abandon their obligations, in return for which we disarmed what was then the third largest nuclear power. Ukrainians feel betrayed, now that their expectations of Nato and EU membership are tantalisingly receding. Ben Judah writes from Kiev about the siege mentality there.

Yet the betrayal of Ukraine is only the latest chapter in the slow retreat of Western civilisation since the triumph of 1989. Unless something changes soon, that retreat now threatens to become a stampede. Having called our bluff over Georgia, Syria and Crimea, Putin may be tempted to keep pushing. So may others who wish the West ill, from Tehran to Pyongyang. If Obama was unwilling to use the Sixth Fleet to deter Russia from annexing Crimea, why would Beijing believe that he would use the Seventh Fleet to stop China annexing Taiwan — as Clinton did in 1996? Who will stop the Iranians making nuclear weapons — or indeed the Arabs and the Turks, the South Koreans and the Japanese? And what about the Atlantic alliance? If the Budapest Memorandum is just a scrap of paper, why should the Balts rely on Nato?

When Standpoint was launched in 2008 to defend Western civilisation, we could not have predicted the rout that has taken place, President Obama's responsibility for which Alex Woolfson analyses in devastating detail. Europe in particular has been rudely awakened from its belief that the only things that matter are elite clubs like Davos and the G8 and other trophies of "soft power". This is the reduction of politics to protocol. 

After phoning the Kremlin, Angela Merkel is reported to have said that the Russian leader was "in another world" — in other words, mad. Yet it is the West — especially Obama and the EU elite — that is out of touch with reality. If his brutalisation of Ukraine shocks us out of acquiescence in decline, Putin may have done us all a favour.