We also need to make it clear to Ukraine and Georgia that the offer of eventual Nato membership made at the Bucharest summit last April remains open. The vital point here is that membership is conditional on reform, both military and political. Georgia's largely poor performance in the war with Russia, continuing worries about Ukrainian arms sales to the developing world, and both countries' shambolic politics show that there is a great deal of work to do before the question of membership becomes practical. The more that they reach Nato standards in everything from the rule of law to management of reservists, the easier it will be to see them as potential allies. It would be quite wrong to use the Caucasus crisis as an excuse for accelerating Nato membership. The commitment for mutual defence embodied in Article V of the Atlantic Charter is stretched thin enough already, without using it as a sticking plaster to bandage the West's wounds.

The great benefit of this is that it shows Russians that there is another way forward. The more of a success that we make of Ukraine, the harder it is for the ex-KGB regime in the Kremlin to make their favourite argument that Russia is different. If a big, Slavic, ex-Soviet country like Ukraine can have a lively free press, properly- contested elections and a reasonably effective justice system, why can't Russia? Nato and EU membership is not a mere label: it is a signal that a country has met some crucial standards in freedom, justice and modernisation.

The danger is that in Russia's current paranoid world view, it will see anything that the West does in countries such as Ukraine as meddling. It is therefore vital that our new robust stance on some issues is combined with a serious willingness to talk about others. The best example here is nuclear weapons. Russia is the world's second nuclear power. It is in everyone's interest to have smaller numbers of warheads, and to lessen the danger of an accidental nuclear conflict. Twenty years after the end of the old Cold War, much of the trust and professionalism built up between nuclear experts on both sides has been squandered. A serious offer to restart talks on strategic nuclear weapons, to share early-warning data and to minimise stockpiles of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe, could have only desirable outcomes. The same, broadly, goes for talks about weapons in space. The end of the Bush administration, with its swaggering, unilateralist and highly short-sighted view of these matters, offers an ideal time for such a change of tack.