Amazingly, under the leadership of Vladimir Putin, Russia appears to be becoming a proud and strong nation once again. I’m on the record as being both an admirer of what Putin has achieved in Russia and nervous about what the future holds for him and his country. The question we must now ask and answer with increasing urgency is this: what do we want to do about Russia?

We have two broad options: cooperation or confrontation. In this case, I’m for the former.

Confrontation is a bad idea. Now that Soviet Communism is dead, what reason have we to stand in the way of Russia’s restoration to the status of a great power? Certainly, even if Russia were to again become an imperialist power, they’d have little interest in confrontation with the United States. They’d be far more likely to either end up fighting the Chinese or shadow-boxing with the Europeans and, quite frankly, after the nonsense that the Germans and the French have given us in recent years, I don’t really have any particular objection to the theoretical Russian conquest and subjugation of France and Germany.

Niall Ferguson warned recently that Putin is a Russian version of Franco or Pinochet. He means this as a bad thing. I don’t see it. When the time came about, both Franco and Pinochet proved to be men that we could do business with. I think that the same is true of Putin.

Look, Russia is a very difficult country to govern. I’m not entirely convinced that it’s possible to govern a nation as unwieldy as Russia by any means other than despotism. Ferguson warns that Putin’s dictatorship might endanger Western interests. To that I ask: more than the alternative?

So far as I can tell the most likely alternative to the mildly authoritarian rule of Putin (“managed democracy” being my descriptive phrase of choice) is the eventual break-up of Russia itself. Instead of a canny-but-sane authoritarian leader, we’ll end up with a half dozen new Moslem states scattered across central Asia, a Siberia effectively under Chinese control and a western Russian rump state forced, de facto, into the European sphere of influence. I hardly see how that suits our interests.

With a few exceptions, we and the Russians now do have common interests. In the long-term, we have the same two principal enemies: Islam and China. We have a few clashes (most notably Russia’s ambitions to restore the western portion of its former empire) but, quite frankly, I don’t think that any of those things are worth losing Russia’s potential over. It makes little sense to me that we ought to worry about the feelings of specks on the European map when we have the chance to make a real deal which might ultimately bring about the defeat of our two worst foes.

To begin we have to agree that Russia should not be allowed to regain control over any of its former territory in Europe. As a fallback, we should accept that it may be that some majority-Russian areas ought to be allowed to join Russia if that is the wish of the local population. In particular, if Eastern Ukraine wishes to be a part of Russia, I see little reason why the West ought to stand in the way.

We need to think of this in terms of great power politics and not in terms of human rights. If the price of winning the Global War on Terrorism is ceding a big chunk of Central Asia to the Russians or signing away the lives of a bunch of violent Moslem separatists, I think that’s a price that we ought to pay.

The time to deal with Russia is now and not when we face an imminent crisis. We need to offer the Russians a “grand bargain” to secure their long-term cooperation.

To being, we need to offer the Russians a completely free hand in Chechnya and against Moslem threats elsewhere. We don’t have to support them, but we do need to absolutely shut up about whatever they do in those places.

Second, we should hand Russia the keys to Central Asia. If the Russians really want to rule a bunch of backwards Third World cesspools that are chock-full of Moslems fundamentalists, I don’t see who we are to stand in their way.

In exchange for these things, we must demand an end to Russia’s further designs on the parts of Europe that we care about and full Russian support for the Global War on Terrorism as well as their membership in an anti-Chinese alliance.

If one thinks about it further, this concept might well be expanded to include India as well. India has no love of China, nor do the people who rule India have any great love of Moslems (despite the fact that they rule over so many of them). It’s well worth remembering that General Musharraf won’t live forever and that something will eventually have to done about Pakistan. As with Russia and Central Asia, if India wants to settle the problem of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal in a five minute period one afternoon, I don’t see what particular objection we should have to it.

We’re living in a new world and we’re going to have to make some compromises to do it.