Abandoned poodle shunned by US and Europe

Gordon Brown talked tough at yesterday’s ineffectual EU summit on Russia, but it will have cut little ice with his European counterparts who now regard Britain with downright suspicion when it comes to international affairs. Not that the Americans have any higher regard for their old ally.

Some observers are even comparing Britain's position in world affairs with the low point reached following the debacle of the Suez intervention in 1956. "The policies of the US and Europe are diverging pretty fast, and Britain is now adrift between the two. It was well placed to play a role in the Georgia crisis, but it didn't know how," a senior European defence analyst and adviser to the Ministry of Defence, told me last week.

As if to prove his point, the Prime Minister wrote in the Observer: "The changing global order cannot be

governed by institutions designed in the middle of the last century." This was bluster straight out of the Tony Blair playbook of vapid futurismo geopolitics. The fact is, 20th century instruments of international security and cooperation, such as the UN Charter and the Helsinki Final Act, are appropriate in the present crisis - the problem is making them work. Russia and Georgia were in flagrant violation of both in Georgia last month.

Once again the British leadership appears to be following the line of the Americans, and speaking the language of confrontation and coercion rather than cooperation and engagement. Moscow needs no encouragement to reply in kind - its cancellation of key instruments "designed in the middle of the last century" like the CFE disarmament agreement to reduce conventional forces, has been ruinous.

Ruinous, too, has been the fatal friendship cooked up with America by George Bush and Tony Blair. This is why so much of what Britain proposes on the international stage now looks like damaged