Here we are again. Syria’s government has killed dozens more of its own citizens, and what does its old ally, Russia, do? It obstructs a substantive UN Security Council response. This has long since become a predictable story, but it raises a fundamental question: what is Russia’s place in today’s world?

Russian membership in western organisations is not exactly yielding positive results. The G7+1 cannot become a G8 until Russia begins to act like a mature free-market democracy. It’s hard to work up much optimism on that score with President Vladimir Putin claiming that recent protests in his country are choreographed by western spies and that he couldn’t make it to the latest G8 summit at Camp David because he was busy putting together his new cabinet – always a complicated chore in an authoritarian country. Mr Putin’s absence made little difference as discussion turned to Afghanistan and the eurozone, where Russia can’t help, and to Iran and Syria, where Russia is part of the problem.

So if its government isn’t interested in western clubs, can we classify Russia as a dynamic emerging market? Not a chance. In China, a Communist party has engineered a complex, high-powered economic engine that has lifted the country from abject poverty to become the world’s second-largest economy. India has produced some of the world’s more innovative private sector companies. Brazil is now an increasingly self-confident democracy with a well-diversified economy and a growing international profile.