Is Russia becoming our enemy?

Phobes staged a narrow victory over philes at last night's Intelligence Squared debate here in New York: "Russia is becoming our enemy again".

A good debate but a slippery motion, as it were. You could worry away at every word of it, which the speakers did. Everybody seemed to agree that Russia was in a bad phase, and doing bad things, if mainly at home â€”though nobody mentioned Chechnya, I think, not even once. The hot-buttons this time were "Politkovskaya" and "Litvinenko".

Edward Lucas moderated brilliantly. Claudia Rosett, Bret Stephens and Michael Waller, a WSJ crowd, spoke for the motion, saying (a bit feebly) that you didn't have to think Russia was our enemy, only that it was heading in that direction.

Mark Medish, Robert Legvold and Nina Khrushcheva thought either that Russia wasn't our enemy, or that even if it was we shouldn't say so, for fear of making it into one.

For my money, there wasn't enough talk about who "we" were. You'd be pretty hard pushed to say that Russia wasn't becoming Estonia's enemy, for example; Estonia is part of Nato and the EU; does that make Russia "our" enemy?

Mark Medish gave the best speech, arguing that you couldn't divide countries into friends and enemies exclusively, there was a big middle ground where you had to work hard at relations, and Russia was deep in that grey area. True, I thought, but it didn't answer the burden of the motion, which was about the trend of Russian policy.

in the end, everybody won. A vote at the start of the debate showed a 41%-23% split in favour of the motion, with 36% undecided. The closing vote went 47%-41% in favour of the motion with 12% undecided. The antis had hoovered up the floating votersâ€”reasonably enough, since they made the more polished arguments. And very probably they were right: it is asking for trouble to call a volatile country an enemy. But no point in holding a debate and then ducking the question.