When the Soviet Union collapsed a quarter of a century ago, the United States indulged in a rash surge of triumphalism. The rest of us simply hoped for a new era of amicable coexistence — even friendship — with the Russian people.
It was not to be. Today, President Vladimir Putin presides over Russian military posturing on a scale unseen since the Seventies at least.
He has massed 330,000 troops on his country’s western frontiers; dispatched a carrier task group through the English Channel to join the murderous bombing of Syria; put 40 million Russians through civil defence exercises, allegedly as a precaution against U.S. nuclear attack; and unveiled a new intercontinental ballistic missile which can supposedly overcome any defence.
Some Westerners dismiss all this as mere sabre-rattling by Putin, to deflect his people’s attention from their parlous economic plight.
There is a strand of truth in this. Modern Russia is nothing like as powerful or dangerous as the Soviet Union. But its neighbours — including Sweden, Finland, the Baltic states — are more alarmed than at any time since the Cold War.
Britain and other Nato nations are seeking to provide reassurance by dispatching a few squadrons of warplanes and token troop contingents to the most threatened regions.
Nobody imagines 900 U.S. soldiers in Poland, or 800 British troops in Estonia, can stop a Russian army.
But these tripwire forces are designed to convince Putin that the price of launching another military adventure against his neighbours will be a showdown with the Western powers, under the terms of Nato’s mutual defence pact.
The question persists, of course: will the master of the Kremlin believe this?
So often during his 16 years of power have the Americans and their allies threatened him with ‘consequences’ for bully-boying, whether in Georgia, Ukraine or Syria. And so often, his actions have remained unpunished.
Most of history’s conflicts, including two world wars, have come about because of nations misreading each other’s intentions, or because an aggressor overplayed his hand.
We should not think of Putin alongside the Kaiser or Hitler, but rather with Kim Il-Sung, the North Korean leader who invaded the South in 1950 because he was sure Washington would not intervene, or Soviet leader Khrushchev in 1962, deploying missiles in Cuba, or Saddam Hussein invading Kuwait in 1990.
All of these men acted as they did because they thought they could get away with it.
A host of people died — or almost did, over Cuba — before they learned differently.
For his part, Putin is an absolute ruler who presides over a reality of his own which bears little relationship to that which we see. Within his closed Kremlin circle, nobody rash enough to argue with him keeps his job or fortune.
Like many of his countrymen, he sees Russia as the victim of a Western conspiracy to defraud it of rightful greatness.
He believes the US should accept Russia has a legitimate sphere of influence across the old Soviet Union, which includes Georgia, Ukraine — and the Baltic States, which are members of both Nato and the EU.
Putin would like to be like Stalin. Among many Russians, the old monster, morally indistinguishable from Hitler, still commands reverence, because his country was respected in the world, if only because it was feared.
Moscow taxi drivers sometimes carry miniature portraits of him on their windscreens. Who can imagine their counterparts in Berlin doing the same with images of the Nazi leader?
Because the Soviet Union was a victor in 1945 in what Russians call the Great Patriotic War, they have never been forced to confront the failure of almost everything associated with Bolshevism.
Russia since 1917 has built many formidable weapons systems including the T-34 tank, AK-47 assault rifle and Katyusha rocket system, together with modern fighter aircraft, space probes and state-of-the-art cyber weapons.
Bizarrely, however, the Russians have yet to develop a single consumer product that anybody beyond their borders would choose to buy.
Putin has developed a new economic model, replacing Soviet collectivism with a gangster entrepreneurialism.
Individuals selected and continuously monitored by the Kremlin are allowed to make money — and Putin himself has acquired a fortune which is said to be as large as £140 billion.
Yet there is no independent judiciary, no legally enforceable property rights, and the KGB’s successor, the FSB, wields unchallengeable authority.
Before the 2008 financial collapse, and largely on the back of oil and gas exports, Russia enjoyed a precarious success, with growth of 7 per cent a year. For the past eight years, however, the economy has been shrinking, the population falling and incomes in decline along with oil and gas prices.
It is the failure of Putin’s domestic policies that has caused him to turn to military adventurism abroad, even at the cost of economic sanctions imposed by the West.
What is remarkable, and indeed frightening, is that most Russian people seem happy to back their tsar’s campaign to restore through force a foreign influence they are incapable of securing by economic, social or cultural prowess.
The West is unlikely to live at ease with Russia unless or until the latter achieves the confidence and self-respect that can only be achieved through succeeding as a 21st-century society — manufacturing mobile phones and movies, cars and planes, lithium batteries and TV soaps that can command markets abroad.
Meanwhile we are left to cope as best we can with a Russian problem that has not much changed since the great U.S. diplomat George Kennan defined it in his ‘Long Telegram’ from Moscow to the State Department in Washington in 1946.
‘At bottom of Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs,’ he wrote, ‘is a traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity… This thesis provides justification for that increase of military and police power of the Russian state…
‘Basically this is only the steady advance of uneasy Russian nationalism, a centuries-old movement in which conceptions of offence and defence are inextricably confused.’
Kennan was explaining behaviour in line with Putin’s — albeit in 1946 and on a much larger scale.
We should never ignore the fact that the Kremlin’s deadly games in Syria, and even its 2014 annexation of Crimea, are small potatoes alongside Stalin’s 1945 seizure of an Eastern European empire with 90 million inhabitants, his 1948-49 blockade of Berlin, and much else.
George Kennan’s answer to the Russian problem back in 1946 is still the right one: containment.
The West must make plain that, however much it dislikes Putin, it has no wish to depose him, nor to interfere in Russia’s domestic affairs.
Beyond Russia’s borders, by contrast, Western leaders must start saying what they mean and meaning what they say. For the past decade they have failed to do so.
Nato’s European forces have been allowed to crumble, and the nations of Europe — including Britain — have left the U.S. to bear the burden of our common defence.
Worse, countries such as Germany and Italy refuse to display a principled willingness to participate in the use of force against anybody, for any cause, or in defence of any treaty. They simply hope that enemies will go away and leave them to mind their own business.
In Moscow, Putin sees this — and sneers.
President Barack Obama was right to recognise new limits to US power when he took office in 2009, after the disastrous tenure of George W. Bush and his Middle East incursion.
However, he was dead wrong in adopting a posture of passivity in the face of repeated acts of Russian aggression.
Perhaps the worst foreign policy failure of the Obama presidency was allowing President Bashar Al-Assad of Syria (who has been kept in power by Russia) to cross his ‘red line’ with impunity by using chemical weapons against his own people.
It is hard to play poker with Putin, because he is a reckless gambler who could bring catastrophe upon us all by overplaying a hand that includes nuclear weapons.
But certainly, the more the Russian leader is allowed to get away with, the more flagrant will be his next act of aggression.
Western troops are being sent to the Baltic states because credible intelligence indicates that Putin is working to destabilise their governments, partly through subversion among their Russian minorities. He may conceivably even launch an armed intervention.
The first duty of the new U.S. president in January will be to convince the Kremlin that if it sends troops or surrogates into Estonia, Latvia or Lithuania, Nato really will fight.
Meanwhile, the peoples of Europe, including the British, must acknowledge that while nobody wants a war, least of all with the Russians, it is essential to show the resolution to defend our allies and vital interests.
With regard to Syria, the chaos is now too far advanced for the West to launch a useful military intervention. No local faction seems deserving of our support. The Russians are likely sooner or later to founder in the bloody morass they have contributed so much to creating.
On Russia’s western borders, however, the West must stand firm.
We can probably avert a war, however loudly and often Putin threatens one, but only if the West shows a strength of purpose in foreign policy, which it has been lacking for a generation.
It is a tragedy that Russia, which gave us Pushkin, Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky, should today seem capable of generating only lies, fear and reckless violence.
As long as this remains the case, however, Putin’s nation cannot be our friend, and must reluctantly be acknowledged as a prospective foe.
Daily Mail
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