Get ready to fight a Cold War
WHEN I was a teenager I enjoyed long walks with my farmer grandfather through his Shropshire fields. He was an amateur historian of 20thcentury politics and I clearly remember the conversation we had about Britain’s policy of appeasement towards Germany during the 1930s. He’d lived through that as a young man and a First World War veteran. I asked him why so many people just couldn’t see the coming menace of Hitler’s Nazis.
“You have to understand, Richard, nobody could bear the idea of another war – including me,” he said (he’d lost part of a foot and the hearing in one ear in the trenches in 1917). “We just didn’t want to believe it was all going to happen again. We couldn’t believe it. It was unbearable. So we chose to live in a fool’s paradise until it was almost too late.”
This week Britain struggled to comprehend the growing threat from Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Threat? What threat? We won the Cold War, didn’t we? (Just as my grandfather’s generation won the Great War.) All that confrontation is behind us, we’re free of it now, surely?
No we’re not. And facing up to the fact that Russia remains a serious, long-term threat to our safety and security is psychologically difficult because we really, really don’t want to believe it. We’re in denial.
Former foreign secretary William Hague addressed the syndrome this week in a series of rhetorical questions. “Can it really be true that the Russians are equipping themselves to snap the undersea Atlantic cables on which all our communications and finances depend? Afraid so. Are they actually positioning themselves to hack into our vital national infrastructure and disrupt it? Looks like it. Can they possibly maintain Soviet levels of espionage and covert activity in our free European societies? You bet they can. Are they flying aggressive sorties to test our air defences? Yup. Surely they’re not developing new chemical weapons and deadly poisons as well? Of course they are.”
We must find the courage and the will to face down Russia’s unacceptable behaviour and “open the eyes of those who do not wish to see”.
Which – let’s be honest, here – may mean opening our own eyes too.