Drafting policy by way of Tolkien

We were talking recently about how clever the Ukrainians had been to call the invading Russian troops “Orcs” even before all the atrocities in the Russianoccupied towns around Kyiv came to light.

Then Tina said: “If Putin’s troops are Orcs, then he must be Sauron.”

You can guess what happened next.

We started trying to link other characters in the current drama with other characters from “The Lord of the Rings,” which many have begun to see as a tract for our times. Frodo was easy: that’s Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, diminutive, vulnerable, but also very brave.

We couldn’t figure out who plays Aragorn, but France’s newly re-elected president, Emmanuel Marcron, is a dead ringer for Legolas.

Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson is one of the more boastful and self-serving dwarves, not Gimli but maybe Bombur.

Joe Biden is Treebeard, the eldest of the Ents, and I’ll leave it to you to flesh out the rest of the characters in this low-budget remake of LOTR. But do let me know if you figure out where the hell Gandalf is when we need him. Probably late, as usual.

But here’s the thing. Comparing the war in Ukraine to “The Lord of the Rings” is a harmless after-dinner game, but it’s a very poor guide to policy. Yet many western leaders are starting to sound like J.R.R. Tolkien is their speech writer. That’s clear evidence that they’re losing the plot.

It’s perfectly normal for war aims to expand after an early success, but it’s usually a mistake.

Ukraine didn’t collapse in the face of the Russian invasion, which was what both Putin and everybody in western leadership positions expected it to do.

So western pundits (and even western politicians) are now predicting that Ukraine will reconquer not just the land Russia conquered since February, but also the territory that it seized in 2014.

That may be possible despite Russia’s three-times-bigger population and tenfold bigger economy, though I doubt it.

But are the Ukrainians sure they want to push a nucleararmed enemy who has shown himself to be irrational and unstable into such a humiliating corner?

Moreover, are the Ukrainians sure they really want the lost provinces of 2014 back? The people who remain in them now are not only Russian speakers, but mostly people who actually identify as Russian.

We will probably be spared all these awkward questions, because such a decisive Ukrainian victory is unlikely.

What is of greater concern is the way that western leaders have slipped so easily into a Tolkienesque mindset that lets them see themselves as the embattled defenders of a West that faces mortal peril from a great evil in the east.

Tolkien had an excellent excuse for writing those sort of books, because he wrote his “Lord of the Rings” trilogy between 1937 and 1949, when the West did indeed face a great threat, first from Nazi Germany and then from the Soviet Union. It was a fitting fable for his times. It is not relevant to ours.

How is it possible to see Russia one moment as a power so weak that it could be pushed out of all former Ukrainian territory by force, and the next moment as a mighty threat to all of Europe or “freedom” or “democracy” or whatever?

Russia is not Mordor. It is a second-rate great power that must be respected because it has a lot of nuclear weapons, but it poses no serious threat to the security of the rest of Europe or to democracy.

Its invasion of Ukraine was a squalid smash-and-grab raid that is being repelled with the help of Ukraine’s friends and neighbours, and that’s all.