Now’s the time for cool heads – not gung-ho ministers making it wors e
UNTIl America’s cruise missile attack in Syria, President Vladimir Putin was celebrating a new era, a historic concord between his Russia and President Trump’s United States.
The master of the Kremlin expected the outcome to be a carve-up, a new division of the world into recognised spheres of interest. Trump was supposed to acquiesce in the victory of Russia’s client, President Bashar alAssad, using any means he chose to crush his enemies in Syria’s civil war.
There have been mirror fears in Europe, shared by British military and intelligence chiefs, that a withdrawal of American support for Nato might open the way for Putin to fulfil his long-held hopes to regain Russian mastery of the Baltic states, perhaps also of Ukraine and Belarus.
And if that scenario has alarmed US allies in Europe, Russian hopes of it have also been riding high.
Yet these fears and expectations have vanished in the pillars of smoke rising above the Syrian airfield where Trump’s cruise missiles landed.
The Russians are bitterly angry. They feel confused and even betrayed by an American whom they had started to think was just like their own big chief.
Questions they want answered are: was the Tomahawk attack a spontaneous gesture, responding to the use of chemical weapons? Or are the Americans starting a whole new game in Syria, aimed at removing Assad and installing a rebel regime?
It appears that nobody in Washington has told them, because nobody knows.
Think of Putin as a rottweiler – an attack dog in whom the Russian people take pride. They seem heedless, even if they know it, that he is probably the richest man in the world, with a vast though effectively unspendable fortune stolen from his people, cached in nominee bank accounts from Zurich to Hong Kong.
He has presided over the wrecking of the Russian economy, his country’s isolation from the rest of the world by sanctions.
YET Russians applaud the manner in which he has defied the world, and especially the Americans, to seize Crimea, support separatists in eastern Ukraine – and prop up Russia’s client regime in Damascus. Putin’s rule relies on his image as a strong man.
The frequent topless photographs of him wielding a sporting rifle or riding a horse through vast wildernesses symbolise the new czar.
The one thing the president cannot afford is to be seen to fail, to lose, especially on a battlefield. That is why he views Trump’s airstrikes as a personal affront and will now be striving to identify some means of redressing it by hitting Western interests somewhere in the world.
The British Government has probably made matters worse by the stridency of its backing for the American action, followed by cancellation of the Foreign Secretary’s visit to Moscow.
Theresa May wants to win points in Washington by standing four-square beside Trump. It was probably unavoidable for her to express formal backing for the missile attack on Friday, as did many other world leaders. Thereafter, however, it would have been smart to wait for the US government to explain its new policy for Syria – if it has one – before rushing to lay explicit blame on Russia for the chemical attack.
It is a good rule of diplomacy to leave a cornered enemy a way out, unless you intend to go to war with him.
Defence Secretary Sir Michael Fallon has broken this by publicly denouncing the Russians.
Few of us doubt that what he said is true – that Assad would have gone to perdition years ago but for Putin’s backing. But it was unnecessary for a British minister to be so explicit.
A second good rule is to keep talking.
Putin is a repellent man who constantly seeks to make mischief for the West: Russian computer-hacking during the US presidential election was only the least of his activities.
It is time that people in Britain and across Europe awoke to the fact that while we would like to be friends with the Russians, they make it almost impossible not to regard them as foes.
But they are a fact of life. We must live with and talk to them.
A friend who has spent a lifetime studying East-West relations observes that it is a tragedy, at a time when diplomacy is badly needed, that we have a buffoon as Foreign Secretary.
Buffoon or not, however, it would have been better to allow Boris Johnson’s trip to Moscow to go ahead rather than inflict a childish snub by cancelling it.
A plausible reason for the decision is that if he went, Johnson would not have known what to say. The Russians would have asked: what is the West’s new policy towards Syria? He would have been obliged to bluster and frolic as if once more a guest on BBC TV’s Have I Got News For You.
Unfortunately, the more likely reason for the cancellation is even less impressive: that Downing Street is pathetically eager to please the Americans, even though Trump’s own Secretary of State flies to Moscow on Wednesday.
MRS May should know her history and ought to recognise that never, during or since the Second World War, has the United States done Britain reciprocal favours.
The two nations’ interests often coincide. But Washington will never toss us a bone merely because we sit up and woof nicely. The indispensable next step, which can only be taken in Washington, is for the Trump administration to explain its position on Syria to the Russians and the world.
It is hard to exaggerate the difficulties: if the US says that it is now determined that Assad must go, a headlong confrontation with the Russians beckons. Putin has staked too much on the dreadful Syrian leader now to abandon him.
But if the Americans say that their Tomahawk strike was merely a one-off protest against the use of chemical weapons, they are left looking foolish, and the British Government more so.
No sane person disputes that Assad’s sarin gas strike was an atrocity for which the Russians bear ultimate responsibility. But if we want a major showdown with Putin, we should carefully choose the time and place rather than lunge out impulsively, as both Washington and the British Government have done over recent days.