The West is forgetting the lessons of Cold War victory
Forty years ago tomorrow, President Ronald Reagan addressed MPS and peers in the Royal Gallery of Parliament. It was, he said, “a moment of kinship and homecoming in these hallowed halls… one of democracy’s shrines”.
It was an important speech for Britain, especially for Reagan’s great friend and ally, Margaret Thatcher, because he fully endorsed British troops fighting to recover the Falkland Islands. Only a week before he had been begging her to cease fire.
Now the president included the Falkland liberators in his wider argument: “They fight for a cause – for the belief that armed aggression must not be allowed to succeed, and the people must participate in the decisions of government ... If there had been firmer support for that principle some 45 years ago, perhaps our generation wouldn’t have suffered the bloodletting of World War II.”
At the heart of Reagan’s thinking was the latest manifestation of the Cold War. Poland, then part of the Soviet bloc, was suffering under Moscow-imposed martial law. Geographically and culturally, he said, “Poland is not East or West. Poland is at the centre of European civilisation.” It was “magnificently unreconciled to oppression”. The task of the West was to defeat such oppression and “secure the basic rights we often take for granted”. In 1988, Mrs Thatcher would reinforce this message in her controversial Bruges speech, reminding EEC partners that Prague, Warsaw and Budapest were European cities.
The Soviet Union, Reagan told Parliament, was providing an example of how “a small ruling elite…mistakenly attempts to ease domestic unrest through greater repression and foreign adventure”. If only the West could concert against this, the Soviets might choose “a wiser course”.
By the end of the 1980s, that had happened. The Berlin Wall had come down. The Cold War was won.
Reagan predicted, however, that “the task I’ve set forth will long outlive our own generation”. He wanted “a crusade for freedom that will engage the faith and fortitude of the next generation”.
Forty years on, that message is extraordinarily apt. For Poland, read its neighbour Ukraine. It is exactly the sort of foreign adventure against which Reagan warned, but Russia claims to see it as a domestic operation to liberate the people from “Nazis”.
Although Communism has never regained its hold on the continent of Europe, the situation may be worse now than then. Vladimir Putin may not believe in Marxism-leninism, but he has as little respect as Stalin for the independence of free countries.
He shares Stalin’s obsession with controlling places he chooses to regard as Russian even when international law and democratic opinion say otherwise. He borrows Stalin’s methods – the shooting, bombing, rape, starvation and torture of civilians, deportation, using prisoners as hostages, puppet regimes and the looting of grain.
Putin has indulged in military bloodletting on a scale not seen since the Second World War. Reagan and Thatcher had to face the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, but even that was not as brutal as Putin’s attempted destruction of Ukraine.
The politics in the West are worse today than then. The United States and Britain are cooperating well over Ukraine, but Joe Biden is no Reagan. As for Boris Johnson, he has shown himself at his best over Ukraine and is widely admired there, but his position at home is so rocky that, as I write, he cannot guarantee his own presence on the world stage. What Reagan called the “hallowed halls” of Westminster echo to the sound of Tory MPS quarrelling.
As in the 1980s – but worse – France and Germany are trying to look both ways, twisting themselves like corkscrews as a result. France, out of vainglory, and Germany, out of guilt, see letting Putin get about half of what he wants as “peace”. In reality, such a deal would be no more than the postponement of the current conflict until he is stronger. He is the only leader since the 1940s to have re-ordered the borders of Europe by force. That cannot be permitted, yet it will be, unless the allies agree to back Ukraine all the way.
Yes, the West should recognise that Russia has legitimate security interests in the region. But what President Macron, as he canvasses the world for the Nobel Peace Prize, and Chancellor Scholz, as he tries to sanction Russia while still buying its gas, need to face is that Putin has broken every rule made to maintain peace. He must not be allowed to gain from that.
Ukraine has taken up the challenge which Reagan laid down 40 years ago, on its own behalf. If the West does not help Ukraine enough, it risks losing its gains from victory in the Cold War – not to mention the grain needed to feed the world.
The Queen’s Jubilee tea party with
Paddington Bear has caused worldwide pleasure, though I have not yet heard anything from “darkest Peru”, whence Paddington originates.
No one is happier than the Ukrainians, who immediately put out the video on their government feed on Telegram. This is partly because Ukrainians are pro-british and love the Queen but also because, in the Ukrainian version of the Paddington
films, the bear was voiced by Volodymyr Zelensky when he was an actor rather than the world’s most popular statesman.
Obviously, Mr Zelensky is rather busy at present, but I hope he can find time to re-voice Paddington’s Buckingham Palace visit and thus, in a sense, have tea with the Queen.