How do we deal with challenges posed by Putin?
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FRANKLY, it’s hard to describe Iran’s presidential election last Friday as anything other than rigged. What else can you call it when ordinary Iranians are “free” to vote for the regime’s pre-approved candidates?
Confirmation we had yet another glimpse of “Global Britain-style” foreign policy last week. Or to put it another way, a pathetic hark back to some kind of Palmerstonian gunboat diplomacy that has become the hallmark of the way Boris Johnson projects the UK onto the world stage.
It wouldn’t quite be so embarrassing were it not for the fact that Britannia has long since relinquished its claim to rule the waves and that today’s world of diplomacy and geopolitics is a far cry from the bygone age that Johnson, it appears, would prefer to inhabit.
No-one doubts that responding to Russia has become one of the most pressing challenges facing the West today. Poking the Russian bear by sending the British warship HMS Defender into the disputed waters around Crimea at this precise moment strikes many as less than helpful on a diplomatic level.
“Sticking up for our values, sticking up for what we believe in,” was how the Prime Minister explained away the British warship’s voyage.
But is this really the best way to engage with the challenges Russia poses under president Vladimir Putin? Doesn’t such an approach not simply heighten the risk of miscommunication or misperception leading to an even greater and more dangerous level of confrontation?
Don’t get me wrong, Putin is not the kind of autocratic political leader or operator that the West should roll over to when challenged by him – far from it. It hasn’t helped, of course, that former US president Donald Trump spent four years doing just that, praising and courting Putin.
That much was clear during the recent summit between Putin and President Joe Biden, but even this less-than-cordial first encounter opened up possibilities for a lowering in tensions between the two nations.
What Biden at least tried to do was find potential areas of co-operation between Washington and Moscow. The same can be said last week of recent efforts by Germany and France to step up dialogue with Putin. “It is not enough for US President Joe Biden to talk to the Russian president. I very much welcome that, but the EU must also create forums for dialogue,” was how Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, who led the initiative, summed up the European approach.
But despite having the backing of France’s president Emmanuel Macron and the summit proposals being welcomed by Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, they ran into serious opposition at an EU leaders’ summit in Brussels last Thursday. Scepticism and opposition to the Franco
German push came especially from those Baltic countries that border Russia, with some leaders warning against engagement with Moscow without first laying down clear preconditions for the Kremlin to rein in its regional ambitions.
“It seems to me like we try to engage a bear to keep a pot of honey safe,” was how Lithuanian president Gitanas Nauseda wryly summed up the Merkel-Macron initiative.
Other opponents also said now was not the time for “free concessions” in the face
Putin is not the kind of autocratic political leader or operator that the West should roll over to when challenged by him – far from it
of Russia’s continued meddling with Poland’s prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki, arguing that dialogue should only happen if there was “actual de-escalation”.
As is often the case in such diplomatic standoffs one side ultimately will have to make the first move, and the rebuffing of the Franco-German initiative has again revealed the difficulty European leaders and the Biden administration will have in stabilising and taking forward relations with Moscow.
Presenting a united front is critical in this process and right now the EU and US are struggling to achieve that.
Never missing any opportunity to exploit such divisions among European leaders, Russia’s long-time ambassador to the EU, Vladimir Chizhov, said the bloc should “get its act together and define what it really wants from its relations with Russia”.
Just as few weeks ago, it appeared that the EU had done just that when its foreign affairs chief, Josep Borrell, presented in a 14-page report the commission’s policy options on EU-Russia relations entitled “Push back, constrain and engage”.
Last week, the Royal Navy’s HMS Defender did a bit of pushing back of its own with the approval of Prime Minister Boris Johnson. But only the most gullible would believe for a moment that this was anything other than posturing rather than constructive foreign policy at work.