The invasion of Ukraine must wake the West
The invasion of Ukraine is an appalling, shameless crime, perpetrated by a corrupt leader entertaining racist fantasies of reuniting “ancient Rus”. The build-up to war was kept largely hidden from his own public, which is now being subjected to another barrage of poisonous tyranny to downplay the losses and casualties suffered by the Russian invaders.
But even if Putin’s adventure is shocking and horrifying to a Western public that has forgotten what it means for this continent to be truly at war, in retrospect it seems unsurprising.
The occupation and division of a peaceful sovereign nation was eight years in the making, and Russia’s full-on embrace of authoritarian imperialism there for all to see since the invasion of Georgia in 2008.
After sponsoring the division of Ukraine in 2014, swallowing up Crimea, Putin focused his meagre economy and stagnant population, immiserated by ineptitude and corruption, on building a massive war machine. Only last year he published an intellectual rationale for invasion that argued Ukraine doesn’t really exist. If only more policy makers had read or taken it seriously, rather than burying their heads in the sand.
Putin has exploited the West’s decadence, its inability to think beyond its own narrow frame of reference, which assumes everybody wants to be as tolerant and democratic as ourselves, and its failure to prepare for the worst. We have also become dangerously reliant upon Russian imports for energy, effectively bankrolling the rearmament of a strategic opponent.
The craven attempt by European states that have effectively disarmed to avoid energy-based sanctions in the run-up to Thursday’s invasion, along with shuttlediplomacy conducted in a holier-than-thou atmosphere (British and American intelligence was painted as hysterical when it turned out to be completely right), should never be forgotten.
An old, effete order has been exposed as morally, even materially bankrupt. Now we have to start over.
The rearmament of the West begins by giving Ukraine as much as is realistically possible to help resist the invader: British arms, we are proud to note, have proven essential to its fight thus far.
At the same time, the West needs, in concert, to hit the Kremlin with punishing sanctions, including removal from the Swift transactions system. This won’t be enough – Moscow has reduced domestic public and private sector debt, and established a war chest in an attempt to protect itself against sanctions – but it is nevertheless necessary.
In the long run, the West needs to spend considerably more on defence – and not simply rely on America which, for perfectly sound reasons, is pivoting towards containing China in the Pacific.
Nato is stepping up its presence in eastern Europe, where it already has four multinational battalion-size battlegroups deployed in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. But Russia has used its resource boom to build the fourth largest military on the planet: a decade of procurement has made it a very dangerous adversary.
There was an assumption post-Cold War that the threat of a European land war was over. Post-9/11, the policy focus moved to combating terrorism and cyber-crime; both remain critically important, but we’ve been rudely reminded that short-term events, such as the collapse of the Soviet Union’s “evil empire”, do not eradicate historic realities overnight. Powerful countries can always be captured by bad faith actors, and nations can remain dangerously wedded to near-mystical identities, in spite of the bright promises of liberal capitalism.
Iran’s mullahs, who have been waging their own colonialist campaign in the Middle East, seek nuclear weapons. China wants to conquer Taiwan. Last week, Putin declared Ukraine to be “an inalienable part of [Russian] history, culture and spiritual space”.
Westerners might believe that their own populations have moved beyond such motivations, but the emergent powers – most of the world – have clearly not, and we need to have a robust, dominant military in place to protect ourselves and our allies. To quote an American saying, strength is not provocative; weakness is provocative. It invites strong men to try their luck.
Second, we are going to have to rebuild the world’s energy market to ensure that we are no longer reliant upon Russia. We are paying the price for a staggering lack of foresight and a slavish devotion to our own self-indulgence, namely the rush to divest ourselves of any non-renewable use as soon as possible and, most stupidly, nuclear – a serious clean alternative for when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine.
We must roll out a new generation of nuclear reactors in record time – it will take years, but we can still divide by three or four the time it would otherwise take – lift the moratorium on fracking and allow the North Sea’s gas fields to be fully exploited.
The events of the past few days have put the West’s pantomime politics into sharp context. Putin’s actions have shown us who the real enemy is, and what the challenges are to come.
To prevent future Ukraines, the West must wake up, now.