They came over just before dawn, darkening the sky, portending terrible things… “How the US and Europe lost the post-Cold War!” “Vladimir Putin’s actions … [are] winning this hands down!” “Ukraine is closer to home than you think!” And on and on.
There has not been much else to throw into the fight. Indeed, The Times in London insisted that what Putin feared most were “Western ideas, not weapons”. Which is a good thing, because when it came to committing weapons to defend Ukraine, we have shied away. The resolute declarations from the West on the civilisational nature of this crisis are coming off the carrier deck at three-minute intervals.
Mind you, Russian President Vladimir Putin has given them plenty to work with. It is one thing when the new authoritarians start to behave like James Bond villains. It is quite another when, as per Putin’s hour-long broadcast 48 hours ago, when they start to look like Austin Powers villains.
In the standard “rambling” style, Putin dug deeper than Western and NATO incursion towards Russia’s borders, and made the “Russian empire” argument that there was no such thing as Ukraine, that its peoples had always been part of Russia, and that the Bolsheviks were to blame for policies of “Ukrainisation” in the 1920s before, under Stalin, they tried, er, something else.
To say there is some truth to this will get me accused of being a Russian stooge, so let me say that there is no justification for Russia’s incursion into two self-declared republics in eastern Ukraine, and Crikey’s management and that of Launceston’s The Examiner join me in warning Mr Putin…
Got that on record? OK. Well, the beef of “Great Russians” everywhere is that in the 1920s, the Soviets set out on a deliberate policy of strengthening non-Russian nationalities in order to offset “Great Russian” chauvinism, which they thought might serve as a basis for a fascist counter-revolution (imagine!). Massive work went into standardising Ukrainian, Georgian and other languages, teaching the culture and pushing the idea of a union of republics.
In the case of Ukraine, “Great Russians” have argued that there was a degree of invented tradition going on — that the area known as Ukraine had been occupied by a bewildering range of peoples, and that “Ukrainians” were really early Russians — the emergence of the “Rus” based around Kyiv, marking Russia’s founding (actually by Vikings, but leave that aside).
This notion of a lost homeland and unity came to be deployed particularly during the Orange “revolution”, when a corrupt pro-Russian president was replaced by a corrupt pro-EU president after a flood of money, advisers and support from the US State Department, the EU, spy agencies, George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, etc etc, helped the nascent movement arguably crookedly depose a crookedly elected leader.
For “Great Russianists” such as Putin — a fan of Stalin but not Lenin — that marked the initial form of recolonisation and manipulation from the West, which followed on from the Bolsheviks’ application of Western republican ideas to “Great Russia”. Ukraine joining NATO would then mark the final division, with Ukraine eventually joining the EU as well.
To what degree is Putin dead serious about this, and to what degree is it a “mad dog” feint to make his relatively minor military action — the support of two small breakaway, Russian-dominated republics in the east, parts of which were fused with Ukraine by Nikita Khrushchev when Crimea was reallocated to Ukraine in the 1950s?
That is hard to know. If Putin is playing up to the mad autocrat image, he’s been doing it for a while now. The sleek, Western-style leader in a sharp suit and mildly repressive style is gone, replaced by the bare-chested-with-tigers kleptocrat sending stooges to poison dissidents in English tourist towns. He’s been more than two decades in power, and that will do things to your sense of reality.
Would Putin be intent on dismembering Ukraine entirely had there not been talk of extending NATO in the giddy globalist ’90s? That is impossible to say, but in realpolitik terms we have certainly given Russia pretext to secure its field of influence and a buffer zone against Europe proper. The notion that Ukraine was “always part of Europe” is another propaganda product of the post-Cold War period, matching, perhaps exceeding, Putin’s “Great Russianism”.
The op-ed squadrons lamenting that Putin has outplayed the West aren’t calling for a reexamination of how the West has operated these past few decades. It’s an attack on Western decadence, a lack of confidence in our own civilisation. In the next few days, they’ll roll out the next line of attack: that “wokeness” so weakened the West as to give Putin his head in extending Russia’s territory, with President Xi Jinping and China the next to have a crack.
But the plain fact remains that Western expansion of the West itself weakened the cultural factors needed for Europe to have a warrior complexion. By presenting the West as the natural and inevitable order of the world, carried by capitalism and technology, the powers that be weakened the notion of collective defence of one’s particular homeland.
If Russia invades fully, the West should certainly provide Ukraine with the means to fight. But who except Ukrainians would die for it? NATO’s power cannot really be extended because the opposition in Europe to full-scale war in Ukraine would bring down governments and possibly break up the alliance.
It’s an open question as to whether Western Europe would fight for Eastern Europe under the NATO command. Is NATO viable as an operative command at all?
Indeed, the only place in Europe I’ve seen with real resolve to fight if need be was in Sweden and Finland, the former still with national military/civil service, a strong sense of collective nationhood created by a fair-ish economy and, of course, as woke as you can get.
But no matter what happens, these inconvenient truths will be disregarded, and the op-eds calling us to war, or damning our weakness and wokeness, will continue. The question of Europe’s collective security, much less our collective security, will remain unresolved, no matter what the outcome in these faraway places on which we have all become instant experts.
Ironic how all the countries doing the sabre rattling and war mongering are the one least likely to be bombed and destroyed if war breaks out. The US, UK as well as Australia are main tough guys who know they are safe. European countries in the firing like in Europe are branded as weak and cowardly because they don’t want be bombed to pieces.
And only Papuans have died trying to assert their right to live free of Indonesia who we handed them to because the USA said so. Virtually nobody in the west has been prepared to die for them.
The history of the world is replete with mistakes and hypocrisy and everyone will find their own piece of dirt to throw back at someone. Unfortunately the USA has developed a foreign policy based on the naive belief that their enemy’s enemy is their friend and their right to strike another sovereign country when ‘threatened’, and everyone seems to forget Israel’s claims to the right to do that (and their air strikes against Iran based on that etc), so we pay the price for power politics.
The dictatorship of Putin is an abomination and the invasion of Ukraine cannot by justified by any means. No matter how much the threat of of NATO is invoked as an excuse by Putin, or those who hate the USA, a perceived or real threat is not justification for an invasion. Unfortunately ‘international law’ is too often only for the theorists.
Why should the West arm Ukraine with the means to fight Russia, it brings to mind so many national liberation movements vehemently opposed by the West. Guy this view is tantamount to an approval of proxy wars and cold war behaviour, unless of course you don’t believe what you wrote — after all, Crikey is privately owned and well within the Anglosphere
Why? For much the same reason the West should have armed the Spanish republican government in 1936 when Franco, with military support and weapons from Italy and Germany, rebelled against his own government; and should have helped the Czechoslovak government to defend its territorial integrity in 1938 againsy German demands. Yes, the West gets it wrong very often, but that’s not a good argument for getting it wrong again, just for the sake of – what? Consistency? “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it.
It is arguable that the ideologies and ambitions of Franco and Hitler are totally the opposite of the Middle Powers, so I am not convinced Spain and Czechia are relevant examples of the need for Western intervention in Ukraine today. But, along the lines of your comment, if we’re looking for moral authority, Guy suggests in the article it may have been bankrupted (“Western expansion of the West itself weakened the cultural factors needed for Europe to have a warrior complexion”). This leaves nothing but a realpolitik rationale for Western intervention. And at heart of that rationale is what does the West want? There is a conflict of strategic intent here!
I’m interested to see when Putin will be giving Crimea back to the Tatars, the southern steppes to the Cossacks, and Siberia to the Buryats, Sakha and other original owners.
Maybe the west can show by leading by example and give back the lands taken from indigenous peoples in the Americas, South America, Africa, Australia and elsewhere?
I think we’ll be waiting a while for that …
Rundle seems to have a thing about “national integrity” when it comes to great powers (he’s weirdly sympathetic to China absorbing Taiwan), but I’ve never heard him suggest he should leave Australia in order to return it to its rightful owners.
Why is no-one questioning the continued existence of NATO? It was set up as a military alliance to threaten the USSR, so why was it not disbanded when the USSR broke up? Instead of being disbanded, it has been greatly expanded, in spite of clear promises from the US, UK, France and Germans that it would not move ‘one inch eastward’. Can we blame the Russians for being paranoid?
It was not disbanded after the USSR fell apart because it has or is looking for some other purpose. It’s not that unusual for an organisation to change over time and pursue different objectives. NATO’s part in the most recent invasion of Afghanistan for example obviously has nothing at all to do with the the USSR.
Lord Carrington was Secretary General of NATO for some years in the 1980s. He took part in a TV interview with Lord Owen in December 2006. There are transcripts of that interview on the internet. Carrington looked at the apparent failure of NATO’s contribution in Afghanistan and said inter alia “I think we ought to ask ourselves if this doesn’t work what on Earth NATO is for?” and then “NATO is not working. And I know the Secretary General is very worried about it.”
Thanks Rat, but if it’s an organisation searching for a purpose, isn’t that the tail wagging the dog? Surely individual European nations can decide for themselves which wars they wish to participate in? I’m left with the conclusion that NATO’s only raison d’etre is to provide a fig-leaf of respectability to naked US self-interest (when it can’t bully the UN into acquiescing) or Russophobia, or some combination of both.
I suspect there’s no good simple explanation that can make sense. It’s all the result of different actors pursuing different objectives at different times with no coherent result. Even when you refer to ‘US self-interest’ there’s no way to be sure what that means. So, when NATO was set up it was clear the US was entirely dominant in the organisation. The US then began complaining the European members were not pulling their weight. European members proposed to meet the US concerns by creating their own capability. The US reacted with alarm at Europe having an independent military capability and moved to prevent it. The US then returned to complaining the European members do not pull their weight, and round and round it goes. So one way to look at NATO is that its purpose is to cripple the EU’s military potential, and if so it’s a big success. Is that the US’s interest?
Yeah, fair enough. I guess it’s an independently-minded EU military potential the US does not want – an EU military potential subservient to whatever the US perceives its interests to be at the time is OK.
Maybe you’re right, and the US is giving up on trying to corral the unreliable Europeans – hence relying instead on the eminently more sheep-like Anglo’s, UK and Aus, with AUKUS.
Disagree, economical with the facts; Russia was invited to join NATO, but was also about controlling former West Germany, then incorporating former East or GDR…. remember the paranoia about reunification from Thatcher et al.?