By Keith Best
The minatory machinations emanating from the White House, the threats to disengage from the defence of Europe, the oral beating up of President Zelensky in the Oval Office, the contention that Ukraine started the war, the cutting off of armaments and intelligence to Ukraine and the failure to criticise President Putin in any way (despite the allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated by Russian troops) and the voting of USA twice with Russia in votes at the United Nations to mark the third anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine (the US opposed a European-drafted resolution condemning Moscow’s actions and supporting Ukraine’s territorial integrity – voting the same way as Russia and countries including North Korea and Belarus at the UN General Assembly) has left the West in a whirl.
It has even led to allegations that POTUS is a Russian agent (certainly, Donald Trump has pursued business deals in Russia since 1987, and, according to Foreign Policy [https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/12/21/how-russian-money-helped-save-trumps-business/] his businesses have received investment by wealthy people from Russia and the former Soviet republics that Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., has appeared to confirm, saying in 2008—after the Trump Organization was prospering again—that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets”). Some of you may have seen the faked video clip on Tik-Tok of Vladimir Putin walking his dog – save that the “dog” is a miniaturised caricature of Donald Trump on the end of the lead! Too far-fetched I hear you say! Only recently, Jan Marsalek the Austrian fugitive former businessman as chief operating officer of the massive German payment processing firm Wirecard, has been unmasked as a Russian spy with close links in several other intelligence services including the USA. High position is no guarantee of security integrity. The serious point and risk to the US is a massive undermining of its authority and international reputation if it is regarded as a poodle of Putin. Far from MAGA this is degrading the very authority the US seeks to wield in the world. Ultimately, the US public will not thank a President who humiliates them.
Yet, after the onslaught of abuse levelled at Ukraine, the Russians in their turn are having to deal with the chameleonic character from the White House who has also threatened dire consequences unless they play ball. Who is playing whom? Maybe Putin will discover himself what prompted Admiral Yamamoto’s alleged entry in his diary after Pearl Harbour “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.” Only by seeing how matters unfold in the coming months and years shall we know.
Not only has this geopolitical realignment brought about an urgent reassessment of the needs and ways in which to satisfy European security but also a debate about the nature of security in itself. As the European countries of the willing (with Hungary as an outrider) now look to re-arm and find the financial resources not just to supply Ukraine but also to build a credible European defence force in the possible absence of the USA so questions are asked if rearmament alone is sufficient. It is true that Russia’s economy and military are now significantly degraded – but it is a dictatorship not a democracy (in which usually, driven by a pacific public fearful of war, every effort
is made to salvage peace) and we have seen with Stalin how depleted forces do not necessarily prevent onward aggression.
Western defence has been built on the back of alliances, particularly NATO and its Art.5 denoting an attack on one country is deemed an attack on all (invoked only once in NATO’s history on 12 September 2001, one day after Al-Qaeda killed almost 3,000 people in its unprecedented terrorist attack on Washington and New York). In the current climate there are many who are by no means certain that if, say, Putin rolled his tanks through the Suwalki Corridor and, in so doing, attacked two NATO countries Lithuania and Poland, that the USA would answer the call. These uncertainties have undermined immeasurably the confidence of the oldest democracies to defend themselves and, hence, for such systems to survive in the face of autocracies actual or imagined.
Treaties and alliances, of course, can be broken and there now appears to be less moral obloquy in doing so that in the days when a nation’s bond was binding and its reputation at stake. The Ribbentrop-Molotov pact to say nothing of the 1938 Munich Agreement (often referred to by the Czechs and Slovaks as the Munich Betrayal) – the infamous “piece of paper” waved by Chamberlain on his return which he had signed alongside Hitler, the French and Italians – were all violated shortly afterwards. Perhaps we should not be surprised – the US government broke or violated all of the more than 500 treaties it made with Native American tribes between 1778 and 1871.
The history of Russia is a litany of broken agreements. The Minsk agreements were signed by Ukraine, Russia, and the OSCE special representative in September 2014 and February 2015 established a formal Russian commitment to return the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk to Ukrainian control (which thus implied respect for Ukraine’s territorial integrity). Two decades earlier in 1994 Ukraine agreed to transfer its nuclear weapons to Russia for dismantlement and became a party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of nuclear weapons in exchange for economic compensation and assurances from Russia, the United States and United Kingdom to respect the Ukrainian independence and sovereignty in the existing borders. We know what happened to that!
The US also needs to think how its approach to Ukraine and the Kremlin will send messages, erroneous or not, to Beijing. Although it may be an unintended consequence, if President Xi Jing Ping thinks that the US acknowledges that major military powers are free to impose their will on smaller nations in their geographical sphere of influence then President Trump, however inadvertently, will have given a green light to a military annexation of Taiwan by the Chinese. In another part of the world the UK discovered to its cost that the proposed naval cuts including decommissioning HMS Endurance from Antarctic patrol without replacement was perceived as having encouraged the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands in 1982 and the subsequent Franks Report acknowledged that it “may have served to cast doubt on British commitment to the Islands and their defence”. It caused the immediate resignation of the Foreign Secretary and two other junior Ministers. Such moves are dangerous.
Does all this mean that we should be cynical about treaties and conclude that they are not worth the paper on which they are written? What else do we have? What is
important for durable treaties, however, is that they have multiple participants with vested interests and all who have something to gain from their continuance and less to win by tearing them up. Moreover, a world where might is right and treaties count for nothing is not only more dangerous but is also a lot more expensive. The arms race in which every opponent’s capacity is analysed and counter measures are implemented means less money on industrial, commercial and social development: it leads to an impoverished existence and we all know that the possession of weapons leads some to an irrepressible desire to see them tested in action. These thoughts are nothing new – they are merely a commentary on history for all to see who care to study. The sad thing is that the cycle needs to be broken or else it will continue in line with the darker side of human nature. It is no good thinking that somehow this time will be different – we all can be reminded of Albert Einstein’s alleged definition of insanity – doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
Many years ago at the height of the Cold War during my Parliamentary days I was Chair of the International Council of a body called Parliamentarians for World Order which was established in 1978 in Washington DC by a group of concerned parliamentarians from around the world to “take collective, coordinated and cohesive actions on global problems, which could not be successfully addressed by any one government or parliament acting alone”. We created the Five Continents Peace Initiative of three Presidents and three Prime Ministers from what were called the Non-Aligned Countries to act collectively as mediators between Moscow and Washington for a reduction in nuclear weapons. Trying to co-ordinate common positions from six foreign ministries was a nightmare but worth the effort. Nevertheless, we changed the name to Parliamentarians Global Action when it was pointed out that Hitler had his own vision of World Order which did not exactly coincide with our own!
The point about this lesson is that words matter and autocrats have their own ideas about an order that is created around their hegemony rather than one that involves many nations (preferably all) having a vested interest in an order that is based on international rules of justice and behaviour. Those autocrats (whether from repressive or democratic systems which, incidentally, can also breed them) who think that such a multi-polar world vying for their own supremacy is a superior existence fail to learn the lessons of history (as well as, for most, the manner of their own demise). Autocrats are mercurial and mostly turn out to be very different from what they offer on assumption of power – they are an unreliable basis on which to build any lasting security. Maybe security rests more in compromise and equal dissatisfaction, the dictum of the much-maligned US President Woodrow Wilson of “peace without victory” which he articulated in 1917. The latest conflicts that beset our world are merely more evidence of the need to do things in a different way by building on the concepts of global co-operation that the nations attempted twice after the two bloody conflagrations of the last century. Ultimately, it is only through improved and structured global governance based on federal principles that we can have a better guarantee of security.