New British PM faces nightmarish threats in Russia and China

Reading about geopolitics is no cure for alarm and despondency, however good the books are. Indeed, the better, the worse. It is the equivalent of small children telling each other ghost stories, so successfully that they are too frightened to go to sleep. Apropos of ghost stories, geopolitics generally leads to the same conclusion. Western Civilisation’s surviving the Twentieth Century was a damned near-run thing. It could easily have turned into a ghost story. 

We can divide that century and the early phase of its successor into five periods. The first, up until 1914, was the prelude to what Anthony Beevor has described as the Suicide of Europe. Then came, in Henry Kissinger’s words, the second Thirty Years’ War. We could also call it the second Fall of Man. There followed the Cold War, prevented from turning hot by mutually-assured destruction. It ended in a brief period of Western triumph, succeeded by a tepid peace which now shows signs of becoming a second Cold War. We can only hope that it will remain cold.

What went wrong? The West had the resources, moral and material, so why were we unable to entrench our victory? There is one explanation. It might simply have been impossible to integrate our two great potential foes into George Bush senior’s ‘New World Order.’  In the mid-Nineties, Moscow seemed a delightful place. Able young Russians were enthusiastic about learning from the West so that they could follow our route to development and prosperity. All seemed set fair.

Alas, that Muscovite Jeunesse Doree was merely the thinnest of meniscuses. Beneath it, tens of millions of Russians were still condemned to the bleak, bitter legacy of a black and agonised history. A Russian writer called Saltykov wrote about “The devastating effect of legalised slavery upon the human psyche.” Serfdom under the Tsars: brutality masquerading as liberation under the Communists: “too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart.” It may be that most of the descendants of those who had endured so much could not cope with freedom.

At one stage, Putin himself dabbled with reform. It seemed that he might become the heir of Gorbachov. He then changed his mind. The lure of corruption is obviously one reason. He may not have understood capitalism. He certainly saw the attraction of gangster capitalism. Vanity was probably another factor. If following the West’s example simply meant that Russians would become second-rate Westerners, Putin might have preferred to fall back on national pride. Throughout history, the disintegration of empires has invariably brought trouble. The Soviet Empire is only the latest example and the trouble is far from over. In the 1990s, when early Putin might have been more malleable, we should have tried harder to entice Russia into a new system of collective security. Although that is too late now, we could hope that there might be a second chance under Mr Putin’s successor. Waiting for a second Gorbachev: you never know. But Waiting for Godot might seem more hopeful.

From the 1960s onwards, the West did try to woo China, inspired by that alpha/gamma President, Richard Nixon. From Henry Kissinger‘s secret visits to Beijing, to the deal over Hong Kong, to David Cameron’s buying Mr Xi a pint in an Oxfordshire pub, there seemed to be at least grandmother’s footsteps towards an entente. That was also a substantial economic underpinning with the emergence of a China/US symbiosis. Cheap Chinese manufactures boosted living-standards, at least for Americans who did not work in similar industries at home. The Chinese invested a vast proportion of their surplus in US Government bonds, helping to sustain the deficit. There seemed grounds for cautious optimism, especially as Mr Xi appeared to be a dynamic young leader, not trapped in the past.

That might have been an illusion, for two reasons. First, apropos psychic scars, the Chinese too may be victims. They regard themselves as a chosen people, at least the equal of any other nation and therefore entitled to a special place in history. For 150 years, they had one: at the bottom of the Asiatic pile. Kicked around successively by the Americans, by us, the French, the Germans, the Japanese – and by themselves – they had a worse deal from history than any other Asiatic country: arguably, than most other countries in the world. So to what extent do they believe that history owes them reparations? Does that feeling create an ineradicable poison in the Chinese diplomatic bloodstream? At the very least, it seems unlikely that any more Chinese leaders will be sampling the beer of the Thames Valley anytime soon.

But history has endowed the Chinese with another problem: a fear of chaos. Unless they are small Gulf Monarchies, modern states need some form of democracy to give their governments legitimacy. A country remotely China’s size also needs a form of devolved government. It is far too big to administer from the centre. Yet the Xi-ites obviously worry that any moves in those directions would threaten national unity and could lead to break-up. This forces Mr Xi towards autocracy: to becoming a second Mao. But that creates another form of instability. If you claim to rule everything, you are obviously responsible for everything. If the buck stops here, so does the blame. There seems a lot of evidence that the Chinese people are not as afraid of their leaders as they were in Mao’s time and that the leadership may be learning to fear the populace. In theory, Mr Xi may be all powerful. In practice, he may have some powerful grounds for anxiety.  

So one is tempted to draw a couple of conclusions. The first is that geopolitics makes great reading and there is no tension about moving from cold to hot. On a hot day, it goes very well with cold wine. That is all fine and dandy, just as long as you do not expect the books to provide you with answers. But within three weeks, the Tory party will have to come up with an answer. Its voters should ask themselves a question. Which of the two candidates is more plausible as a leader to guide British geopolitics in a difficult and dangerous world?