The West has itself to blame for current tensions with Russia

“War, I fear, is coming.” That was the conclusion reached by historian Niall Ferguson at the end of a long analytical piece published on Bloomberg Opinion on 2 January, warning that President Biden, the EU and NATO would be powerless to prevent war in Ukraine. Other commentators are warning, with some credibility, that we are closer to nuclear war than at any time since 1962. The controversial Franco-American-Russian commentator, Vladimir Pozner, formerly a Soviet propagandist, has told an American university audience that the West created Vladimir Putin and has only itself to blame for the current crisis.

You do not have to be an uncritical receiver of Pozner’s opinions to recognise the truth of that claim. For a generation – the post-Thatcher/Reagan era – the West has been afflicted with inadequate, incompetent, often narcissistic, leaders and now the chickens are coming home to roost. Fukuyama’s inane mantra “the end of history” and its uncritical acceptance among Western elites speaks volumes about the wave of delusion that engulfed governments at the end of the Cold War.

The “Gorby” fever that infected the West, which totally misunderstood what Mikhail Gorbachev was about, signalled the incomprehension of governments and public alike with regard to the phenomenon that was the “collapse” of the Soviet Union. In fact, the USSR did not collapse, it was decommissioned by Gorbachev in an attempt to preserve communism by more sophisticated methods: Gorbachev did not abolish communism, he tried to manage its decline, with a view to later revival. The task proved beyond him; but many institutions of the Russian Federation derive from that predecessor state and retain many of its characteristics.

While we raved about Gorby, we disdained Boris Yeltsin. Even the iconic image of him on a tank outside the (Russian) White House had little enduring effect. He was a drunk, a comic figure, treated to all the media caricaturing that would later be meted out to Donald Trump. In this way, we squandered the transient but enormous possibilities of negotiating a radical new relationship between Russia and the West with the one man with whom we could have done serious business.

There was a patronizing attitude towards the Russians adopted by the West: they were losers in the Cold War, we owed them nothing. Western newsreels were keen to show rust-bucket Soviet warships rotting at their moorings; it seemed the hardware of the Cold War had been a paper tiger – why had we ever feared it? The Western mentality was dangerously close to the hubris of the Versailles Treaty of 1919, with Russia in the role of Germany. When the Russian government began to concern itself with fears of encirclement – the most fecund seedbed of war, as history demonstrates – the West promised no eastward expansion of Nato, only to break its word.

The West has an inviolable security duty towards Poland, which it betrayed at Yalta, and the Baltic states; but military intervention in Serbia and Kosovo were more problematic initiatives. The United States, which had reacted so strongly to Soviet missiles on Cuba, was happy to site missiles close to the Russian frontier. Many Western actions were legitimate, but some compromises should have been struck and attempts made to cultivate Russia.

The core incomprehension between the two sides is the Western belief that conceding a sphere of influence to Russia would amount to appeasement. That ignores history and Russia’s cultural link to Orthodox nations, a pan-Slav entanglement that dragged her into the First World War on Serbia’s behalf. What are eastern European NATO member states but Western spheres of influence?

None of this is to justify the aggressive character of Putin’s foreign policy which, as Niall Ferguson has pointed out, is modelled on that of his hero, Peter the Great. But the West has exhibited some extraordinary blind spots vis-à-vis Russia, of which Western outrage over Russia’s reabsorption of the Crimea is the most absurd. The Crimea was part of Russia from 1783 to 1954 when Nikita Khruschev allocated it to the Ukraine, partly as a local boy’s pork-barrel gesture, mainly to enlarge the ethnic Russian demography of the Ukraine. Demonstrably, more than 90 per cent of its inhabitants wish to belong to Russia. If that is denied, whatever happened to the principle of self-determination?

But Russia took Crimea, illegally and by force, from the Ukrainian government, runs the pro-sanctions argument. That would be the Ukrainian government that claimed its validly elected but pro-Russian predecessor administration had lost its mandate – because it refused to seek EU membership – and, regardless of the fact that the government was legally obliged to hold an election within 11 months, when the issue could have been put to the test democratically, launched a violent revolution, at the immediate cost of 116 lives, taking power by force and destabilising the region. That move was encouraged by the EU, which has just sent an envoy to the Ukraine to mediate, in the hope of averting a Russian invasion, demonstrating the lack of self-awareness prevailing in Brussels.

All of the West’s misapprehensions and blunders are mirrored by reprehensible moves on the Russian side: the West’s errors are highlighted here because they receive less acknowledgement in our media. Future historians will be confounded by the geopolitical illiteracy of the West’s interaction with Russia. In the present crisis of impending war it beggars belief that, in 2014, Western leaders boycotted the Russian-hosted Winter Olympics at Sochi, not over some important geopolitical issue, but because of disapproval of Russia’s laws against exposing youngsters to homosexual propaganda. 

What business of ours was that? And how delusional was it for Western governments to arrogate to themselves the right to dictate the moral values of another sovereign power bloc, the Russian Federation? Were there not issues more demanding of reproach arising in China, with whom Western nations were desperate to do trade? The infantile notion that persisted was that Russia was somehow negligible and powerless, compared to Western might.

Last October Vladimir Putin delivered a speech in which he denounced so-called “progressives” in the West who “believe that aggressive blotting out of whole pages of your own history, the affirmative action in the interest of minorities, and the requirement to renounce the traditional interpretation of such basic values as mother, father, family and the distinction between sexes are a milestone… a renewal of society.” He pointed out that Russia had passed through that phase in the early Bolshevik period and it had failed. Russian nationalists routinely mock the “woke” weakness of the West and there is no doubt that the perception of an effete society has encouraged Russian hawks.

On 17 December, Russia published two draft security agreements, one proposed for conclusion with the US, the other with NATO. Their Draconian demands included a veto on NATO incorporating new members, a ban on US and NATO short- or intermediate-range missiles within range of Russian territory, no US nuclear weapons to be stationed abroad, no NATO deployment of forces or arms to former Warsaw Pact countries, no NATO military exercises above brigade level and US agreement not to cooperate militarily with former Soviet states. So extravagant are these demands, they bear an ominous resemblance to the punitive ultimatum sent by Austria to Serbia in 1914, with the intention of waging war.

Today, while America is obsessing over its slave-owning remote past, climate hysteria and the allocation of pronouns, Russia is competing with her and China in development of hypersonic nuclear missiles. With a dotard in the Oval Office, there has never been a more favourable opportunity for Russia to assert its claims in eastern Ukraine. The supreme danger for the world is that a weak leader who has been out-manoeuvred might overreact, in an effort to save face. The other peril is that, in a climate of distrust, a computer error could launch a nuclear conflict that, in less confrontational times, could be prevented through a quick conversation via a red telephone.

The tragedy is that we should never have come anywhere close to where we are now, had it not been for the delusions of neo-cons attempting to export “liberal democracy” to the entire world, the infantile priorities of “woke” governments sidelining core geopolitical issues of realpolitik, and the endemic incompetence that has become the defining characteristic of Western governance. As it is, it is unlikely that the West will deliberately go to war in defence of the regime in Kyiv; the likelier probability is that it will again suffer humiliation, as it did recently in Afghanistan.