The West is not doing enough to help Ukraine beat Putin

I had planned to write this latest newsletter on the way in which the decadent and supposedly doomed West turns out to be much more resilient than expected.

The so-called invincible strongman and geopolitical genius, forever posing with his top off while he rides horses and camps in the extremely boring Russian wilderness, turns out not be a strategic master. Not only is he a butcher. Putin is a bungler.

The West rallied to the support of Ukraine, and thanks to the bravery and skill of the Ukrainians, supplied with weaponry and US, UK and Canadian training, Putin is being beaten back.

The West that is supporting Ukraine is not so weak after all. Or if it is weak, that weakness is strength. It is precisely because we have a noisy, disputatious free society that we adapt, quickly in a crisis such as this. Our governments are held to account, albeit imperfectly. In the West, truth can be spoken to power, unlike in Russia. Military doctrine is tested and when found wanting, as it has been in the last 20 years, it can be adjusted and reinvented. Freedom is the source of innovation. What looks like weakness or chaos is strength.

This is cheering when we’ve heard a lot in recent years on how navel-gazing about culture wars has made our societies too soft, decadent, and fundamentally unserious. As if to prove the point, somehow the leader of the British Labour party, the actual Labour party, the party of Barbara Castle, is unable to say when asked what a woman is. Interviewers now dangle the p-word in front of him. A red-faced Sir Keir Starmer looks away, embarrassed, unable to opine on whether it is feasible,  biologically, for a man with such an appendage to be a woman. The sensible answer, biologically and electorally if he wants most women and most men over the age of 40 to even consider voting to make him Prime Minister, is “no, someone with one of those is biologically male.”

Meanwhile, in Germany the political class designed a disastrous national policy that weakened the West. This meant sucking in cheap energy from Russia, spewing out exports to China, and all the while not taking defence against threats from resurgent autocrats seriously enough.

Merkelism (to be fair, a policy inherited from her pro-Russian predecessor) was calamitous, for Ukraine, Germany and European security. For presiding over this madness, and generally keeping going for a long time, Angela Merkel was hailed by sophisticated people as the thinking person’s stateswoman, a giant of the age, a beacon of calm common sense and grown up realpolitik. Oops.

The most obvious manifestation of wider Western European weakness was the decision to spend too little on defence once it became clear more than a decade ago that the gangster Putin was a Russian imperialist prepared to menace his neighbours.

In America, the world’s leading power, they maintained a relatively robust defence and high spending. The permanent architecture, the military and intelligence capability, is strong and well-equipped, though a humiliating exit from Afghanistan arranged by the political class emboldened the West’s enemies. On leadership, America is in a bind. It followed the Trump experiment with Joe Biden, a leader in name only, a figure lost in the fog. Before that was Obama, cool as a cucumber with an unerring habit for getting it wrong. He mocked his opponent Mitt Romney in 2012 over his warnings that Russia was a serious threat. Obama was wrong. Romney was right.

All in all, the West got itself into a terrible tangle post-financial crisis. Throughout, the mistakes were accompanied by a chorus of weeping and wailing from social justice warriors denouncing  wicked western civilisation from every angle.

Note that in diagnosing Western weakness I haven’t even mentioned the narcissistic Will Smith yet. And I’m not going to mention him either, not even as a symbol of Western decadence, evidenced by his poor manners and bad tailoring at the Oscars last weekend.

And yet, when it came to it with the invasion of Ukraine it was the West that recalibrated its thinking. The autocrat Putin looks wooden, slow. Other autocrats and dictators, in countries such as China and North Korea, will be looking at his humiliation and revising the assumption that the West will always retreat in the face of aggression.

But I’m not going to write this newsletter on the way in which the West turned out to be more resilient than expected. Western self-congratulation is hardly appropriate when in Ukraine the Russian slaughter continues and the Ukrainian president says not enough is being done to aid his country militarily.

Zelensky is right. The West is simply not doing enough to aid Ukraine.

On Friday the Ukrainian Air Force mapped it out. Countries such as the US and the UK have done well in sending anti-tank weapons and other defensive weapons.

The sixteen tweet thread is worth reading in full, here.

In essence, they need help in the skies. The no fly zone was always impractical, as it it threatened to create the conditions for a Third World War, if a NATO jet engaged a Russian jet.

Today, the Ukrainians seek to buy or lease (think lend lease) jets via the US and a chance to train pilots. This should begin straight away. And they want better air defence systems. Send the lot. The West is already involved and the distinction about different kinds of weapons not constituting escalation, and others being fine, looks more odd with every passing day.

If Putin is to be evicted from Ukraine and properly defeated, and so bedraggled is the Russian war machine that this is now a possibility, then the West needs a proper plan to help and supply the Ukrainians do it.

For policymakers, Ukraine’s strong showing does create a dilemma. Is it enough that Putin has largely failed? Can’t we try to draw a line under it in peace talks?

Russia has lost in its attempt to take the bulk of Ukraine and is now restricting itself to territory to the east and south east, in the hope it can in peace talks carve out new Russian statelets, from where it can run operations to disrupt post-war independent Ukraine.

Doing everything feasible, short of the direct involvement of NATO forces, should be the aim.

The British government is, I understand, taking a maximalist position, arguing for as much aid, defensive and offensive, as possible. If Putin loses decisively it potentially transforms the European security situation. There’s a little time then to fortify Ukraine and the work out best how Europe and it’s allies can organise to repel the autocrats, in an era where much of the rest of the world is non-aligned and wanting good relations with Russia and China, and Europe.

There is a suspicion, denied, that Germany and France are more keen on an early peace deal, so that sanctions can start to be eased and normal trade return. That would be a mistake, as short-sighted as Merkelism was.

For all the horror, there is good news. The Ukrainians may be able to win with the right help. And, if they do it, this is a major defeat for the idea that autocratic strongmen are advancing inevitably against a decadent, weak West. Their triumph is not inevitable. Freedom is worth something important. As brave Ukraine is demonstrating, free nations can get fight back against bullies. Free nations in a strong alliance can win. Give the Ukrainians what they need,

Can Boris get a grip?

No.

At the risk of making this the shortest ever item in this weekly newsletter, approaching its sixth anniversary, I’ll simply point out that those who until recently were demanding that the Prime Minister get a grip, overhaul this that or the other structure in Number 10, and generally start behaving like a normal Prime Minister, seem to have gone very quiet.

The reorganisation post-Partygate was carried out. There are fewer slip-ups, but inside government it’s basically no change. The farce of the attempt to construct an energy security policy is a case in point. Margaret Thatcher, Gordon Brown or most other Prime Ministers would have used their convening power, cracking the whip, to sort it out. Instead the Chancellor, now really disliked by Team Boris, pleads that the sums have to add up. Kwasi Kwarteng, always angry, never listening, is still in the land of COP26. Assorted experts offer contradictory advice. Weeks go by. In the middle of it all sits the Prime Minister, engaged on the war, but still on everything else not a details man, someone who can concrete for no more than 15 minutes, always the Spectator editor getting bored of editorial leader conference.

Boris is what Boris is.

Javier Blas in conversation

The latest of our Authors in Conversation series is with Javier Blas, the energy and commodities guru from Bloomberg. His brilliant book – the World for Sale – explains how the world really works. We’ll send a link to the interview to subscribers.

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