Putin’s obsession with recovering his nation’s superpower role stems from our failure to handle end of the Soviet Union
The serious side of Boris
Johnson was on display in his Commons debut as foreign secretary this week.
Moved by TV images of suffering in Aleppo — images that should carry the health
warning “there is no strategic analysis here” — MPs lined up to tell him that
“something must be done”.
Hackneyed analogies with
Guernica and the Nazis were bandied about, when the Russian flattening of
Grozny in 1999 was more apposite. Tom Tugendhat, a callow
colonel-turned-Tory-backbencher, demanded that our Navy’s ship (sic) in the
region fire missiles at Syrian and Russian aircraft to stop the killing.
Mr Johnson was right to say
that a no-fly zone is not only unworkable but might trigger a global conflict
(President Obama, whose F-22 fighter aircraft would have to be involved,
dismissed such a zone as “ill-informed . . . mumbo jumbo”). But the mask soon
slipped and he revealed his own callowness by calling for demonstrations outside
the Russian embassy. Has he forgotten the harassment of British embassy staff
in Moscow by Vladimir Putin’s thuggish youth league? Since the Conservatives’
Saudi friends slaughtered 150 Yemenis attending a funeral last week, perhaps he
could encourage demos outside their embassy too?
Under Putin, Russia has
entered a dark time. His foreign adventurism remains popular, so long as the
official body count in Syria is 21 Russians and the war is presented as a
computer game on state-run TV.
He has created a series of
costly frozen conflicts, and grabbed Crimea, while asserting Russia as an
“unavoidable” power in the Middle East. Russia’s “anti-globalist” summits of
French fascists and Texan nationalists may be a joke, but its increasingly
sophisticated cyber and financial subversion of western democracies is not.
Frequent statements about its nuclear arsenal and modernised conventional
weapons are designed to disconcert the West.
Given Russia’s abundance of
oil and natural gas, she is not in the Middle East for economic reasons, except
to sell arms and to make mischief at America’s expense. It is all about being
taken seriously as a superpower again. Putin calculates that Obama’s attention
will be focused on this weekend’s expected big push to liberate Mosul from
Isis, which the president hopes will rank alongside the killing of Osama bin
Laden as one of his legacies. The Russian leader is focused on reclaiming
“useful” Syria, notably a military port and airbase on the Mediterranean,
leaving anti-Assad rebels to fight over “useless” desert. The West’s problem is
that there are so many jihadists among the rebels that we dare not give them
the anti-aircraft missiles they need to fight back.
Rather than glibly dismiss
Putin as an unreconstructed tyrant, we should face up to the fact that he is,
in many ways, our creation.
Loss of empire, which for
Britain and France was a messy but protracted process lasting half a century,
happened to Russia almost overnight with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in
1991. It took Britain decades to alight on a role as the virtuous provider of
liberal values to the rest of mankind (except people in Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi
Arabia or Yemen). Russia has found a new role much faster but it is rooted in
the virtues of authoritarianism.
The existential shock to the
Soviet system’s true believers was enormous. One was Major Vladimir Putin,
serving in a backwater KGB station in Dresden. Confronted by an angry crowd, he
telephoned HQ in East Berlin for instructions. “Moscow is silent” was the
response. Reflecting on these events in 2005, Putin said the collapse of the
Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century.
The economic chaos that
followed saw Russia transformed into a casino culture, with local gangsters and
foreign vultures despoiling its assets. It was the West’s great opportunity to
sell the benefits of the rule of law and free trade to a struggling nation but
it blew it in the hubristic belief that Russians would naturally come around to
its way of thinking. Faced by mounting instability, Putin swapped his
allegiance to Boris Yeltsin’s liberalising reforms for a cocktail of moral
conservatism, Orthodoxy and military might that struck a chord with ordinary
Russians fed up with a know-it-all western arrogance.
After demonstrations of
US unilateral power turned to dust in Afghanistan and Iraq, Putin resolved to
draw lines around Russia herself, while exploiting his countrymen’s view that
the liberal West is too decadent to stamp out the Islamist menace.
An armed clash between the
West and Russia over Syria could easily escalate out of control. Insulting
Putin’s undoubtedly bloody conduct may make MPs feel better about themselves
but does nothing to change his ways. Instead, we should make our red lines abundantly
clear — from the independence of the Baltics to the unacceptability of
cyberwarfare. Reducing our dependence on Russian energy, with alternative
sources, is vital to reducing the Kremlin’s power to hold us to ransom.
Getting embroiled in Middle
East conflicts is no way for a post-imperial nation to acquire a new role and
recover its self-respect. That is one lesson Britain and its historian foreign
secretary are qualified to teach.
Michael Burleigh is author of Small Wars, Faraway
Places
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