This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column
So they finally got their war. But what are they going to do now? This is the most avoidable, needless conflict in modern history. It was nurtured and hatched in the small minds of foolish men. There was a compromise available, but because they were too proud to consider it, terrified civilians now weep outside the ruins of what were once their homes.
At this point, these noisy boasters turn out, as usual, to have big mouths and tiny fists. The Kremlin, responding to years of deliberate humiliation, taunting and provocation, finally goes mad and invades a sovereign country. The mighty West hits back by… chucking Moscow out of the Eurovision Song Contest.
You might have thought that, after 30 years of tough talk, they could have come up with something a bit better than that. But if you had observed, as I have, the steady, shameful shrivelling of Britain’s diplomatic soft power and hard armed forces over the past three decades, you would not have been surprised.
When I say ‘they’, I mean the army of Washington power-worshippers, think-tankers, politicians and swaggering musclemen journalists – most of whom have never heard a bullet fly or seen a corpse.
Since 1992, they have thought it wise to treat Russia like a beaten dog. The inventor of that policy is the American neo-conservative politician Paul Wolfowitz. He just happens to be the architect of that other great disaster, the Iraq War.
The New York Times in March 1992 reported the existence of a Pentagon document, believed to be the work of Mr Wolfowitz. It said that from now on there should only be one superpower. It stated ‘Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union.’
The suggestion was ridiculous. The former Soviet Union was at that time a bankrupt mass of scrap metal, rust and corruption. I was there, I know. Once the dust settled, it would find itself with an economy the size of Italy’s, and an ageing, ill, diminishing population. The Communist ideology which had driven its expansion and aggression was dead.
Yet here were senior American political figures, planning further humiliation. The outcry over this dangerous language caused a hasty rewrite, and when the document was published it had been greatly toned down.
Yet within a few years, under Bill Clinton, and supported by expensive lobbying by US arms manufacturers, the USA began the eastward expansion of Nato. Since then Nato has never said who it is defending its members against – because such an admission would be an act of aggression in itself. But it can only really be explained by a desire to keep Russia down. For what purpose?
I have never seen any attempt by anyone to reply to the urgent condemnation of this decision, made in 1998 by one of the greatest diplomats who ever lived, George Kennan. Mr Kennan, inventor of the successful strategy of ‘containment’ of the Soviet Union, came out of retirement to protest.
He said Nato expansion was folly, and correctly predicted it would create nationalist backlash in Moscow. Did the neo-conservatives who created this policy really think Russia, with its huge intelligence services and vast, sophisticated foreign policy establishment, would not notice that it was being targeted?
Russia guards its interests, as do all nations, just as rain falls downwards and water is wet. Out of this realisation came Vladimir Putin, the direct consequence of the Wolfowitz doctrine. We created him.
In fact, Wolfowitz and Clinton were simply wrong. China was the real danger. Think about this. In 1989, the Soviet Empire gave way to mass demonstrations in Prague and East Germany. It could have massacred protesters in Leipzig, Dresden and Berlin, but it did not. After a few nasty but feeble attempts to fight demands for independence in the Baltic states and Georgia, Russia gave up its enormous empire in Europe and Asia. In return, Russia was treated like a pariah by the EU and Nato when it sought a civilised relationship with them.
That same year, China’s Communists answered their people’s demands for freedom by murdering them on the streets of Peking.
In the years since, they have created an ever-fiercer police state regime, tightened their dictatorial grip on Tibet, and menaced Taiwan by hugely increasing their military and naval power. They have also blatantly broken their promises to maintain freedom in Hong Kong, and engaged in a shameful and racialist repression of the Uighurs.
This is a real threat, and a regime which makes Putin look relaxed. Yet we stay on friendly terms with them. When their despots come to London, and dine at Buckingham Palace, British police cravenly crush peaceful demonstrations of protest lest our tyrannical guests are offended. We continue to pretend Taiwan is not independent.
We cravenly shun the Dalai Lama for the sake of trade. Is it precisely because we are so feeble in this real struggle that we pretend to toughness in the supposed New Cold War with Russia? I often think so.
And now here we are again, in a moralising frenzy. The BBC, which insisted on strict neutrality between Britain and Argentina in its coverage of the Falklands War, flings itself into an ignorant and one-sided coverage of the Ukraine crisis.
A leading presenter proclaims, from a city he weirdly calls ‘Kyeeeev’, that Ukraine is a ‘European democracy’, in which case he is very easily satisfied.
As my old friend Edward Lucas, no friend of Russia, put it in the Daily Mail yesterday, Ukraine is a country where ‘oligarchs run media empires, with politicians and officials on the payroll. The judicial system is a festering mess where arrests, prosecutions and verdicts are used as score-settlers between political and commercial rivals. Senior positions are bought and sold. Healthcare and education are plagued by kickbacks. The security service, the SBU, is infested with intrigue and sleaze – and penetrated by Russian agents of influence’.
Justified outrage over the terrible harvest of war would be more convincing if we had paid more attention to the hundreds of civilian casualties, many of them inflicted by Ukrainian armed forces, in and near the breakaway regions in the country’s East.
A 2020 report by the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe said that between January 2017 and September 2020, there were 946 civilian casualties, of which 161 were fatalities. Among the casualties were 100 children (73 boys and 27 girls).
It would also be more convincing if our political and media establishment had not supported the Nato bombing of Belgrade in 1999 (with major civilian casualties); the crazy invasion of Iraq in 2003; and the forgotten Nato bombing of Libya, also with its toll of dismembered children killed in supposed ‘surgical strikes’. That intervention destroyed Libya. Mr Putin, and the Chinese police state, know that we did these things, and see them as precedents for any crimes of the same kind they may commit later.
I’m told I am supporting the invasion by saying we provoked it. But if I warn a child that, if he annoys a wasp, it will sting him, am I supporting the wasp? I am accused of treachery, or of being an apologist for Russia, for urging a different view on this crisis. Surely this is how dissent is treated in dictatorships.
I write this as a British patriot. How was it in our interests to provoke a war we cannot win, and cannot even fight, against a country which is not, in fact, our enemy?