Few who watched last Friday’s scenes in the Oval Office can have felt anything but revulsion. Whatever our opinions about the course of the War, its causes, or the necessary conditions for peace, the spectacle we witnessed was that of the stronger man deliberately and publicly humiliating the weaker man for the purpose of extracting ‘a deal’. That the weaker man, Zelensky, is a democratically elected leader engaged in a struggle for his nation’s survival that has cost the lives of between thirty and eighty thousand Ukrainian soldiers, and those of countless civilians, made the scenes even harder to stomach.
Naturally, the media had a field day. The front page of the Daily Mail proclaimed ‘A Spectacle to Horrify the World’. Trump and Vance were behaving like gangsters. America had never sunk lower – at least, not since 1945 when it terminated its Lend-Lease aid to Britain, heralding six more years of rationing for the British people. But putting aside our sense of outrage, the brutal reality of the situation is that with the West wanting to counter Russian aggression yet not get directly involved in the conflict, the two sides were inevitably going to fight each other to a standstill, resulting in a ‘Korean-style frozen conflict’, just as Owen Matthews predicted in The Salisbury Review in June last year. With Europe and America increasingly reluctant to finance the war indefinitely, and Ukraine struggling desperately to find recruits to hold the front line, Russia’s vastly superior resources were always going to tell in the end.
Putin’s ruthlessness and disregard for the human cost of the war has only counted in Russia’s favour. It has also helped Russia that it has the support, tacit or open, of much of the non-Western world. It even hosted the BRICS summit last year. The prediction of Boris Johnson that our sanctions, carefully constructed to avoid harming the City of London and its offshore tax havens, would ‘strike at the heart of Putin’s war machine’ has turned out to be, at best, bluster, at worst, deliberate deception. Meanwhile, large parts of Ukraine have been reduced to rubble and Ukraine’s economy destroyed.
Those who would continue the war so that Russian aggression is ‘not rewarded’, that Putin is not emboldened to expand his empire further, and that we do not see ‘another Munich’, are entitled to take the high moral ground. But they fail to explain their alternative strategy. Is it that Ukraine re-conquers its occupied territories – something it has proved incapable of doing in the past three years, and even Zelensky now admits is unlikely? Or is it to deploy Western forces and declare war on Russia?
Writing in the Figaro on 14 February, former French minister Pierre Lellouche provided a chillingly dispassionate analysis of what has gone wrong. Forgetting Clausewitz’s dictum that war should only be waged with a clear political end, the Europeans entered this ‘proxy war’ in the heat of ‘emotion and indignation’ without ‘having defined the slightest strategy’, their sole stated aim being to support Ukraine ‘for as long as necessary’. Meanwhile, Biden’s America, anxious to avoid a Third World War, refused Ukraine’s entry into NATO ‘while publicly maintaining the illusion that this prospect remained open’, which allowed them ‘to rule out at the same time agreeing with Russia on a neutral status for Kiev’. With the advent of Trump, a ‘national isolationist’, and with Europe lacking the resources to fund the reconstruction of Ukraine, or to defend itself, it was inevitable that the Europeans would be left bystanders while Trump and Putin cut a deal. The result, however, will not be lasting peace, but an ‘amputated, economically devastated, politically unstable, but militarily over-armed Ukraine’ as our neighbour.
Could the war have been prevented by the West’s insisting on Ukrainian neutrality and recognising that Russia has legitimate interests in the region – for example, that the eastern part of Ukraine is Russian-speaking? Or would this merely have represented appeasement of an expansionist dictator? Whatever the answer, Russia will now get all that it had originally wanted handed it on a plate, though at the cost of up to 200,000 Russian dead. Is Putin’s Russia a military threat to Europe? It is difficult to say, but either way, urgent rearmament is advisable.
What is clear is that Europe has been exposed on the world stage for what it now is: impotent, weak, a post-national construction bent on renouncing its history, its culture, its spiritual inheritance. Indeed, it is the ultimate contradiction at the heart of the EU’s progressive liberalism that the project of creating an open-bordered, multi-cultural utopia renders a society incapable of defending itself. For by replacing national loyalties with abstract human rights, no-one has any reason, or motivation, to make the ultimate sacrifice.
The contrast with nationalist Russia could not be starker.
