It’s Nato that’s Empire-building, not Putin
By Peter Hitchins
The article below was originally published in March 2015
January 16, 2018 "Information
Clearing House"
- Just for once, let us try this argument
with an open mind, employing arithmetic and
geography and going easy on the adjectives.
Two great land powers face each other. One
of these powers, Russia, has given up
control over 700,000 square miles of
valuable territory. The other, the European
Union, has gained control over 400,000 of
those square miles. Which of these powers is
expanding?
There remain 300,000 neutral square miles
between the two, mostly in Ukraine. From
Moscow’s point of view, this is already a
grievous, irretrievable loss. As Zbigniew
Brzezinski, one of the canniest of the old
Cold Warriors, wrote back in 1997, ‘Ukraine…
is a geopolitical pivot because its very
existence as an independent country helps to
transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia
ceases to be a Eurasian empire.’
This diminished Russia feels the spread of
the EU and its armed wing, NATO, like a blow
on an unhealed bruise. In February 2007, for
instance, Vladimir Putin asked sulkily,
“Against whom is this expansion intended?”
I have never heard a clear answer to that
question. The USSR, which NATO was founded
to fight, expired in August 1991. So what is
Nato’s purpose now? Why does it even still
exist?
There is no obvious need for an adversarial
system in post-Soviet Europe. Even if Russia
wanted to reconquer its lost empire, as some
believe (a belief for which there is no
serious evidence), it is too weak and too
poor to do this. So why not invite Russia to
join the great western alliances? Alas, it
is obvious to everyone, but never stated,
that Russia cannot ever join either NATO or
the EU, for if it did so it would unbalance
them both by its sheer size. There are many
possible ways of dealing with this. One
would be an adult recognition of the limits
of human power, combined with an
understanding of Russia’s repeated
experience of invasions and its lack of
defensible borders.
But we do not do this. Instead we have a
noisy pseudo-moral crusade, which would not
withstand five minutes of serious
consideration. Mr Putin’s state is, beyond
doubt, a sinister tyranny. But so is Recep
Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey, which locks up far
more journalists than does Russia. Turkey is
an officially respectable Nato member, 40
years after seizing northern Cyprus, which
it still occupies, in an almost exact
precedent for Russia’s seizure of Crimea. If
Putin disgusts us so much, then why are we
and the USA happy to do business with
Erdogan, and also to fawn upon Saudi Arabia
and China?
Contrary to myth, the expansion of the EU
into the former communist world has not
magically brought universal peace, love and
prosperity. Croatia’s economy has actually
gone backwards since it joined. Corruption
still exists in large parts of the EU’s new
south-eastern territories, and I am not sure
that the rule of law could be said to have
been properly established there. So the idea
that the recruitment of Ukraine to the
‘West’ will magically turn that troubled
nation into a sunny paradise of freedom,
probity and wealth is perhaps a little
idealistic, not to say mistaken.
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It is
all so much clearer if we realise that this
quarrel is about power and land, not virtue.
In truth, much of the eastward expansion of
Nato was caused by the EU’s initial
unwillingness to take in backward, bankrupt
and corrupt refugee states from the old
Warsaw Pact. The policy could be summed up
as ‘We won’t buy your tomatoes, but if it
makes you happy you can shelter under our
nuclear umbrella’. The promise was an empty
assurance against a nonexistent threat. But
an accidental arrangement hardened into a
real confrontation. The less supine Russia
was, the more its actions were interpreted
as aggression in the West. Boris Yeltsin
permitted western interests to rape his
country, and did little to assert Russian
power. So though he bombarded his own
parliament, conducted a grisly war in
Chechnya, raised corruption to Olympic
levels and shamelessly rigged his own
re-election, he yet remained a popular guest
in western capitals and summits. Vladimir
Putin’s similar sins, by contrast, provide a
pretext for ostracism and historically
illiterate comparisons between him and
Hitler.
This is because of his increasing avowal of
Russian sovereignty, and of an independent
foreign policy. There have been many
East-West squabbles and scrimmages, not all
of them Russia’s fault. But the New Cold War
really began in 2011, after Mr Putin dared
to frustrate western — and Saudi — policy in
Syria. George Friedman, the noted US
intelligence and security expert, thinks
Russia badly underestimated the level of
American fury this would provoke. As Mr
Friedman recently told the Moscow newspaper
Kommersant, ‘It was in this situation that
the United States took a look at Russia and
thought about what it [Russia] wants to see
happen least of all: instability in
Ukraine.’
Mr Friedman (no Putin stooge) also rather
engagingly agrees with Moscow that overthrow
last February (2014) of Viktor Yanukovych
was ‘the most blatant coup in history’. He
is of course correct, as anyone unclouded by
passion can see. The test of any action by
your own side is to ask what you would think
of it if the other side did it.
If Russia didn’t grasp how angry Washington
would get over Syria, did the West realise
how furiously Russia would respond to the EU
Association Agreement and to the fall of
Yanukovych? Perhaps not. Fearing above all
the irrecoverable loss to NATO of its
treasured naval station in Sevastopol,
Russia reacted. After 23 years of sullenly
appeasing the West, Moscow finally said
‘enough’. Since we’re all supposed to be
against appeasement, shouldn’t we find this
action understandable in a sovereign nation,
even if we cannot actually praise it? And
can anyone explain to me precisely why
Britain, of all countries, should be siding
with the expansion of the European Union and
NATO into this dangerous and unstable part
of the world?
Peter Jonathan Hitchens is an English
journalist and author. He has published six
books, including The Abolition of Britain,
The Rage Against God, and The War We Never
Fought.
This article was originally published by Truepublica -
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