Alphen, Netherlands. 22
April. Joe Biden’s visit to Kiev and the
failure of last week’s Geneva Accord should finally force Europeans to face reality;
Russia is a competitor not partner.
A few years ago in
Garmisch-Partenkirschen I sat opposite the Russian Deputy Defence Minister at a
NATO-sponsored dinner. It was one of those
classic moments when two Great Powers met face to face – Russia and
Yorkshire. As she was a woman who
clearly did not mince her words neither did I.
“Is Russia part of European security or a problem for it?” The Minister
smiled as she understood my meaning. “Russia will always have
its own interests”, she replied frostily.
The greatest shock of
the Ukraine crisis to Europe’s High Priests of Soft Power is not per se the unexpected instability in
Europe’s east but Russian inability to 'get' Europe.
The fact that after all these years Russia has not accepted the primacy
of the EU’s liberal-eurocracy as the defining feature of ‘power’ in
contemporary Europe.
American mathematician
John Nash pioneered the so-called Nash Equilibrium whereby competitive actors
achieve stability only when no actor can gain by changing a system of
relationships. Moscow has today perceived
the opportunity for gain through aggression because Europeans have failed to
invest in key elements of Europe’s security and thus lack both the intent and
capability to preserve the system in stasis.
For too long Brussels
and other European capitals (not to mention Obama’s Washington) refused to
understand that Moscow sees the relationship with the West as essentially and
inherently competitive. Indeed, for
Russia all crises reflect nodal points of decisive competition at two levels –
low politics (between peoples) and high politics (between states) – both of
which are to be exploited in the Russian interest.
In the ‘low’ politics of
Afghanistan, Iran, Libya, Syria and now Ukraine the desperate struggles of
desperate people in desperate societies are to Moscow domains for high
political competition not merely humanitarian tragedies. In the immediate aftermath of the Cold War
when Russia was reeling at the sudden loss of empire and prestige the West
decided that geopolitical competition was at an end. Henceforth the future strategic creed would
simply concern the steady spread of Western liberal values via globalisation
and humanitarianism. Revisionists were
simply those states that either could not nor would not see this ‘reality’ and
in time would be forced to recant by their own peoples.
However, high politics
was not and never will be at an end. President Putin repeatedly told the West that
he was a student of history and saw Russia’s future not in terms of the values
espoused by European liberal-eurocrats but by a concept of the Russian national
interest that was deliberately differentiated.
At the Munich Security Conference he laid out his vision of Russian
Great Power. He was politely listened to
in that appallingly condescending way the Eurocracy deals with all
dissent. The result is Europe’s new disequilibrium.
Historians will see the
European complacency and self-indulgence of the nineties and ‘naughties’ as one
of those great self-delusions that Europeans are all too wont to suffer. President Putin calmly went about exploiting
the seemingly bottomless well of empty rhetoric that steadily hollowed-out
Europe’s security and defence. Moscow’s method
was to keep Europe off-balance by telling European leaders by and large what
they wanted to hear, by exploiting the European appetite for ‘cheap’ energy and
then quietly doing the very thing European did not want to see.
Russia’s true
intentions are now clear; Greater Russia.
Greater Russia does not necessarily mean a new Cold War but it does mean
that Russia will never buy into ‘Europe’.
Putin today sees the world today very much in the light of Mackinder
with cores of power and their peripheries. His power map of the world is and always has
been Russia not Europe-centric with Russia the core and Europe Russia’s
periphery. Energy and military power are
simply his dynamic agents of change.
President Putin finds
nauseating in the extreme the whole concept of European soft power and the idea
that stability is a power end in and of itself and therefore that power is in
fact weakness. He utterly rejects the
idea that power and influence lies in a world more like the EU than
Russia. Ultimately, for President Putin
power and prestige are founded on the military men and machinery that every May
again march through Red Square and the energy that lies beneath his feet.
For the Russian
president weakness legitimises Russian intervention for it creates the very lines
of advance for pursuit of the Russian interest and with it the creation of a
new ‘equilibrium’ built on European dependence on Russia.
Europeans have
forgotten the first rule of grand political Realism; don’t get fooled by
illusions you have yourself created.
Nineteenth century Russian Prime Minister Gorschakov once described
Europe as a peninsula stuck on the end of Russia. That is President Putin’s twenty-first
century aim.
The Americans seem to
understand this but Washington’s ‘understanding’ is not without tragic irony. Moscow understands that the EU is less than
the sum of its parts. In the midst of
the crisis the Obama Administration is driving Europe’s powers to abandon their
individual foreign policies to create a new EU ‘power’. The American obsession with a ‘united’ Europe
not only complicates the crisis it undermines NATO and turns Europeans into a non-power;
easy for Washington to control but incapable of exerting credible influence.
The cruncher is this;
for the High Priests of European Soft Power to see credibility restored unto
their creed they must invest in the military tools of hard power that President
Putin has helped restore as a reserve currency of power. They must also wean Europe off
Russian energy.
As John Nash said; in
competitive relationships there is always a loser.
Julian Lindley-French
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