The war in Ukraine was never going to be resolved until the White House vacancy was filled. But for the West it is “make your mind up” time.
The detestable Donald Trump has promised to do a great many unachievable things, including bringing peace to Ukraine within 24 hours of winning the election. But clearly, for financial reasons if no other, he wants to stop the war, and that, surely, is achievable. But there is a major selling job to be done, and for that Trump might be just the person.
Much of the West’s media and most of its politicians have played a shameful, cheerleading role in parroting the official line – that the encroachment eastwards by Nato had nothing to do with heightening Kremlin paranoia, and that Putin’s war is one of aggressive imperialism.
Putin is indeed an autocrat who, like his oligarchic hoodlum chums, worries first of all about holding onto his job. He wants, therefore, to use Max Hastings’s phrase, to create a “servile neighbourhood”. All the more reason, you might think, for treating him and his jumpy cronies with caution. Yet we never seem to learn that playing deaf to the protestations of out-of-touch dictators is no way to head off a war.
Instead, when Putin and generations of his compatriots have been brainwashed into thinking Nato was an expansionist rather than a defensive alliance, we gave them every reason to confirm that belief.
In the three decades since the Cold War was supposed to have ended, we rubbed Russian noses in their defeat, adding to Nato’s membership as casually as if it were a tennis club.
I write this, incidentally, as a supporter of Nato, but believing in Nato didn’t prevent a rather more illustrious figure, George Kennan, father of US postwar strategy, from writing in 1998: “I think [Nato expansion] is the beginning of a new cold war. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else.”
In Britain, Kennan’s view was endorsed by figures of the standing of Field Marshal Lord Bramall, Sir Frank Cooper, the former permanent under-secretary at the Ministry of Defence, Lord Healey and Britain’s most distinguished military historian Sir Michael Howard. None can be described as dangerous peaceniks.
So this, I would argue, is the root cause of “how we got here”. You may or may not sympathise with this argument, but it is Putin’s version of history and therefore the one we must address. He raises it at every opportunity, he uses it to stoke the fears of his people, yet we persist in baiting the bear by talking breezily of inviting Ukraine into the club. The greatest use to humanity of Nigel Farage, who shares this view, would be to explain it to his friend in the White House.
The focus in the West has been on not wanting to “reward aggression”, and any settlement will need to be applied with a great many sweeteners and face-savers on both sides. The diplomats will certainly need to earn their money, but was the West’s strategy – if that is not too generous a word – not heading in that direction anyway?
Over the weekend one politician was still talking about Ukraine “winning” but that a “grubby deal”, with enormous financial costs on both sides and the Russians reportedly suffering 1500 killed or injured every day, was looking likelier every day.
If the killing is to stop, it will require the resolution, or at least the management, of some extremely thorny issues. Will Russia insist on keeping all her occupied territory? What happens to the Crimea? To Donbas? Ukraine, surely, cannot join Nato, but will need security guarantees. Could the UN, for so long the only viable show in town but recently nowhere to be seen, be pressed into service? Is EU membership to be off the table? Who will pay for the rebuilding of Ukraine? Will war crimes, great and “small”, go unpunished? Will all anti-Russian sanctions be lifted?
These are hugely difficult questions, and if any progress is to be made they will need to be addressed with an understanding of Putin’s view of “how we got here”. (In short, and don’t laugh, on the macro level Moscow will want its own security guarantees, which if the West is as benign as it likes to believe should not be difficult.)
But addressing them is surely preferable to the sub-Churchillian delusion – which would be clownish if it wasn’t playing so cruelly on the astonishing bravery and heroism of the Ukrainian people – that “victory” (never defined) is a serious possibility, with or without the tools Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky wants.
I happen to believe that Putin never wanted this war, miscalculated badly and would welcome a way out as long as his face is saved. The new man in the White House also wants to show off how clever he is, so we are now at the ego-salving stage.
Let the diplomacy begin. To the extent that Britain counts – and surely it can do if it wants – the appointment of Jonathan Powell is surely a good start.
Even if you believe Putin is an expansive, imperialist monster, do you have a better idea?
James Hanning is co-author of Cameron: The Rise of the New Conservative