New passenger on Putin’s bandwagon

Until today the Mail columnist Stephen Glover has mostly written on domestic politics, and reasonably well. His is a safe pair of hands – provided, of course, he stays within his area of expertise.

Today, however, he strayed outside it to regale us with his thoughts on the current situation in the Ukraine. That was a mistake.

To start with, Mr Glover adopts the disclaimer strategy honed by his Mail colleague Peter Hitchens: “I don’t dispute that Putin is a thoroughly nasty piece of work… Nor is there any doubt his regime ruthlessly eliminates its enemies both at home and abroad, and opposes Western interests whenever and wherever it can.”

Having got those supposedly irrelevant incidentals out of the way and divested himself of the stigma of servility to Putin, Mr Glover gets on with the business in hand. His message is that “Russia has a case in Ukraine”.

That’s an opinion, and as such of no interest whatsoever until it has been supported with thought and fact to turn it into a sound judgement. It’s his attempt to do so that shows up Mr Glover’s shortcomings.

He knows the way to prevent war and secure lasting peace. “It involves trying to get inside President Putin’s mind, and attempting to understand Russian attitudes towards Ukraine and Nato with a sharper sense of historical perspective.”

All God’s children like historical perspective. Yet this approach requires, as a minimum, some rudimentary knowledge of history, an asset Mr Glover manifestly lacks. By the sound of him, he even lacks access to Google.

Thus he writes: “Before the 1917 Revolution, part of modern-day Ukraine was in the Russian Empire. After 1945, the entire country was incorporated into the Soviet Union.”

The entire country, as it then was, was incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1922, when the USSR was formed. The Ukraine’s western part at that time belonged to Poland and was detached from her in 1939, when, following their Pact, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union partitioned the country.

Sharpening historical perspective even further, prior possession is no per cent of the law. A cursory glance at the history and geography of Europe will show that the borders of most countries have been shuffled and reshuffled for centuries. This is especially true of Eastern Europe, large swathes of which have been changing hands like well-used banknotes.

Glover’s “historical perspective” is tantamount to a call for that process to continue in perpetuity, which is intellectually feeble and morally defunct. If he acquires access to Google, he should key in TRANSYLVANIA, YUGOSLAVIA or ALSACE for verification.

Or, for that matter, CRIMEA. There Mr Glover complements his historical perspective with an ethnic one. “In 2014,” he writes, “Russia seized Crimea – from 1783 until 1917 part of the Russian empire, and now overwhelmingly ethnically Russian – from Ukraine.”

The Crimea was part of the Russo-Soviet Empire during roughly the same period as India was part of the British Empire. So do we have a valid territorial claim to the subcontinent? As to the ethnic composition of any area in Europe, any argument based on it is even more fatuous than one based on prior possession.

Nevertheless Mr Glover persists: “There are some 8 million ethnic Russians in Ukraine, nearly 20 per cent of the population, many of whom regard the government in capital, Kiev, as hostile.”

How many exactly? When the Russians invaded two predominantly Russophone provinces of the Ukraine in 2014, most of the population fled west, not east. I’ve seen numerous polls showing that most Ukrainian citizens, regardless of their ethnicity, are prepared to die for the Ukraine. Has Mr Glover seen any contradicting surveys? He certainly doesn’t quote them.

But even assuming against all evidence that his observation is valid, so what? I could say with equal justification that “there are some 3.5 million Muslims in the UK, many of whom regard the government in capital, London, as hostile”. Should Britain or any other country make far-reaching geopolitical conclusions on that basis?

And how far is Mr Glover prepared to push the ethnic argument? The population of Riga is about 40 per cent ethnically Russian. That of Narva, more than double that. Should Russia invade Latvia and Estonia then, with Mr Glover’s blessing?

His capacity for empathy is as endless as it is misplaced. “Imagine the feelings of policymakers in Moscow,” he writes. “Nato is already breathing down Russia’s neck. If Ukraine joins the alliance, Russia could face the possibility of American troops, and potentially nuclear missiles, on the other side of a 1,200-mile land border.”

Here Mr Glover is accepting Russian paranoia, more put-on than real, as a legitimate concern worthy of serious consideration. First, I am not aware of any immediate plans to admit the Ukraine into Nato, as I am aware of some members, notably Poland, staunchly opposing any such development.

And in what way is Nato “breathing down Russia’s neck”? Is Nato some kind of Chimera, described by Homer as “breathing forth in terrible wise the might of blazing fire”? In the good tradition of Soviet propaganda, Mr Glover ignores the facts and then confuses cause and effect.

Nato was created in 1949 to defend Europe from an aggressively hostile power. Had Stalin and his heirs not threatened Europe, Nato wouldn’t exist.

When, after 1991, the credulous West got to believe that the threat had disappeared, Nato’s presence in Europe was reduced. Eastern Europe, however, wouldn’t be tricked quite so easily – its experience of Russian history was, unlike Mr Glover’s, first-hand.

When power in Russia passed on to the KGB (84 per cent of the Putin administration and much of Yeltsyn’s made their bones in that, history’s most murderous, organisation), they knew what that meant. Hence they begged to be admitted to Nato, to thwart Putin’s declared aim of reversing what he called “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20^th century” (meaning the disintegration of the Soviet empire and not, for example, the two world wars).

Even then, the western Nato members only deployed, at most, a few hundred troops anywhere near the Russian border. That symbolic presence only began to be beefed up after Russia’s 2014 aggression against the Ukraine. The more aggressive did Russia become, the more determined Western resistance (more in word than in deed).

A dose of anti-Americanism is unavoidable in such articles, and Mr Glover doesn’t disappoint: “It seems that, not for the first time, we are too beholden to America, which has driven the expansion of Nato and the encirclement of Russia.”

That’s exactly the line taken by Putin’s propagandists, and Soviet ones before that. Russia is encircled by enemies, which justifies her pouncing on her neighbours like a rabid dog. Actually, only five Nato countries border on Russia, covering just about six per cent of the country’s perimeter. That hardly amounts to encirclement, does it?

Mr Glover also echoes Putin’s lies about the nature of the present conflict, with the Ukraine merely providing a battleground for the clash between Russia and the US. This is a fight in which Britain, according to Mr Glover, has no dog.

After all, Russia poses no “existential threat to the West”, because “the Russian economy, smaller than Italy’s, is desperately vulnerable”. The first part of that statement is incorrect; the second, irrelevant.

A plausible scenario could unfold along these lines: Russia, encouraged by Mr Glover’s ethnic approach to geopolitics, annexes Narva in Estonia, a Nato member. That should activate Article 5 of the Nato Charter, saying that an attack on one member is an attack on all.

If Nato acted accordingly, that would spell an immediate “existential threat” to all of us. If Nato ignored its Charter, the threat would merely be deferred. Nato would effectively disband, with the system of collective security going the same way. If that wouldn’t constitute an existential threat, I don’t know what would.

As to the size of Russia’s economy, that would only come into play in case of a long war of attrition – and perhaps not even then. What’s critical isn’t a country’s riches but her concentration of her economic and moral resources in the military area.

A country with a GDP of £10 trillion that spends £1 trillion on defence will be outgunned by a country that spends £2 trillion even though her GDP is only £5 trillion. And a country prepared to take millions of casualties has a definite edge over one for which any such losses are unthinkable.

Mr Glover has to be commended for dreading the possibility of war. However, he must be rebuked for believing that adopting a supine posture of pacifist surrender is the best way of achieving that laudable purpose.

As a champion of “historical perspective”, he ought to refresh his memory on what a similar strategy achieved in 1938. And as a commentator, he should really take his cue not from Hitchens but from Vegetius: si vis pacem, para bellum. If you want peace, prepare for war.