Politics and the economy
United Kingdom? Ukraine? Either? Or both?
So many questions for a PM.
In Britain for the Coronation, Chris Hipkins’s genteel republicanism was rewarded with a plate of leftover sausage rolls.
Nor was his muted positivism out of tune with the contemporary London vibe of springtime celebration after winter mourning. Republicans here have so far been lying low, not gluing themselves to gun carriages.
Elon Musk was Time magazine’s Person of the Year in 2021. With his release of a peace plan for Russia-Ukraine, you wonder if he’s trying for the double.
Not if Ukrainian president Zelensky has any say in the matter.
It’s usually sensible to be thinking about a settlement while fighting, but it’s dangerous to forget that, while politics is hard to control, war can be impossible.
With every pause in the Ukrainian counteroffensive, talk of stalemate pops up. But pay more attention to the currents, than the surface froth.
So nice to get some quality thinking in the Hoover Institution’s Strategika publication. First, Niall Ferguson with a typically thought-provoking insight into war as a continuation of economics by other means.
He argues that Russia is just too poor to overwhelm a Ukraine backed by the rich West.
Or a bad one up, it would seem.
Jeremy Corbyn has reminded us why Britain’s Labour party dispensed with his leadership after defeat by Boris Johnson in 2019, when he offered his thinking: on war in general and Ukraine in particular.
We can share common ground with his platitude that it is “disastrous … for the safety and security of the whole world”. Like him we might want the UN to be “more centre stage”. While being a touch more inquisitive as to why it languishes in the wings.
But probably not so much in agreement with his view that “… pouring arms in isn’t going to bring a solution, it’s only going to prolong and exaggerate this war”.
Then again, it’s what some important people in the French and German governments seem to think. They just know that they need to say the opposite in public.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump deplores other people’s pouring and reluctantly admits he needs to be holding the vessel.
And, like Henry Kissinger, Pope Francis wants us to not lose sight of the geopolitics. He urges “simply against reducing complexity to the distinction between good and bad, without thinking about roots and interests, which are very complex”.
Unlike the Vatican, Corbyn has never understood the value of an experienced press secretary.
OK – these commentaries predate the recent Ukrainian counter-offensive which seems to be stunningly successful.
Doubts are growing about the ability of Russian forces to manoeuvre, to resupply and even to hold their ground. We are reminded again of the projecting power of the US war fighting machine and led to speculate on the extent and nature of US support (a re-examination of the US influence on the remarkable transformation of Croatian forces during the Balkan wars might be timely).
Indeed, it suggests that pouring in arms (albeit on a limited scale relative to Russian and Chinese resources) could lead to an early termination favourable to both Russian and Ukrainian peoples.
Putin has skilfully surmounted weakness before. But this does seem to be the first time he has actually lost the initiative. His main electorate – the whole of the Russian security and governing apparatus – perceives risk.
All that stands between him and political defeat is the support of enough Russians for his goal of bringing the Russian people home.
Corbyn is surely right that you can’t control a war by pouring in arms. Unfortunately, the non-controllability of war is not always a decisive reason for non-involvement.
Belligerents need to choose between limited aims.
As do non-belligerents.
Nor does achieving limited aims guarantee the outcome you want (reference the oeuvre of comparative literature on the first and second world wars).
The Ukraine war is complex; people are dying; it has tremendous risks for Europe and the world; and it’s surely not the best way for settling disputes between the peoples of the former USSR.
But the institutions which place a higher value on human dignity have an opportunity to inflict a defeat on their opponents. And you just hope that such an outcome is better than the reverse.
The US administration appears confident in its ability to calibrate pouring to achieve the outcome it wants. And who knows, that might even bear some resemblance to those of Henry Kissinger or even Pope Francis.
Russia’s foreign ministry recently put out a handy three minute video to commemorate (celebrate is probably not the word) the 83rd anniversary of the signing of the Hitler-Stalin alliance on 23 August 1939.
As befits professionals, they try to avoid direct lies and use as much of the truth as possible. Inconvenient facts (like the division of Eastern Europe into zones of occupation, deportation and extermination) are omitted.
But you have to pause at the concluding sentence: ‘Thanks to the Soviet-German non-aggression pact, the War began on strategically more advantageous borders for the Soviet Union, and hundreds of thousands of lives were saved’
So much to discuss.
Whether one should still call an arrangement for war a non-aggression pact; whether the alliance was strategically quite so advantageous for others; why that costly advantage (particularly to those rotting away in camps and execution pits on both sides of the demarcation line) was so spectacularly thrown away in 1941; and indeed whether the ministry’s final justification – that ‘ … hundreds of thousands of lives were saved’ – has any merit.
That question must certainly occur to anyone who has read Timothy Snyder’s ‘Bloodlands’ which concluded that the interaction of the two dictators consumed some 14 million (non-combatant) lives in the geographies covered by the arrangements – many of them in Ukraine.
The question would also have had a particular resonance the following day, which was the 31st anniversary of Ukraine’s declaration of independence from the Soviet Union.
It is also exactly six months since Russian forces started their third invasion to complete the re-integration of the more Russian bits of Ukraine and neutralise the rest – within strategically more advantageous borders no doubt.
And perhaps that’s also why the foreign ministry chose this moment to signal that Russia doesn’t see a diplomatic solution to the war and expects a long battle.
Fair enough. Vladimir Putin comes across as a keen student of Carl von Clausewitz and would surely agree with him that “ … war is nothing but a continuation of politics with the admixture of other means.”
And his overall political goal must be to convince those who identify as Russian that it is worthwhile continuing the struggle to unite them under his type of government. According to opinion polls, many Russians are sympathetic to this.
But politics works both ways and the progress of the war since 2014 indicates that Putin has also done outstanding work in creating a distinctive Ukrainian identity (one which appears to be shared by many Ukrainians whom he thinks are Russian).
Which suggests that if Ukraine can successfully resist, Russians might conclude that changing the Russian government would be a better way of achieving a sound long-term relationship than by forcibly changing the Ukrainian one.
That might also meet Henry Kissinger’s enumeration of the Western coalition’s logical goals of Ukraine as a “bridge between Europe and Russia” and avoiding a situation where “Russia could alienate itself completely from Europe and seek a permanent alliance elsewhere”.
This leaves the initiative in the hands of the US administration who – despite the sterling efforts of British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace and soon-to-be ex-PM Boris Johnson – dominate the supplies of money, weaponry, training and intelligence necessary for Ukrainian resistance and even resurgence.
Luckily, the Americans are playing a blinder on this (as they make clear in their conversations with the sympathetic folk at the Washington Post). At least, if one judges by their disdain for everyone else.
They take some pains in bagging Ukraine’s President Zelensky for failing to take their intel seriously. His response:
“Zelensky heard the U.S. warnings, he later recalled, but said the Americans weren’t offering the kinds of weapons Ukraine needed to defend itself.
“You can say a million times, ‘Listen, there may be an invasion.’ Okay, there may be an invasion — will you give us planes?” Zelensky said. “Will you give us air defenses? ‘Well, you’re not a member of NATO.’ Oh, okay, then what are we talking about?”
The Americans offered little specific intelligence to support their warnings “until the last four or five days before the invasion began,” according to Dmytro Kuleba, Zelensky’s foreign minister.”
As the prospect of a long haul grows, both in the fighting and in the politics, we must hope that the Biden administration continues to perform to its own high standards (and perhaps even exceed them when cooperating with its allies). Because there is potential for a better outcome than merely more advantageous borders.
As Russian forces raise their horizons and start killing more Ukrainians in what seems to be a full-on invasion, Britain’s PM, Boris Johnson, got the stakes right when he said “this mission must end in failure”.
That covers a multiplicity of outcomes of varying bloodiness – but the logic is that conflict continues until the goal is reached. It may take quite a while then.
The phrase game changing is overused, but – in the sense of recognition of a profound change in direction – it might well be applicable in this case.
Point of Order 