Category Archives: Ukraine
NATO’s Unity and the Challenge of Article 5
All of us have felt safe in the belief that, should any one of the thirty NATO countries be attacked, it would trigger an automatic response from all members, putting them at war with the attacker. However, today, for the very first time, I read in the Sunday Times that this is not the case. For Article 5 to become a reality, unanimity is required. If a single country were to demur, then it would not happen.
Now, in any situation that requires the unanimity of so many, it is next to impossible to envisage a scenario in which such a large number would agree. It is almost certain there will be one or more who will not, especially when what they are being asked to agree to is war. Some might argue that, in a real-world scenario, Article 5 is, therefore, worthless.
In the context of the war in Ukraine, there are two countries — Hungary and Bulgaria — who we know already would not agree, and there are likely to be more recalcitrants; one that springs to mind immediately is Turkey.
The alarming situation which now presents itself is that if a desperate Russia strikes out against either of the three Baltic states, or indeed Poland, which all four now see as a real possibility, then NATO will be shown to be impotent.
The only solution that stands any chance of making Article 5 mean what it says, which is almost certainly the reason why all of its members joined in the first place, is if the European Union came to the rescue. It could make it clear that any dissenting state would forfeit its place in the Union. Such a loss would be more than likely to bring any of the foot-draggers to heel.
In providing such a guarantee of its own, the Union would be protecting its own best interests since war in Europe would likely shatter what it has lovingly accomplished over the past seventy years.
As for NATO itself, it will need to look to the future—if there is to be one for it—at this impossibly high bar of unanimity and opt for a threshold of, say, 60%. Any member who will not agree to this should be invited to leave. That way, the remaining members will have what they have long, mistakenly, believed they always had: a cast-iron guarantee.
Autocracy vs. Democracy: The Stakes in Ukraine
Putin, with a population three times larger than Ukraine’s, plans to expand his armed forces by 170,000. Unable to defeat Ukraine in a fair fight, he seeks to employ the infamous ‘steamroller’ approach that both Stalin and the Tsars relied on: overwhelming numbers. This tactic worked against the plucky Finns in the 1939 ‘Winter War’. They, like the Ukrainians, initially bested the autocrat of their day in spectacular fashion, until the massed ranks of Russia’s poor peasantry were thrown against them.
This time around, the vastly superior ranks of the democracies must ensure a different result. Ukraine absolutely must be supported to the end. Should Trump win the upcoming election and withhold further funding – which I very much doubt – then Europe must step up to the plate. Its resources, both industrial and financial, are twenty times greater than Russia’s, and its population is three times larger.
Should the Ukrainians find their numbers in danger of being overwhelmed – for Russia’s rulers also have historically been careless with their soldiers’ lives – then volunteers from across the continent must step into the breach. Joining the Ukrainian army would not put their respective countries at war with Russia, any more than the International Brigade supporting the Spanish government against fascist insurrectionists put their countries in the firing line. The only reason the democratically elected government lost was that the fascist regimes of Germany and Italy stepped in to aid their fellow fascists.
The Western world must realise that this struggle between autocracy and democracy is one it cannot afford to lose. The consequences of defeat are too dreadful to contemplate. Winning, which must include the recovery of Crimea, may well set in motion the breakup of present-day Russia. It will certainly bring about the fall of Putin. Restive regions with non-Russian majorities may see a once-in-a-lifetime chance to break free. The most likely regions include South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Chechnya, Belarus, Transnistria, and various Siberian Republics. In this scenario, it is entirely possible that a weakened Russia will see the Finns regain the Karelian areas seized by Stalin following ‘The Winter War’, and the Kaliningrad enclave may opt to join the European family.
Unlike at the time of the USSR’s breakup, the democracies must this time embrace the new Russia and help set it on a course that Peter the Great deeply desired for his people: to become true Europeans. Russia has much to offer once it finally turns its back on despotic rulers. The brutal war against a fellow Slav nation, which has shattered the peace of Europe, is increasingly seen by Russians for what it is: one man’s megalomaniac dream of Empire. Empires were a fact of history – if you had the power, you used it, and others, for the most part, went along with it. But they are done and will never return. We, the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch, and the French have all realised this. Only Putin hasn’t.
Whatever Putin’s game plan was, it cannot have been any of this
Recent events still playing out across the distant steppes of Europe are bringing about seismic changes in the geo-political landscape.
Russia, today, stands friendless in a way it has never before. Its leader has unleashed a war that has appalled the whole world and from which there is no easy way to row back without massive loss of face.
Vladimir Putin is a man riven with hatred for what he sees as Russia’s treatment by the West. Too long now in power, he sees enemies in every quarter and has undoubtedly developed a personality disorder which prevents him from acting rationally. So out of touch with reality is he that he actually believed his forces would be greeted as liberators, with flowers tossed on his tanks and armoured carriers. He has convinced himself that a country ruled by a Jewish prime minister and a Jewish president is a fascist state and he calls them Nazis. He invites his countrymen and women to share this outlook.
Galling to him the extreme is that his plans for a quick victory are unravelling and the Western allies uniting to funnel in weapons to enable a protracted struggle to develop.
His choices are stark. Only the application of overwhelming force stands a chance of breaking the logjam. But his soldiers – mainly conscripts – are unhappy. The people they are being asked to kill are what they have always called their little brothers. Unlike in the ‘Great Patriotic War’ Putin’s soldiers are not fighting for their homeland, but to gain possession of another’s. The people they are being asked to despoil are not the brutal, merciless, sadistic Nazis, who regarded them as a lower form of humanity (Untermensch), but fellow Slavs who speak their own language and share a common history.
This time it is not the Russians who are motivated, but their invaded brother nation who, like them in 1941, face an existential struggle for national survival.
Shockwaves have swept across the entire planet which had nurtured the fond belief that a no-holds war of this kind had been consigned to the annals of history. There is a very real risk that million-plus cities will be reduced to rubble. Remembered with melancholy is the fate of Aleppo in Syria and what these same Russians did to the world’s oldest inhabited city.
The entire enterprise has become very personal. Even Hitler did not dispatch death squads to take out his implacable, eventual nemesis, Stalin, as Putin has done with the Ukrainian leader. He is well versed in taking out anyone who seriously offends him, no matter what foreign capital they may live in. The single exception to this is Washington.
Putin’s mindset is one that cannot contemplate defeat, nor tolerate a protracted struggle in which he gets bogged down, nor see his economy wreaked by Western sanctions.
Also, he has unusually sinister plans for the disposal of the dead bodies of his young conscripts. In Afghanistan, even the Soviets returned them to their loved ones which, unfortunately for them, brought home the bitter and melancholy cost of war. Putin is reported to have arranged for mobile crematoriums to be sent to the battlefield. But unlike even the Japanese in WWII, who returned the ashes of their fallen to Tokyo, Putin’s incinerators are designed to vaporise the remains. This is a truly awful man we are talking about.
Notwithstanding the fearful range of weaponry that the Russian tyrant is prepared to use – much of which is banned under international law – this may yet be a war that he cannot win. But if he does, he will need a huge army of occupation since the Western third of Ukraine is ideal partisan country, and Ukraine is Europe’s largest nation – substantially larger in land than France.
Part of Putin’s problem, after twenty-two years in power, is that he is beyond listening to anyone. But there is one power in a position to impose mediation on him and force him to the conference table. That power is China. Apart from a handful of rogue regimes which can offer him nothing, China is the only one which can mitigate, to a degree, the effects of sanctions. It comes to something that he does not even enjoy the support of the mullahs in Tehran.
Such is Putin’s isolation, and so crippling the range of sanctions now deployed against him, that only China can keep him afloat. Putin cannot do without it. As a result, that country is the only one that can twist his arm into a climbdown that may magic up some sort of fig leaf to cover the humiliation involved. It could, perhaps, involve the United Nations.
It may well be that China asserts its power, for the very first time, on the continent which, two centuries ago, began the process of humbling it and bringing it into the modern world. It may broker a conference to bring a halt to the violence presently engulfing the cities and towns of Ukraine.
The truth is that China is appalled at the situation which Putin has brought about. It has an obsession, dating back millennia, in stability. Harmony is in its DNA (providing due respect is shown to its ancient lineage). That doesn’t stop it, however, gloating over the West’s recent disarray with its armies of naval-gazing bleeding hearts bemoaning its perceived sins of the past, as well as the present, and its legions of Woke social justice warriors. These are the kind of warriors that China would like to see more of. It couldn’t believe its luck when it saw the ignominious scuttle from Afghanistan, and the European half of the Western alliance question Uncle Sam’s commitment to Europe. It has revelled even at how its own home-grown virus has laid the Western world low and plunged it into unimaginable debt.
Now, overnight, its erstwhile neighbour, Russia, has inadvertently awoken the sleeping giant of the Free World and both NATO and the European Union are re-energised with the US beathing fire and smoke, and pledging to “defend every inch of NATO territory”. Even pacific Germany has seen the light. It has thrown its mighty engine into rearmament – a terrifying prospect for the Russians – and proposes to take its nuclear plants out of mothballs, fire up its coal-fired plants and free itself from dependency on Russian oil and gas. Nord Stream 2, with its £8 billion dollars of spent investment – much of it Russian – is now for the birds. The formerly proud neutrals of Sweden and Finland are also suddenly keen to join the alliance.
Whatever Putin’s game plan was it cannot have been any of this.
All this means for the Chinese that the long-sought-for seizure of Taiwan is once again off the agenda, for China now believes that it can longer be certain that Uncle Sam will scuttle a second time. Indeed, the landscape has so changed that it seems the entire democratic world is now on the march and its growing dream of a quiescent West standing by while it advances to world domination is now just that: a dream.
The Last Foundling 