In choosing to go it alone, the UK helps Putin

Leaving the EU has critically undermined the European security system

Dateline: 14.00hrs, Friday, February 18th 2022

This is England. This is Brexit. This is dismal.

Thus, Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian this week ends his article. He was, in fact, talking about the continuing crisis in Ukraine, which rumbles on, ever closer to going hot as I write, with Russian tanks far too close to the Ukraine border, false flag ops in the Donbas basin. Putin is creating some form of devilish maskirovna before the main event. Or is he? Just as likely, having got the attention of the West, with a succession of leaders traipsing to the Kremlin to pay homage, he wants to keep European capitals in a heightened state of nerves for the next few months, simply because he can.

Why now? Here’s part of the reason: Brexit has much to answer for. Aside from the opportunity a weakened and divided Europe has given Putin, the UK itself is about to be battered by a rising storm of woes, brought on by our isolation.

The true economic disaster for the UK is only just beginning to manifest, masked so far by the pandemic. It applies to the rest of the EU as well, the drop in their exports to us, as well as ours to them. Meanwhile, the entire continent is wading in paper and all the nonsensical extra bureaucracy this Government has created. So much for raising their (false) flag of small government and more freedom.

The appointment of Rees-Mogg as the minister for Brexit opportunities (or whatever Alice through the looking glass title he now sports) is either a joke played by the chief clown against the Mogg’s ambition to be the next prime minister, or part of the increasingly fantastical animus of Johnson towards the country he falteringly claims to lead.

There are no opportunities to exploit, outside the EU. I heard (and could hardly credit I had) a government minister actually say that one triumph from having left the EU was in getting the crown stamp back onto beer glasses. Rees-Mogg, desperate for some good new, has asked readers of The Sun to tell him what good things they have to show for Brexit. Trouble is, there is none.

Our exit from Europe was not just from the EU. Its manner and execution has meant we have also distanced ourselves from a host of other vital European organisations including, whatever yelping noises Ben Wallace may make, from Nato and the OECD.

Our exiteers shouted as loudly as they could – Johnson has frequently boasted about this – that the UK, in going it alone on the world stage, would a become world-beater, a new economic (and by implication, political and military as well) powerhouse. Honestly, what a joke, but then jokers are in charge.

Putin is an opportunist. He also has a long memory. The insults dealt to Russia in the 1990s by the West (in belittling his country and its economic chaos), the piracy of Western businesses trying to rip off Russia, the lies told (Nato did assure Yeltsin there would be no eastern expansion), are coming back to haunt us all.

Worst of all, was Bush senior’s assertion – in the face of all the evidence – that the West won the Cold War, that capitalism triumphed over Communism. Well, in one way that Marx would chuckle over, that is true. Das Capital, volume 1, does predict that, over time, capital will come to be concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people. In Russia, in 2022, that is entirely the case, with the system held in place by a repressive, secretive cabal. Hello to our favourite Russian oligarchs, with their obscene wealth, their super-yachts, their mighty houses in and around Hampstead Heath – and their eternal debt to Putin for allowing them the freedom to steal Russia’s economic assets.

An awful lot of those gangsters in all but name got their fast-tracked residential, extended visas courtesy of the then mayor of London (guess who that was?). We will, here, pass over the undoubted influence exerted behind the scenes by these same oligarchs on the Tory party via massive, sustained donations.

It is absolutely no coincidence that Putin’s threat to invade Ukraine comes a mere two years after the UK left the EU. Our departure has weakened the chances of European peace, possibly fatally. Nato is a vital part of that; even more so, the EU, whose foundation was grounded in the original Franco-German pact of the early 1950s, which amounted to agreeing to never fighting each other again, a principle much bolstered by us in 1973, when we joined the EEC.

Peace in Europe since 1945, is now threatened by the Russian calculation that Europe will not be able to withstand the pressure he now places on her through Ukraine. Remember, apart from a dream of the Russian Empire rising again through his efforts, he has plenty of reasons to wish to distract his restless, ill-served population (who are being fed increasingly outrageous lies as to what is happening in the West).

The Russian economy is nose-diving again; the pandemic is out of control (look at the figures for cases and deaths). The Muslim issue has not gone away, just become temporarily quietened. His southern borders seethe with fundamentalists. Muslims may outnumber ethnic Orthodox Russians inside Russia inside a generation. The Russians historically carry anti-Semitic bile in their blood; their attitude to Muslims is the same.

Forcing Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Slovakia (Hungary is already an ally, as is Serbia), back into a firmly Russian sphere of influence would help him concentrate on the bigger, medium term territorial and religious problems of the huge central Asian republics to the south. None is remotely a democracy, which helps him. But, behind the thrones of these autocracies lurk religious zealots, ever ready to plunge a knife into the heads of the present Satanic, secular states.

Looming further away over the horizon, there is China, an awakened giant. Russia and China are not natural allies, not even in the days when both espoused communism (always a very different kind). Today, with China poised to become the world’s biggest economy, her threat to Russia is bigger than that of the USA and Europe combined. 

Returning to Freedland’s article in The Guardian, because it encapsulates neatly just what is the broader picture, he ends by saying:

“Trouble is, the US, egged on by Johnson’s tatty Churchill tribute act, rejects outright changes to Europe’s ‘security architecture’. It also favours Kyiv’s interpretation of what the Minsk agreements say should happen in the disputed Donbas region

“And although the US promises to discuss limiting its deployment in Europe of new nuclear-capable, medium-range missiles – an alarming, largely undiscussed reprise of Washington’s 1980s cruise and Pershing missile cold war escalation – it insists that Putin back down first. That’s unrealistic.

“To sum up. Pariah Putin, an international hooligan, triggered the Ukraine crisis and is now exploiting it. Macron, representing France and the EU, [has tried] to resolve it. Is this because Washington and London know what’s best for Europe? No. It’s because the US, projecting its national interests through Nato, and the feckless, lying windbag in Downing Street, cannot bear the thought of an empowered, strategically autonomous Europe successfully managing its own security.”

We – the entire citizenship of Europe, including European Russia – are the losers in this caricaturist’s sabre-rattling.  Nato ought never to have expanded to the east, but it did. The alliance is now too large, with too many potential internal conflicts as a result. How would Nato defend the Baltic States without recourse to battlefield nuclear weapons? How could it have allowed itself to get embroiled in the UK/USA obsession that turned into a debacle that was Afghanistan? How can it continue to be financed against the strident demands of Europeans not to have their taxes raised? Does anyone seriously believe that the USA puts the same weight today behind its foreign or defence policies in Europe, as it once did, with the very real threat of China, or even a crazed North Korea, threatening its security in the Pacific?

Realpolitik tells us that super-powers will flex their muscles to defend their borders, and expect a broad sphere of influence to extend beyond them. Look at US behaviour in central America to this day; or, earlier, its view that the whole of south America was a legitimate arena for it to meddle in, as it frequently did.

 Back to Europe: while recognising that Putin is all the bad things we know him to be, he is the only negotiator in town worth talking to. He has the military power, too.

From a re-defined position of its agreed strength, the West has to take back the initiative. One move would be to agree, openly, that Ukraine will not join Nato. Seriously, it should not, just as it should not join the EU, except as a loose partner (like the UK, like Norway). But, as a quid pro quo, the Russians have to be seen to be withdrawing their forces, with agreed, neutral, foreign military observers watching this happen on the ground.

A conference, on European security in the 21st century, should be organised, a reflection perhaps of the Congress of Vienna of 1815. That kept the peace in Europe for a hundred years.

Otherwise, all options will remain on – and off – the table.

This week: Tim has been regaled by various Louis Theroux tv documentaries, all on BBC iPlayer. Say what you like about the man, he has perfected a way of wheedling his way into the most unlikely of situations. His latest effort, broadcast on BBC2 last Sunday, had him embroiled with America First, with its dangerously charismatic 22-year old leader, Nick Fuentes, who gives a daily three-hour rant on his streaming channel (it’s on YouTube, go see for yourself). These are kidults with guns, metaphorical and literal. Thin-skinned, inadequate youths, one can be heard telling a rare female supporter (she’s now left the group) that he is going to seek her out and anally rape her. She shows Theroux this video gem, saying, ‘I don’t think he’s joking, do you?’. Whether he is or isn’t, it’s foul, nasty, racist, misogynistic, ignorant bile and, frankly, straight out of the old Trump playbook.