The threat from Russia

The world: suffering from Long Covid

One of the most puzzling and, for those unfortunate enough to experience it, depressing and debilitating aspects of Covid is the inability of some people to recover completely from a bout of the disease. This phenomenon has been dubbed Long Covid, and sufferers of it continue to experience some of the symptoms and side effects, such as lethargy, loss of energy and loss of the senses of smell and taste, even when technically no longer harbouring the virus.

Nobody knows yet how long Long Covid and its effects last. There are instances of people still experiencing Long Covid after more than a year, and many in the medical profession suspect that in extreme cases it may for some people be a permanent state. And, since people with Long Covid do not actually still have the disease, it is in most cases extremely difficult to treat.

We think Long Covid is a good analogy for the state of the world today. The world is slowly “recovering” from Covid, in the sense that the disease is moving from pandemic to endemic, and from life-threatening to (for most people) a rather milder disease – though still unpleasant enough. Different countries are at different stages of this journey, and ironically those initially most successful at keeping the most virulent stages of the disease at bay – through isolation, hard lock-downs and closed borders – are now finding their populations short of herd immunity and succumbing to the milder Omicron variant in greater numbers than countries who suffered more in 2020 and 2021. But all countries remain scarred to a greater or lesser degree by Covid, and will be for some time to come.

One of the main ways in which this scarring is manifesting itself is general discontent in society. People have made considerable sacrifices, in some cases financial, in many cases emotional, and for almost everyone in restrictions to their liberty. It has been a long haul, and over most countries there is a mood of sullenness, of being fed up, and of yearning for better times to return.

And – perhaps not entirely fairly, but completely understandably – there is also a mood of frustration and even anger against governments, against the people who have imposed all the restrictions on us. As a result, most governments across the world are politically unpopular. As we say, this is not exactly fair, as governments did not cause the pandemic or ask for it, and have been scrambling to handle it with neither a recognised playbook to work from nor experience to draw on. But then, nobody ever said that politics was fair!

In many western countries, this discontent is threatening to spill over from anger with the political class into lack of support for the democratic process itself. With the normal channels of politics not providing the satisfaction and redress for their grievances that many people are seeking, they are taking more active steps, with physical protests and civil disobedience multiplying, even in countries one would normally assume to be orderly and restrained, like Germany and the Netherlands.

To be fair, this has not emerged from nowhere and is not solely due to the pandemic. Partly because of the advent of social media, partly because of the stagnation of living standards, and partly because there is a definite air that “things are getting worse”, western electorates have been in grumpy mood for some time, and “Democracy under strain” and “Lack of confidence in the political class” have it seems been features of western society for years, probably since the Global Financial Crisis broke nearly 15 years ago. But the manifestations of this discontent are getting sharper.

Enter Russia

And it is to this mix – unpopular governments, frustrated populations, democratic processes under pressure – that the start of 2022 has added the threat of war in Ukraine.

On one level, Russia’s aggression appears to be largely opportunistic, as Putin seeks to exploit weak and distracted western leaderships, dissension between allies and within the EU and energy shortages with some adventurism in eastern Ukraine.

But we think there is a second reason for Putin to move now, and that his actions are another consequence of the world’s Long Covid. Discontent in Russia with the government and the restrictions of the pandemic is no less prevalent than it is in the West, and despite the lack of democracy and a free press, the authorities in Moscow will be well aware of their unpopularity and the danger this poses to their rule. And, in classic style, Putin has adopted the standard defence of autocrats under pressure: repression on dissenters at home and finding a foreign adventure so he can rally his people behind the flag.

How should the West react to this threat? Firstly, we think the West should take it seriously: Russia is unlikely to be bluffing and has both the ability to carry out an incursion into Ukraine and domestic political reasons to do so.

Nor is aggression on its western border out of keeping with Russia’s history. The country – whether under the Tsars, as the Soviet Union or now under the post-Soviet regime – has always had the strategic weakness that it has no defensible natural border to its west, with the result that to keep the heartland safe, it traditionally attempts to expand and create buffer zones until forced to retreat. And whenever that pressure disappears, it attempts to expand again[1].

Added to this, in many ways Russia has assumed the mantle that the UK had in the 1960s of having “lost an empire and not yet found a role”. It is perhaps the most important “unsatisfied” major country today, and we see in Putin a desire to re-establish an explicit hegemony over his near abroad.

Not that Putin wishes to recreate completely the Soviet empire: he is reputed once to have said “Anyone who does not feel sad about the collapse and disintegration of the Soviet Union does not have a heart. But anyone who dreams of rebuilding it does not have a head”. And just as recreating the British Empire was never an option for the UK 60 years ago, so recreating the Soviet empire would never be acceptable to the international community now (and certainly not to the inhabitants of the Baltic States, Finland, Poland and others).

But Putin does have a legitimate need to preserve his country’s security, particularly in the light of what he sees as Western expansionism into Moscow’s zone of influence. And a neutral assessment of Russia’s case would have to conclude that there is some justification for this feeling of being aggressed by NATO. As has been said “If not Russia, then who exactly is NATO aimed at?”

Putin’s negative views of NATO are almost certainly also shaped by what is known as “the betrayal narrative”. This is the view, very widely shared in Moscow, that when negotiating the reunification of Germany and the right for the re-united Federal Republic to station its military (and so by implication NATO forces) on the territory of the former GDR, NATO promised the Soviet Union that it would not seek to expand further into areas formerly under Moscow’s influence. Although never codified in a formal treaty, Russians across the political class believe the promise was made, and then, once the USSR had agreed to German unification, almost immediately broken[2].

Whatever the truth here, NATO’s (and the EU’s) activities in expanding eastwards have been a thorn in Moscow’s side for 30 years, and whether or not the promise was formally made, from 1991 onwards NATO has given the impression of thinking only of its own interests and activities and has ignored how they would be perceived in Moscow. And it is a major error in geo‑politics not to factor in the reaction of one’s opponents to one’s moves.

It is not even as if NATO’s expansions make sense strategically: one does not make Finland, Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine and Georgia et al feel more secure by making Russia feel less secure, any more than one would make Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela feel more secure by making the US feel less secure.

And finally, whether the West likes it or not, Ukraine has always been well within Russia’s sphere of influence and for most of its history integral to the Russian state and its people’s history. For most Russians, it is not a foreign country, and far less a fully separate sovereign state, but rather the heartland and original home of their race[3].

So, we conclude that Russia has both the ability and the motives to make good on its threats. Moreover, Europe is badly placed to take an aggressive stance against Russia. A number of EU countries – most obviously but not only Germany – are heavily dependent on Russian gas for their energy, and the threat of turning off the gas supply is a real one and one the EU, already faced with very high prices for energy supplies, cannot easily counter. As a consequence, unity in Brussels is non-existent; already the proposal that Russia be threatened with being excluded from the SWIFT inter-bank payment system if it does not withdraw (one of the few sanctions the West could apply fairly easily) has met with strong opposition from Germany among others.

All this suggests that ignoring Putin’s threat would be unwise, and aggressively countering it with either military force or sanctions while maintaining unity in the West will be difficult. But there is a third option, which is to persuade him through diplomacy to step back. This is not as unreasonable an objective as it might seem; for all his seeming strength, Putin’s position at home is not impregnable, and he faces the challenge that anyone invoking a foreign adversary to rally the country behind one has, viz once done, it is then very difficult to step back[4].

So the West should be actively looking to provide a ladder for Putin to climb down with dignity. And it is not impossible to find – accept that Russia feels beleaguered and aggressed by NATO, accept that NATO has probably overstepped the line, and offer to rein back any attempt to bring Ukraine (and Georgia) into the western sphere of influence. In truth, this is not far from NATO’s unspoken position anyway, and if done generously – perhaps with an offer of the aid that Russia should have had a generation ago when the Cold War ended, perhaps even with the hand of genuine friendship – there is a chance not just that the current hostilities could be defused but that the long enmity between Russia and the West could be more permanently reset.

And there is a further reason for trying to turn Russia into a friend and even an ally. And that is that some time this century, both Russia and the West are likely to face a common foe. That China is a threat to the West is widely understood: it is aggressive, strong and growing stronger, fundamentally opposed to everything the West does and stands for and determined to establish what it sees as its rightful position as the world’s dominant power. That it is a threat to Russia is less appreciated in the West, but fully understood in Moscow. This threat arises from the unbalanced and unstable position of the two countries in Russia’s Far East. Here, the Amur River forms the boundary between on the north side, mineral-rich but very sparsely inhabited Russian lands, a long way from Moscow’s heartlands and totally indefensible, while just to its south are the teeming hundreds of millions of China, land-hungry and resource-starved[5].

Russia knows that, in an echo of Palmerston’s famous assessment of Britain’s alliances in the 1840s, China has no eternal allies and no perpetual enemies – only its interests are eternal and perpetual. For the moment Russia is a useful friend and vassal for China; were that to change, Beijing would have no hesitation in ending the friendship, and Russia’s Far East would then very quickly come into play.

The concept of Russia as the West’s friend may seem extreme, though it has of course happened before, just 80 years ago where both fought together against Nazi Germany. And if nothing else, the offer would cause Putin to stop and think – which with the tanks poised on Ukraine’s borders would be no bad thing.

And then both the West and Moscow can turn to the bigger issue of how to counter an aggressive and hostile China. This fight will come, and for us, to counter it even the unthinkable of making an ally of Russia should not be off the table.

 

[1]              I am much indebted to my colleague Gabriel Stein for this and other insights on Russia’s geo-strategic history and geo-political position.

[2]              For more on this, see for example this article from the Guardian:  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/12/russias-belief-in-nato-betrayal-and-why-it-matters-today .

[3]              For a longer assessment of the position of Russia and Ukraine, and the consequences of NATO’s actions in the region, this essay by Henry Kissinger in 2014 remains invaluable reading:  https://www.henryakissinger.com/articles/how-the-ukraine-crisis-ends/

[4]              Something that President Xi of China also suffers from: having stirred his country to military adventurism against Taiwan to bolster his own credentials as a Great Leader, he has no easy route to a more peaceful coexistence. War is not inevitable in the Taiwan Strait, but Xi may need help to stop a slide into hostilities.

[5]              There is – of course – much history here: until the middle of the 19th century China controlled huge swathes of the land north of the Amur (or Heilongjiang in Mandarin), but the enfeebled Qing regime was forced to concede all of it in the 1858 Treaty of Aigun, a treaty which needless to say the Chinese to this day consider unfair and imposed on them in their time of weakness. It is for Beijing yet another of the 19th century injustices that China suffered and that the PRC wants to unwind.