USA & NATO vs Russia in Ukraine: Washington's & London's Warmongers

 

“Take a charitable view,” was the advice of Sir Wilmot Lewis, the veteran correspondent of The Times in Washington in the last century, “bearing in mind that every government will do as much harm as it can and as much good as it must”.

His cynical words are particularly pertinent in times of war because it is then that governments have an unrivalled opportunity to do harm. They can wrap themselves in the national flag and denounce their critics as unpatriotic appeasers. Most dangerously, they can purport to be providing good judgement and competent administration despite a dismal track record of bungling and dishonesty in the handling of domestic crises far less complex than the demands of warfare.

A frightening example of this born-again bombast came this week when British Foreign Secretary, Liz Truss, made a speech at the Mansion House in London expressing enthusiasm for maximum war aims. “We will keep going further and faster to push Russia out of the whole of Ukraine,” she said, which would mean backing a Ukrainian counter-offensive to retake Crimea and the Russian-backed separatist republics in the Donbas. These are objectives that any Russian leader, regardless of whether or not Vladimir Putin remains in the Kremlin, is likely to resist.

“Britain has always stood up to bullies,” said Truss. “We have always been risk takers.” This is a rather serious misreading of British foreign policy, which historically has tended to be cautious and avoid risky leaps in the dark. Overall, Truss’s reduction of foreign policy to a series of triumphalist slogans could be set to music and take its place in an updated version of “Oh! What a Lovely War”.

But if the British Government’s actions in a military conflict – in which it is becoming more engaged by the day – is as inept as its performance in times of peace, then we face a dark and uncertain future. Evidence for this is not hard to find since on the same day that Truss was indulging in undiluted war euphoria, the High Court in London was issuing a judgment saying that the Government’s policy towards care homes in England in 2020 – alleged to have killed 20,000 inmates – was “irrational” and “unlawful”. The judges concluded that the then health secretary, Matt Hancock, had “failed to take into account the risk to elderly and vulnerable residents from non-systematic transmission”.

This is probably a better example of recent British risk taking than anything Truss may have had in mind in lauding this approach as a national tradition. Wild-eyed boosterism followed by practical failure has been the motif of Boris Johnson’s government over the past three years.

Patent though this government’s failings have has been, one could take some comfort in the hope that its ability to do harm would be mitigated by its own incompetent grasp of the levers of power. “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation,” Adam Smith famously said in 1777, downplaying the capacity of a poor government with bad policies to bring about national ruin.

However, an exception to the great economist’s rule occurs in wartime. Political leaders who have seen their schemes founder or prove ineffectual at home are suddenly taking decisions of life and death for thousands of people. They tend to revel in this new authority – however incapable they are of exercising it competently.

I suspect that successful politicians, more than most individuals, have an inner Napoleon who is always struggling to break free and send armies into battle. In so doing, their self-confidence differs markedly from the French emperor, who warned against preconceived ideas about what was happening, or going to happen, on the battlefield because such notions usually turned out to be wrong.

Vladimir Putin is one of many good examples of a leader whose belief in his own propaganda lured him into launching an invasion of Ukraine that could succeed only in the unlikely event of there being no Ukrainian resistance. Putin has tried to adjust to this reality which is so different from his expectations. At the beginning, he tried to wage a conventional war in Europe with inadequate Russian forces, still at their peacetime level of mobilisation because they were engaged only in his special military operation.

Yet Putin’s false optimism about his prospects for military victory cannot be attributed to his “isolation in the Kremlin”, or to the “blood-soaked traditions of Russian history”. This has been a common feature in most military conflicts that I have reported on – from the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 to the Nato intervention in Libya in 2011.

Most of these wars ended disastrously for those who started them because they did not understand that military conflicts have so many moving parts, seen and unseen, that their length and outcome cannot be predicted.

President George W Bush was pilloried for standing beneath a banner reading “Mission Accomplished” after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, but this sense of premature accomplishment is common to most wars. The same is likely to be true of Ukraine because so many countries with divergent interests are now involved.

But there is another wild card that makes the Ukraine war even more dangerous. The decision-makers in wars really do matter, but the calibre of leadership in the White House and in Downing Street is at a historic low in all three cases.

The British Government has been hopping from scandal to scandal and failure to failure at home and is unlikely to perform better abroad. President Joe Biden appears to believe that this is a chance to win a smashing victory over Russia, but his war aims remain hazy, except for his blinded hatred for Russia.

The ballooning arrogant self-confidence of the Nato powers has led to them cavalierly dismissing as phoney the risk of Russia using tactical or strategic nuclear weapons. Well-publicised Russian missile tests are played down as mere sabre rattling, though the last time Putin rattled a sabre – by threatening to invade Ukraine – he did exactly that.

The low quality of the main leaders inside and outside Ukraine is significant because the war may soon enter a third and more violent phase. Because Vladimir Putin initially believed that he was not fighting a real war he has never carried out a full mobilisation. Shortage of infantry has been the abiding weakness of the Russian war effort during the first phase of the conflict.

The same is still true of the second phase of the war, which is being fought out in the Donbas. But, if that also fails, and backed by USA&Nato’s military Ukraine launches a counter-offensive, then Putin may have little choice but to declare a general mobilisation rather than face a defeat.