Yet before 2022, the truth is that British diplomacy was not always so clear and resolute about countering Putin’s aggression.
Now
that we are re-engaging with China – by far the most powerful of our
adversaries – it has never been more urgent to understand the dangers of
dealing with hostile states...
Our diplomats
profoundly believe that “engagement” is almost always the answer to any
international problem. Engagement is what they do and they are convinced
that it serves our national interest and makes the world a better
place.
For countries that are more or less friendly – thankfully the huge majority – the diplomats are right.
But
what about hostile states that strive to do us harm and will not
abandon their threatening ambitions? As a minor cog in the engine room
of British diplomacy, I saw how dealing with them involves cost, risk
and moral compromise... At worst, you may end up emboldening the adversary to go further and inflict more harm than he would have done anyway.
One evening in late 2016, as darkness settled over the trees of St
James’s Park outside my window in Private Office, I finished drafting a
newspaper comment piece about Russia for the foreign secretary, then
Boris Johnson.
Before submitting my work to him, I had to send it for clearance by some of our most senior diplomats.
Back
came the answer: all fine, just one thing, please delete the phrase
“Russian aggression”. I asked why? Putin had grabbed Crimea and invaded
eastern Ukraine two years earlier; he was, at that moment, waging a war
on Ukrainian soil which had already claimed 8,000 lives and driven two
million people from their homes. For good measure, his air force was
carpet-bombing Aleppo in Syria.
Didn’t all of that justify the phrase “Russian aggression”. Of course, I was told. But our boss met Sergei Lavrov,
the Russian foreign minister, in New York a few months ago and we’re
looking for more engagement. So best not to use that phrase.
Just the prospect of dealing with Lavrov – apparently as an end in
itself – was enough to produce a minor but demeaning act of
self-censorship.
As it happens, I had been in that meeting in New York and Lavrov’s
bristling mendacity had been so obvious as to be almost comical. Given
that nothing he said could be relied upon, it wasn’t clear to me why
Lavrov was worth the foreign secretary’s time at all, let alone if there
was a moral price to be paid.
How could experienced diplomats, who were surely not naive or credulous, see Lavrov differently?
The
answer is that if you start with a sincere belief in the power of
engagement, then you more or less have to regard the person you will
engage with as a worthy interlocutor, even when it’s Lavrov.
The same impulse may cause diplomats to go further and misread not just individuals but regimes.
The
Foreign Office’s Russia department was generally composed of people
with a grimly realistic view of Putin: most had no illusions about what
we were facing. I sometimes thought we would be better off if they were
in charge.
But as late as 2019, I
remember one of our leading Russia experts describing Putin’s annexation
of Crimea as not an “imperialist” but a “defensive” project.
The
irony was that Putin himself begged to differ. He was very clear about
why he was dismembering Ukraine. He told anyone who would listen that he
grabbed Crimea for the obviously imperial motive of restoring the
territory annexed by Catherine the Great in the 18th century to the
Russian motherland.
Soon after achieving this in 2014, Putin made a triumphal progress
through his new province, hailing the “return” of Crimea to the “native
land” and describing this as a tribute to “historical truth and the
memory of our ancestors”. He did not trouble to pretend that his motives
were defensive.
How could a Civil
Service expert suggest otherwise? The only plausible explanation is that
this person genuinely believed in the necessity of engaging with
Russia. If Putin’s motives really were implacably imperialist and
expansionist, then there would be nothing to talk about. So those must
not be his motives.
If
your starting point is that engagement is the answer, then it becomes
tempting to define the problem to suit the solution, rather than vice versa...
The West has the collective power to thwart any expansionist regime, provided that it uses its leverage hard and early.
But
some of our diplomats will always prefer to advise against this. They
will caution that if we do get tough, then the hostile state will cancel
our engagement, which we must of course seek to preserve.
They will warn about
jeopardising the next meeting and “empowering the hardliners and
marginalising the moderates” (an unfalsifiable and formulaic argument).
They
will say that the regime is not monolithic, that not everyone around
the dictator agrees with him, that somehow the moderates could still
prevail, and we should look for the cracks and widen them, rather than
give the hostile government something to unite against.
This
might sound like a sophisticated analysis, but the problem is that our
adversaries know exactly how our diplomats think because this approach
goes back many years.
So they play along and
create the impression that they want nothing more than serious
engagement. They will agree to dialogue and say conciliatory words
simply to tie us down and lead us to constrain our own options, delaying
the moment when the penny finally drops and we use our leverage.
For
hostile states, the purpose of engagement is seldom to reach an
agreement, but rather to stop us from actually doing something against
their interests. That is exactly how Putin has handled Donald Trump for
the past six months. Iran has been doing the same for years, often
successfully...
It seems incredible now but after Russia’s first invasion in 2014,
Britain and most of our allies decided not to supply Ukraine with
weapons, imposing a de-facto arms embargo on the target of aggression
which lasted right up until Putin was massing his forces for the second
onslaught in 2022...
In January 2022, barely
a month before the second invasion, Boris Johnson as prime minister
dispatched 2,000 anti-tank missiles which were soon vital in the defence
of Kyiv and Kharkiv, littering the streets and boulevards with the
blackened carcasses of Russian armour.
That
consignment, delivered when no other state was publicly sending
weapons, established Britain as Ukraine’s strongest supporter and
generated goodwill and influence which persist to this day.
But
suppose we had been arming Ukraine not for four weeks before the
onslaught, but four years? Wouldn’t Ukraine have been able to resist
even more strongly and save lives by holding back the Russian advance?
Wouldn’t Britain have amassed yet more goodwill and diplomatic access?
And what exactly was
achieved by keeping our channels to the Russians open after the
Salisbury poisonings? What did we gain by not supplying weapons to
Ukraine?
If that was the price of preserving engagement, it was surely not worth paying.
I came to the
conclusion that if engagement with hostile states leads to
self-censorship, wishful thinking and self-imposed constraints, then it
may be worse than pointless.
The danger is that our adversary might be emboldened to cause even more damage.
Remember
that the cumulative effect of all the West’s engagement with Putin was
that he concluded that he could get away with destroying Europe’s
biggest country.
In
fairness, Britain was probably least culpable for this outcome. Our
prime ministers and foreign secretaries had far less contact with Putin
than some of their European counterparts. Angela Merkel, who clocked up 101 meetings or phone calls with Putin
during her time as German Chancellor, must carry the greatest share of
blame...
There is no avoiding
the tragic reality that the West’s collective effort to engage with
Russia and “keep channels open” ended in Europe’s bloodiest war for 80
years.
Surely it
would have been better if we had all worried a lot less about engagement
and got on with arming Ukraine straight after the first invasion in
2014? The results could hardly have been worse..."
