John Humphrys asks: are we doing enough to protect European peace?
It can hardly have passed you by (the BBC alone has made sure of this) that next Monday is the hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War or, to be more precise, of Britain’s finding itself dragged into the melée. Like the Second, the First was a world war with its origins in Europe. Now, a hundred years later, we have come to take for granted the notion that Europe is a continent of peace and stability in a world otherwise still wracked by war. Yet the European peace seems suddenly to feel more vulnerable. Are we doing enough to protect it?
We have long abandoned any hope, desperately clung to by those who suffered the horrors of the trenches and saw the slaughter of a whole generation of young men, that the First World War would be the ‘war to end wars’. The outbreak of the Second, barely twenty years after the end of the First, put paid to that. Nonetheless, since 1945 we have tacitly come to harbour a more modest hope, that at least we in Europe will be spared the ravages of war whatever may happen beyond Europe’s shores.
Initially it was the Cold War that gave substance to this hope. The stand-off between the Soviet Union, on one hand, and western Europe with its American alliance in NATO on the other, seemed to guarantee a peace of sorts. Paradoxically, the knowledge that we both possessed the ultimate weapon of mass destruction served the make war even less likely. Not for nothing did the doctrine of mutual assured destruction have the acronym MAD. When the Soviet Union fell, our optimism became even greater. Russia could now be our partner not our foe. It wasn’t clear any longer what exactly NATO was for.
It’s true that wars did still break out in Europe but they were more like civil wars than the old style of European war between nation and nation. The vicious fighting in the Balkans in the 1990s following the break-up of Yugoslavia could be seen in this light and those wars were eventually brought to an end largely through the intervention of NATO. Two of the countries involved in those post-Yugoslavia conflicts are already members of the European Union; the others are queuing up to join.
So there were grounds for feeling Europe had become immune to war. But now this seems not a little complacent. Ukraine, a country that is divided over the very issue of whether its identity is European or not - and where some of the most bloody fighting of the Second World War took place - has become the crucible in which at least the possibility of a new European conflagration could be ignited.
Few doubt that Russia, which has already seized back from Ukraine the Crimean peninsula that it regards as part of Holy Russia, is encouraging, financing and arming the ethnic Russian separatists fighting in eastern Ukraine. Few doubt that it was those separatists, using Russian missiles, who shot down the Malaysia Airlines jet killing nearly three hundred people, many of them European civilians. Certainly the European Union and the United States don’t doubt it and this week imposed a third round of increasingly tough economic sanctions against Russia in protest.
It’s true that sanctions are not quite the same thing as armies, so August 2014 does not feel anything like August 1914. Both the EU and the USA have made clear they are not going to go to war over Ukraine even if, as remains possible, Russia’s President Putin comes to the conclusion that it is in the interests of Russia and the ethnic Russians in Ukraine for Russian troops actually to invade eastern Ukraine. Most commentators still regard this as unlikely. But the very possibility raises some sharp questions about whether European security and our supposed immunity to war are as strong as we thought.
What ought to cause us most alarm is the fact that the grounds for future conflict are very real. Read the popular press and you might get the idea that President Putin is a modern-day Kaiser, a swaggering adventurer intent on expanding his country’s power no matter who might be in the way. There may indeed be some truth in this but there is also another way to see both Germany’s predicament in 1914 and Russia’s in 2014. The aggressive paranoia that comes with the feeling being encircled applies to both.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia has seen the buffer it has historically felt it needed between itself and western Europe get narrower and narrower. All the eastern European countries it dominated after the Second World War through the Warsaw Pact have gone over to the ‘other side’ and joined both the EU and NATO, but some parts of the old Soviet Union itself, notably the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, have done the same. The battle over Ukraine is in part about whether it might do so too.
There is no doubt that Russian public opinion is largely supportive of President Putin’s stance not just because people share a belief in the need for a buffer in order to prevent encirclement, but also because there are so many ethnic Russians in the neighbouring countries in question. It is their predicament as well as the Russian desire to widen the buffer that provides the grounds for growing conflict. In this regard some informed observers, including Hillary Clinton, have drawn the parallel not between Putin and the Kaiser but between Putin and Hitler, whose case for invading Czechoslovakia in 1938 was to come to the aid of the minority ethnic Germans in the country.
If President Putin decides to increase his sabre-rattling on behalf of fellow Russians in other European countries, are we ready to deal with him? According to the House of Commons select committee on defence we are not. In a report published this week the committee said there were ‘serious deficiencies’ in NATO’s preparedness. ‘NATO is currently not well-prepared for a Russia threat against a NATO member state,’ it baldly said.
NATO has no obligation to defend the territorial integrity of Ukraine because Ukraine is not a member of NATO. But it does have such an obligation, under Article 5 of NATO’s treaty, to come to the aid of any of its members who is attacked. The question is whether it could meet that obligation if the need arose. It is the Baltic states,who are the most vulnerable to a Russian attack and the committee lamented that NATO ‘may not have the collective political will to take concerted action to deter attack’. The committee chairman, the Conservative MP, Rory Stewart, said that the risk of a Russian attack on a NATO member country, ‘whilst still small, is significant. We are not convinced that NATO is ready for this threat’.
But it is not so much a conventional invasion involving ground troops that so much worries the committee. ‘A Russian unconventional attack, using asymmetric tactics – the latest term for this is “ambiguous warfare” – designed to slip below NATO’s response threshold, would be particularly difficult to counter’, it said. Mr Stewart spelt out what they meant. ‘The nature of Russian tactics is changing fast – including cyber attacks, information warfare, and the backing of irregular “separatist groups” combining armed civilians with Russian Special Forces operating without insignia.’
The committee called on the government to take a lead in restoring NATO’s readiness to face a Russian threat in all its forms. It suggested that NATO needed to reorder its capabilities so that there was a continuous presence of troops and equipment in the Baltic states, a dramatic improvement in its rapid reaction forces, more large-scale exercises and a widening of the definition of attack in Article 5 to include the sort of unconventional methods outlined by Mr Stewart.
Most of all it wants NATO countries to recommit themselves to spending 2% of their GDP on defence, which in the case of most NATO countries means raising their spending to that level since most have failed to honour that commitment. Britain does still devote that much to defence but, given the pressures on public spending that any government will face after the next election, few think defence will be spared from further cuts.
So, as we remember the horrors of a hundred years ago, are we being too complacent about our own security? How much of a threat to peace is Putin’s Russia? And how much are we prepared to do to counter it?
What’s your view? Let us know.
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