Soapbox

Few images of World War II are more harrowing than the mushroom clouds rising over Hiroshima and Nagasaki from the atomic bombs dropped by the US that killed approximately 200,000 people. Today’s more than 13,000 nuclear weapons are significantly more lethal. Apart from their immediate impact, they would rain radioactive particles across the earth and choke the atmosphere with ash. The use of multiple bombs in several locations would lead to the death of billions and spell the end of human civilisation, along with much other life.

It’s nuclear weapons’ capacity for annihilation that led Albert Einstein to caution that if they were used to fight the next world war, then “World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones”. His warnings against their proliferation went unheeded, but for all the hostility of the Cold War years, no such weapons have been used in anger since. That there’s even speculation Vladimir Putin would consider resorting to nukes now, highlights just how unstable the world has become.

As Boris Starling writes, it could have worked out differently. Those who spent time in Russia during 1991 and 1992 remember the genuine appetite and excitement of the Russian people for a very different life than the one endured previously; a life that leveraged their rich culture (see Joanna Grochowicz) to become a vibrant democratic partner in the free world.

The West must share responsibility for the fact that their dreams were dashed within three years. Those who blame NATO’s enlargement over the past two decades for pushing Putin into a corner miss the point. Enlargement – and engagement – did not go nearly far or fast enough. At that time, the prospect of all the former Warsaw Pact countries including Russia joining a formal alliance with the West was a tangible possibility, one that had the support of the nascent Russian administration under Boris Yeltsin.

It would have required political vision and will, and real support for the country’s sustainable transition to a democracy and market economy, not unlike that given to Japan and West Germany after 1945. But instead, the West treated the Russian economy as a casino, and its state as the untrustworthy inheritor of the USSR, both of which became self-fulfilling realities. The belated, non-binding “founding act” signed between NATO and the Russian Federation in 1997 was a paper tiger from the outset; any real trust had already broken down two years later when NATO unilaterally bombed former Yugoslavia during the Kosovo War.

As such, the emergence of Putin from the rubble of the Soviet economy and society was as inevitable as the rise of Hitler after Versailles. His unjustifiable war against Ukraine is fuelled by a distorted version of history (see Michael Burleigh) and blatant lies, and prosecuted without compassion or compunction.  But the responsibility rests entirely with Putin and those who commit atrocities in his name (see Hugh Barnes), not the ordinary Russian people who are also victims of his despotic gangster state. If we blame them, then we must have a reckoning of our own. Let’s take just one of several conflicts, the invasion of Iraq in 2003 by the western military coalition led by the US and the UK.

We don’t need to make the case for moral equivalence to acknowledge that this was an illegal war based on the lie that Iraq had developed weapons of mass destruction and posed an imminent threat. Whatever the motivations of our political masters at the time, it resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, provoked militant extremism, and brought untold misery to millions, of a kind that will be familiar to today’s Ukrainians. That is why we can’t allow the current political culture of lying to become de rigueur (see Gavin Esler). When politicians lie, too often ordinary people die.

Voltaire was right, and Putin – like most warmongers – will probably escape justice. For now there are other priorities, like stopping the killing without caving in to his criminal aggression; showing might without provoking a nuclear response. Undoubtedly western leaders face an unenviable task in grappling with the consequences of our past mistakes. Now is the time for a resolute display of solidarity, unity and, above all, strength.  We should continue to provide Ukraine with weapons and swiftly fix the debacle of our lack of support for refugees (see Sonia Sodha). It’s time for talking softly and wielding a big stick.

Putin has put himself beyond the pale, and there can be no proper reconciliation with Russia while he remains in power. But it’s also important to remember that he won’t always be. The bloodless end to the Cold War exemplified Sun Tzu’s dictum that the “art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting”. But in failing to help Russia build a democratic civil society and economy afterwards, we disregarded Field Marshal Montgomery’s maxim following World War II, to “win the peace”. If that opportunity should arise again, post-Putin, we must seize it. Only then will future generations live free from the fear of a nuclear winter.

Peter Phelps is Editor at Perspective