At last week’s Paris meeting of the ‘coalition of the willing’, Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron congratulated themselves on reinserting Europe into the peace process opened up by President Trump. In practice, they have done their best to derail it.
Nothing is more foolish than their idea of placing British and French military soldiers and aircraft in Ukraine to provide ‘reassurance’ against renewed Russian aggression after a ceasefire.
Not only cannot it not be made to happen -since both America and Russia reject it - but the attempt to make it happen distracts attention from the serious business of making peace. It is, rather, a desperate attempt to make Britain and France relevant to a peace process which they did not initiate and never wanted.
What might be made to happen, because potentially acceptable to both Russia and the United States, is a UN-supervised ceasefire with non-NATO peacekeepers. But there has been no European suggestion to this effect.
Scarcely less foolish is the Paris decision to ‘accelerate’ and ‘toughen’ economic sanctions against Russia. To keep sanctions as a pressure point is perfectly sensible, but to urge their expansion now is to derail peace talks just at the moment when a real prospect of peace has opened up.
Economic sanctions are instruments of war, successors to the blockades. Their phased withdrawal should be part of peace-making.
The project of ‘reassuring’ Ukraine against renewed Russian aggression says nothing about reassuring Russia against future Nato aggression.
This reflects the dominant western view that NATO is a purely defensive alliance, that Russia’s attack on Ukraine was unprovoked, and that therefore any Russian demand for reassurance is bogus.
This flies in face of credible evidence that NATO’s leader, the United States, played an active, and possibly crucial, role in destabilising the elected pro-Russian government of Yanukovych in 2014, and installing a Ukrainian nationalist alternative.*
That the Russian invasion was provoked, is not to say that it was justified. It was a moral and strategic blunder, one of whose consequences was to add two new members to the NATO alliance. Nevertheless the hostility to NATO expansion which underlay it was a product not just of a long history, but of insistent repetition from Gorbachev onward which the West, confident of its victory in the Cold War, cheerfully ignored. It was naive to believe that vengeance would limp after Russia had recovered its strength.
The second strand in western thinking is that democracy is the peaceful, while autocracy is the warlike form of the state. This is because democracies are inherently legitimate, whereas autocracies need to legitimise themselves by wars of conquest. It is therefore always democracies which need reassurance against autocracies, not the other way round.
This is often asserted, but is empirically poorly grounded. Dictatorships may do horrible things to their own people, but few of them have been prepared to risk their own demise by attacking their neighbours.
Hitler, who dominates the western imagination on this topic, is the paradigmatic exception.
Moreover, while democracies may not have much appetite for foreign conquest, they tend to regard their wars as moral crusades, whose only satisfactory outcome is the extirpation of evil. A.J.P. Taylor’s dictum is apposite here: ‘Bismarck fought ‘necessary’ wars and killed thousands; democracies fight ‘just’ wars and kill millions’.
The third strand goes back to the Cold War and reflects the resurrection of the tribe of professional Cold War warriors whose intellectual capital was destroyed by the prospect of the normalised peace which opened up in 1991. But history suggests that their capital was dubiously acquired.
Two recent books by Sergey Radchenko and Vladislav Zubok** offer a Russian perspective. The Americans saw the Cold War as an ideological battle between democracy and totalitarianism, whereas the Soviets (who never used the word ‘war’) were mainly interested in establishing a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. With the experience of both the first and second world wars, they saw a pro-Soviet eastern Europe as an essential buffer against future invasions. The US was encouraged by Latvian, Ukrainian, and Polish lobbies in Washington to believe that Soviet insistence on making Eastern Europe a sphere of influence was only a prelude to the attempt to subjugate all of Europe.
Today exactly the same faulty reasoning is employed to justify Europe’s rearmament against Russia. Buffer zones, spheres of influence (as well as Monroe Doctrines) may be repugnant to our ‘rules based international order’ but they do not portend limitless expansion. It is right to be suspicious of Putin’s intentions without falling for the idea that he will never stop.
In fact Russia under Putin is much less of a threat to Europe than was Russia under Stalin, not least because Stalin had millions of men under arms, whereas Putin can barely muster enough forces to subdue Ukraine. The image of a territorially voracious Russia has been created by western foreign policy establishments, backed by their ever hungry military interests. Eisenhower warned against the ‘military-industrial complex’. Today’s Cold War warriors offer a ‘defence-industrial complex’, or ‘military Keynesianism’, to justify escaping from their self-imposed fiscal rules.
The great value of the Trump intervention is to break the logjam of mutually reinforcing paranoia, and open the way to a new security architecture which addresses the needs of both Ukraine and Russia.
Although our government has abandoned hope of a Ukraine victory it still rejects any talk of Ukrainian territorial concessions. The words ‘compromise peace’ never pass its lips. The aim of a grown-up British -and European- diplomacy now should be to persuade Ukrainians to accept the reality of limited, but real independence, the fruit of its successful resistance to the Russian attempt to restore its servile status.
A compromise peace would leave intact a more compact, and therefore more governable country whose road to NATO may be blocked but whose road to the European Union will be opened up.
Notes:
*For more, see Richard Sakwa, Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands (2015).
**Reviewed by Sheila Kirkpatrick, LRB 20 March 2025.
Robert Skidelsky is a member of the British House of Lords, Professor Emeritus of Political Economy at Warwick University, and the author of a prize-winning three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes.
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