Edward Lucas on a big war: “Too little, too late”

by Edward Lucas, a British writer, journalist, and security analyst

Source: Substack blog platform

I’m lucky enough to remember the Cold War. It had its horrifying moments. But we were part of a strong alliance. We were bigger, stronger and richer than our adversaries. Our system worked. Theirs didn’t. We had ideas that we believed in. And we had fought a proper war against a peer adversary within living memory.

None of that is true now. Our alliance is divided and distracted. We have already witnessed the capricious unreliability of past US administrations. This one will probably be worse. Other economic and political models seem to work better than ours. And our armed forces are not prepared for the war that is heading towards us.

I’ve spent my life warning about this. In the 1980s I campaigned against communism and covered its collapse of communism. I was arrested, beaten up, interrogated and deported by communist secret police forces. After 1991, living in the Baltic states, it was completely clear to me that Russia was not the promising emerging market and reliable security partner depicted by the conventional wisdom. It was run by crooks and spooks, with an ingrained imperialist attitude, most dangerously to its neighbours. The cocktail of dirty tricks deployed in the Baltic states and elsewhere included propaganda, bribery, physical intimidation, subversion, sabotage and psychological warfare. Sound familiar? Russia also weaponised history, accusing other countries, falsely, of Nazism, while ignoring the fact that its own empire really does rest on foundations of mass murder compounded by lies.

They warned us. People like the former Estonian president Lennart Meri, in a speech in 1994 in Hamburg. His prescient warning of the danger, that Soviet nostalgia was the foundation of a new Kremlin imperialism, so infuriated the Russian delegation leader that he led a walkout, slamming the door behind him.

I wonder if anyone can guess who he was? Here’s a hint. He ran the foreign economic relations committee of the City of St Petersburg. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.

In this ahistorical age, it can be hard for us to understand that a politicized interpretation of the past is now the battering ram of Putinist ideology, most notably in arguing that Ukraine is not really a proper country. Future historians may wonder why Putin’s history-led war in Ukraine was not foreseen and forestalled.

For at every stage it would have been cheaper and easier to stand up to Putin, just as we could have avoided our reckless dependence on China.

But we have failed.

This country and its allies now face the gravest defence and security crisis in the lifetime of everyone in this room. It is going to inflict horrible, perhaps catastrophic costs. But the price so far has not been paid by us, or the other countries of what I call the comfortable West. It’s been paid by millions of Ukrainians. Dead, maimed, traumatised, bereaved and exiled, their life chances blighted.

Ukrainians’ sacrifice bought us time. We wasted it. We did not help them when our help would have been most effective. If we had been decisive rather than dithering, Ukraine would not be in the plight it is now, its frontline crumbling, its people exhausted, its heating and energy infrastructure devasted, and with far worse to come as winter bites.

Our sanctions on Russia have failed.