‘Arrogance in Foreign Policy Increases the Danger of Miscalculation’

I’ve remembered a few more details about our exchanges in ____ on that evening in _____ ____. I’m sure I mentioned the old description of Britain as ‘America’s unsinkable aircraft carrier’. And there was a similarly humorous effort to explain Russia’s essential role in the world, told to me by a friend in _____.

A buffer-zone which prevents war between Poland and China.

That joke got a laugh when I told it in the preamble to a question at a book festival in Bristol last November. The preceding talk was focused on Pskov, and (maybe because of my special interest in medieval history) I was curious to know about local views of Alexander Nevsky. The speaker incidentally was effectively a Nato cheerleader, and another questioner put it to him that the proxy conflict in Ukraine is ‘the West’s war of choice’ – a sentiment I agree with, though I wasn’t bold enough to say it out loud.

An elderly woman in the seat next to me told me she’d travelled to Moscow in the 1980s to make a BBC TV programme with Canadian broadcaster and former Liberal politician Michael Ignatieff. Ignatieff’s great grandfather incidentally was Count Nikolai Pavlovich Ignatyev; ‘MVP’ of the Great Game who was Russian ambassador to Peking (1859-61) and Constantinople (1864-77). Online I couldn’t find any trace of a 1980s Moscow programme, but I did find an interesting BBC documentary Ignatieff made about Ukraine, called ‘Blood and Belonging’, in 1993. On page 79 of the accompanying book he wrote:

I have reason to take… Ukraine seriously indeed but to be honest I’m having trouble. Ukrainian independence conjures up images of peasant embroidered t-shirts, the nasal whine of ethnic instruments, phony Cossacks and cloaks and boots and nasty anti-semites.

If Ukrainians want to shake off the latter tag, they could start by toning down their hero-worship of Nazi filth like Andriy Melnyk. Last month’s repatriation and state burial was condemned by the Polish president and Lech Walesa as well as by Israel’s foreign ministry. The Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem issued a statement:

Honoring the leader of a movement that supported and collaborated with Nazi Germany during the persecution and murder of millions of Jews undermines the moral integrity essential to Holocaust remembrance.

At a second book festival event, historian Giles Milton discussed wartime diplomacy in Moscow. While he was speaking a thought occurred to me about the decision to host the ‘Big Three’ conference at Yalta in February 1945. I’m sure I read or heard somewhere that Soviet appeals for increased deliveries of equipment and supplies via the Arctic Convoys were specifically linked to the brutal struggle to re-take Crimea, completed in May 1944. Milton was non-committal when I asked his views on this, but the more I think about it, the more certain I am that this was a factor in Stalin’s choice.

[…] I hope I’m not unduly critical of ‘baby-boomers’, but there’s one thing I think they get badly wrong. It concerns the great event everyone associates with JFK, apart from his assassination. Joe Biden set out the conventional wisdom in a speech he gave in October 2022.

We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Notwithstanding his cognitive decline (as shockingly advanced as that was by 2022), Biden was either ignorant or dishonest on this point. ‘Life as we know it’ teetered on the brink of nuclear annihilation not once but twice during the Cold War. The idea that the world was safe in the autumn of 1983 is a joke as sick and dark as the suggestion that Biden could run for president again, in 2028.

In 1983 the nuclear stand-off was more acutely perilous than almost anyone realised, though of course it did spill over into public consciousness. On 20 November, ABC News dedicated a special discussion programme to the subject, with panellists including Henry Kissinger, Robert McNamara and Carl Sagan. McNamara told the audience that

There are 40,000 nuclear warheads in the inventories of the US and the Soviet Union today with a destructive power roughly a million times that of the Hiroshima bomb.

No less importantly, Kissinger explained:

There's a point that has not been mentioned this evening at all. We are talking as if nuclear weapons cause wars. What will cause wars is political tensions and crisis and uncontrolled ambitions, and unless one is willing to face that fact and unless one is willing to do something about it… if tensions multiply in the world sooner or later there'll be a war, not necessarily a nuclear war, and any war in which we are involved and maybe the Soviets are involved increases the danger of nuclear war… sooner or later it is going to be the political instability that is going to drive us into war not the weapons by themselves [emphasis added].

I’m sure this is old hat as far as you’re concerned, but I must admit I’ve only just picked up on the unique capacity of intermediate-range nuclear missiles to undermine the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction. Mainly, this is because they could be launched relatively quickly, with a high degree of accuracy, over distances the target government didn’t exactly know. Potentially therefore, a ‘first-strike’ could decapitate the civilian leadership of the target country. In addition, in order to be within range of important US or USSR population centres, their ground-based variants typically needed to be launched from the territories of satellite dependencies. As such they automatically widened and/or complicated the scope of superpower confrontation.

Contrary to standard western accounts, the primary cause of the October 1962 crisis was not the Soviet transfer of intermediate-range nuclear missiles to Cuba. Khrushchev’s actions were precipitated by Kennedy’s deployment of Jupiter missiles with similar specifications in Turkey in March of the same year.

43 years ago, on 2^nd June 1983 veteran US diplomat Averell Harriman met with Soviet leader Yuri Andropov. Following on from 1980’s ‘The Empire Strikes Back’, George Lucas’s ‘Return of the Jedi’ was released in UK cinemas on the same day. Very clearly, Reagan intended to jump on the bandwagon when he used the incendiary term ‘evil empire’ in a speech to Evangelical ministers on 08 March. To borrow a phrase used by Taylor Downing in his book ‘1983: Reagan, Andropov, and a World on the Brink’, Reagan was

…striking the populist chord that got him elected.

This is confirmed by his announcement of the ‘Strategic Defense Initiative’ in the same month. That it instantly came to be nicknamed ‘Star Wars’ could not have surprised anyone, least of all the US president who understood the ‘military entertainment complex’ better than anyone else.

Yet according to Taylor Downing, even Nancy had advised him against this type of inflammatory rhetoric. Harriman too, on the eve of his audience with Andropov, told Secretary of State George Schultz:

I do wish the President could be more careful.

Reagan’s announcement of ‘Star Wars’, hard on the heels of his turbo-charged dog-whistling, delivered a body-blow to superpower relations that were already in big trouble. Hence Andropov’s earnest warnings to Harriman about the dangers of miscalculation. In an 80-minute audience, the Soviet leader referred four times to his belief that nuclear war could be in prospect; notably in his observation that Reagan was ‘moving towards a dangerous red line’.

With the following words to Texas A&M University students on 15 April 2019, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo set out the basic problem whenever the US stakes a claim to the moral high ground.

I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. It’s — it was like — we had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.

On 1^st September 1983 it was just the luck of Korean Airlines Flight 007 to stray hundreds of miles off course into Soviet airspace, past a careless US reconnaissance aircraft loitering in the same area. KAL-007’s shoot-down, to howls of ‘pre-meditated murder’ from western capitals, was the stunt Nato needed to force through the deployment of Pershing II intermediate-range missiles in Germany. Exacerbated by the arrival of cruise missiles in Britain and elsewhere, Mikhail Gorbachev would later describe the new WMD landscape as

a gun pressed against our temple.

Taylor Downing provides chapter and verse on the diagnostic tools which the Kremlin used to assess the likelihood of an imminent ‘first strike’. Jill Kastner’s synopsis is from her 31 May 2018 review of Downing’s book in The Nation.

[On 26 September] a software glitch at a Soviet early-warning station reported five separate launches of American ICBMs. Thanks to the cool head of [Stanislav Petrov], no retaliation was ordered, but the malfunction stoked Soviet fears that their early-warning systems might not be up to the task.

On October 23, [in response to] a massive truck bomb at the US Marine barracks in Beirut, US embassies and military installations across the globe went on heightened alert.

This ticked an important box in Moscow’s ‘first-strike’ checklist; as did the US invasion of Grenada two days later, since it caused

a dramatic spike in cable traffic between London and Washington—prompted by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s fury at the American move.

Meanwhile, NATO had begun Autumn Forge, a massive annual war game stretching from Norway to Turkey that involved approximately 100,000 NATO personnel, including 19,000 American troops airlifted across the Atlantic under radio silence. The finale was Able Archer, in which NATO practiced procedures for launching nuclear weapons at Warsaw Pact forces. Although it was designed to be a command-post exercise, involving no troops, there were enough troops on the ground to sow confusion.

Downing’s book makes the most compelling case yet that the Soviet reaction to Able Archer was extraordinary. Cables coming into the London KGB residency warned that NATO forces had gone on alert and might be preparing for the long-awaited first strike, possibly beginning in seven to 10 days. KGB officers were urged to go all-out in their search for signs of preparations for war. Roughly 50 percent of the [Soviet] SS-20 missiles were deployed to their secret field stations. The MiG-23 fighters on East German runways were placed on 30-minute alert. After the players in the war game moved to Defense Readiness Condition (DefCon) 1, the highest level of military alert, NATO did what it had never done before, changing the codes used in every other Able Archer exercise to something totally new for the most sensitive part of the game.

The commander of an SS-20 unit [was ordered to] stay in his bunker in constant radio communication, on the highest state of alert, waiting for orders to launch. He was in contact with Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, the chief of the Soviet general staff, who had descended into the bomb-proof bunker outside Moscow, from where he could launch an attack should the leadership in the Kremlin be wiped out in a decapitating first strike. An assistant commander on a Delta-class nuclear submarine describes how his sub moved to its battle station under the Arctic ice and remained in a continuous state of combat alert, the only such instance in his 18-year career. In an SS-19 ICBM silo, a two-man team was joined by the dreaded ‘third man,’ a presumed KGB officer, assigned to ensure that any orders to launch would be followed.

[…] The lessons of 1983 are clear. Arrogance in foreign policy increases the danger of miscalculation. Dialogue with our adversaries, whether in Pyongyang or Tehran or Moscow, is essential. Given the renewed nuclear sab[re] rattling on the world stage, we would be wise to remember a time when a toxic cocktail of threats, fear, and misunderstanding nearly led us down the path to Armageddon [emphasis added].

Stella Maris Meals

“St Mary-on-the-Quay is central to the history of the Catholic Church in Bristol.” Mervyn Alexander, Bishop of Clifton 1974-2001 (✝2010)

Fr Michael Cleary moved into St Mary’s presbytery on the feast of the Triumph of the Cross, 14 September 2004. Ably assisted by Frs Nico and Anil, he thus became the first SVD (Divine Word missionary) incumbent priest. SMQ is usually understood to enjoy the special protection of Our Lady’s Immaculate Conception. However, before his untimely passing in October 2008, Fr Michael told me his firm conviction that the true dedication is to Our Lady, Star of the Sea. Of course, ‘on-the-Quay’ was an accurate qualifier when the church was consecrated in 1843, though the docks were covered over in the 1890s. And he went on to explain that Bristol itself is under the patronage of Stella Maris (‘Star of the Sea’ in Latin). The same title of Our Lady is also likely to have been the original dedication of St Mary Redcliffe: described as “the fairest, goodliest, and most famous parish church in England” by Elizabeth I on her visit to Bristol in 1574.

In 1992, at Craig Lodge, Dalmally, salmon farmer Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow founded an aid agency, Scottish International Relief (SIR), in his Dad’s slightly wonky all-purpose shed. On the face of it you wouldn’t expect a Stella Maris tie-in here. She’s the patron saint for instance of the Netherlands, associated with seafaring and maritime communications. Located twenty miles or more from the nearest jellyfish-infested waters, it hardly seems worth floating the idea that Dalmally is a beachfront holiday resort. Even so, one could mention that the beautiful wider region, Argyll, has a name said to derive from Old Gaelic Airer Goídel, meaning ‘Coast of the Gaels’. Might a Star of the Sea connection be worth taking on board after all?

In the cold light of day it’s more likely pie in the sky. The relevant passage is in Chapter 6 of The Shed That Fed 2 Million Children, Magnus’s bestselling page-turner which he updated last year. Englishman Tony Smith came up with the name Mary’s Meals in 2002, while living in landlocked Malawi. His inspiration was a television interview with onetime US presidential candidate George McGovern. Bemoaning the lack of idealism in US politics, the former Senator from South Dakota extolled the virtues of providing nutritious meals every school day in the world’s poorest communities. The evidence showed three important effects in every one of thirty pilot programmes in different countries. Enrolment almost doubled; academic and general health standards rose sharply; and girls were able to benefit. This last outcome is crucial, not least because educated girls almost invariably marry later and go on to have roughly half or less than half the number of children (on average 2.9 per mother, as opposed to 6). As McGovern put it:

“Nutrition is not only the handmaiden of education, in that it gets children into school and enables them to learn when they get there. It’s also the handmaiden of a responsible birth-rate”.

Still, SMQ wouldn’t be the only example of an obscure or disguised dedication to Stella Maris. In the 2000s there was a centre in downtown St Petersburg, Russia, providing food, medical care and basic education to homeless and underprivileged children. Its name, ‘Morskaya Zvezda’, translates literally into Russian as Sea Star – ‘starfish’. But the Marian connotation wasn’t lost on staff and administrators, many of whom were Byzantine-rite Catholics from Ukraine or RCs from western countries. And when the author of this article was in the famous Shed at Craig Lodge in May 2013, about to embark on a largely overland (and walking) pilgrimage to Malawi, there was a measure of providence in the fact that Magnus told me to visit Liberia.

Like neighbouring Sierra Leone, Liberia was founded in the nineteenth century as a homeland for freed slaves. It falls into the challenging subset of relatively young countries which also happen to be among the world’s poorest. SIR/Mary’s Meals has been active there since the years of devastating civil war in the 1990s, and has made an incalculable contribution since the fighting ended in 2003. I was powerfully struck by the contrast between the calm and confident demeanour of folks in villages benefitting from Mary’s Meals, and the often woebegone ambience of communities it hadn’t reached.

Another notable thing about Liberia though, is its lack of a clearly stated patron saint. True, various possibilities have been suggested, including Jane Rose Roberts, who served as First Lady twice in the mid-1800s. Born in Petersburg Virginia and brought to Liberia in 1824, Mrs Roberts worked hard to improve the lot of the poor and reconcile different tribes. Yet in the absence of any swift progress towards her beatification, the Star-Spangled Banner she may have helped design surely offers the best clue as to who Liberians should turn to in their hour of need. Monrovia, the capital, has a shipping registry containing more vessels than anywhere else in the world except Panama. I began the modified ‘flag of convenience’ below in the Monrovian suburb of Virginia on the feast of St Nicholas (patron saint of seafarers), 06 December 2013. Since my as yet unfinished account of the pilgrimage as a whole has a tongue-in-cheek Indiana Jones theme, the Liberia chapter is projected to be called ‘The Template of Doom’.

“Look at the Star, call upon Mary … With her as your guide, you shall not go astray; while invoking her, you shall never lose heart … if she walks before you, you shall not grow weary; if she shows you favour, you shall reach the goal.” St Bernard of Clairvaux

Until 31 January 2023, all donations to Mary’s Meals will be doubled by a group of generous supporters, up to £1.5 million. It is hoped this will enable the charity to overcome difficulties caused by conflict and increased food insecurity.

The Amber Dog

Tsar Nicholas II’s uncle by marriage, King Edward VII (d. 1910) was the first British monarch to decree that since his birthday was in wet and grey November, its ‘official’ celebration should be moved to the summer. His great granddaughter Queen Elizabeth II was born in April, when the weather also tends to be a bit mixed, so Saturday 11 June 2016 was appointed as her official 90th birthday. What made this particularly interesting to me was that it coincided with an important football match between Russia and England.

When I arrived at the Mamonovo border crossing on 25 May 2016, the official who checked my passport decided I should be given extra scrutiny, so I was interviewed by two of her colleagues. To put their minds at rest I cited Inga as one of my contacts in Kaliningrad; and indeed my two previous visits, as a guest of IKBFU in 2012 and 2014 (without which I could never have realised my aims on this trip) were made possible only by Inga selflessly sparing time to clear bureaucratic obstacles on my behalf. Moreover I was keen to see her of course, my former colleague and friend whom I’d first met seventeen years earlier, though I had no wish to believe it would be my last opportunity. But meanwhile I explained to the guards that my principal objective was to give a talk at a church in the small town of Znamensk, about a charity called Mary’s Meals. The delay caused by this interview however, meant the coach I’d travelled on from Gdansk had to leave without me, so I ended up being given a lift to Kaliningrad by an Azeri truck driver. In conversation with him, it was very useful that I knew the name of Tofiq Bahramov.

According to legend, the man known to countless English football fans as ‘the Russian linesman’ (in spite of his hailing from Azerbaijan) was given a gold whistle by Queen Elizabeth in gratitude for his award of a controversial goal to England in the 1966 World Cup final. In fact it was customary for the referee of the final to get a gold whistle; in 1966 there was only a slight change when both his assistants received them too. [1] [2] Nonetheless, to this day there are those who think the Queen intentionally sought to ensure that Mr Bahramov’s part in England’s victory over West Germany did not go unrecognised.

Queen Elizabeth’s sense of humour surfaced more unambiguously in April 2014, when she met Pope Francis for the first time. Presenting the Pontiff with a set of signed photographs of herself and her husband, she said,

“I’m afraid you have to have a photograph, it’s inevitable.”[3]

Clearly she found this particular protocol a bit of a bore; and no doubt she would have had exactly the same reservations about the identikit pictures given to Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia, on his visit to Buckingham Palace on 18 October 2016. Even so, in view of the prevailing chill in relations between Russia and Britain at the time, an important thing to note about this meeting is that it exceeded all expectations. Before his departure from Luton Airport, the Patriarch told journalists:

“I am very pleased with the [results of] this meeting and I must say that I did not expect it to take place in such an atmosphere and at such an active level as it did. She has bright beaming eyes, a wonderful reaction to words, to questions, to the conversation. She herself talked a lot and said very right, clever things that were interesting to listen to. This conversation made a very pleasant impression on me intellectually and emotionally.”

What’s more however, on this occasion there is reason to suspect that a certain high-profile Royal may have been behind a decision to furnish her guest with a souvenir that certainly doesn’t find its way into many a tourist’s hand luggage. The day before the palace meeting, Patriarch Kirill’s entourage had its ranks unexpectedly swelled by the addition of a yellow Pembrokeshire Welsh Corgi puppy. 

Archbishop Justin Welby looks on as Patriarch Kirill receives a Pembrokeshire Welsh Corgi puppy, London, 17 October 2016 [4]

On the face of it this was a gift from the Russian Orthodox Cathedral of the Dormition in London, where Prince Michael of Kent, the Queen’s cousin who bears a striking resemblance to Tsar Nicholas II, is known to worship. Patriarch Kirill was delighted with his present:

“The dog is wonderful, and since I spend a considerable part of my personal life completely alone, it is very pleasant for me to know that there will be a reliable friend to share my solitude.”

But the intriguing thing is that Pembrokeshire Welsh Corgis are exactly the breed to which Queen Elizabeth has been especially devoted, for almost all of her 91 years.[5]

There’s a picture of a dog sculpted out of amber (Figure 2) on page 91 of a book Inga gave me for my 40th birthday, which I celebrated in September 2014 with a few friends in one of Kaliningrad’s ‘Britannica’ English-style pubs.

Figure 2: amber dog on p.91 of The Poetry of Amber, Mastery and Discovery by Gennady Losets[6]

In Figure 3, Gennady Losets’ The Poetry of Amber, Mastery and Discovery is visible underneath the box of chocolates she also gave me, next to my glass of ‘amber nectar’.[7] Incidentally, underneath that book one can just see the corner of another tome, Robin Dunbar’s fascinating Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language, which I would never have read if Inga hadn’t given it to me, but which turned out to have a direct bearing on writing I’ve been doing, about Africa.

Figure 3: the author's 40th birthday celebration, in the company of Inga and other friends, Kaliningrad, September 2014. Two books are visible, underneath the box of chocolates.

Inga’s scientific interest in differences between male and female communication perhaps helped her to tolerate the occasions when I talked about football. In one of our last conversations, I told her how appalled I was to learn that someone had shone a green laser into Russian goalkeeper Igor Akinfeev’s face, just before Algeria’s equalizer against Russia in the Brazil World Cup (I’d seen similar behaviour in Morocco, in a game featuring one of Casablanca’s teams).[8] I also made a ‘Soviet-era’ joke, that if Akinfeev had a very traumatic time in the game against England, then perhaps Russian TV would feel obliged to show Swan Lake. Approximately, this was also when Inga put her birthday tribute for Queen Elizabeth inside another book, which I later sent from Kaliningrad.

The Shed That Fed A Million Children, which tells the story of Mary’s Meals, should one day appear in a Russian edition, thanks to the translating efforts of another of my dearest Kaliningrad friends. As regards the copy I sent to the Queen however; Inga was one of about a dozen local residents who put birthday greetings inside. Although I don’t have a photograph of those messages, I do have pictures of the card I sent at the same time (Figures 4-7). The front shows the scene in the Britannica pub where I watched Russia vs. England; another friend did the enlargement of the image of the Queen holding a pint of amber nectar, as if to toast her own birthday.

Figure 4: front of card showing the interior of Britannica pub on the Queen's official 90th birthday. The match between Russia and England finished 1-1.

Figure 5: Message inside card sent to Buckingham Palace from Kaliningrad, June 2016

Among the things inside the card, Inga tipped me off about the building rumoured to have been the residence at one time of a British government representative.

Figure 6: information about Kaliningrad inside the Queen's birthday card

Figure 7: back of the Queen's birthday card, showing Britannica pub, Kaliningrad, with Russian, British and EU flags. The card was dated and sent from Kaliningrad on the day Britain (England) voted to leave the EU

Having put the book and card into the post on 23rd June 2016 (the day of the UK’s vote to leave the EU, after which England’s footballers went to pieces), the letter dated 14 September from Balmoral Castle showed that the Queen received them (Figures 8-9). The question then is whether they might have made any difference to her meeting with Patriarch Kirill a month later. I think they did, firstly because she and her daughter Princess Anne are well aware of Mary’s Meals and its founder, Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow OBE, who wrote The Shed That Fed A Million Children.[9] More specifically however, I think the things she received from Kaliningrad made an impression because although footballing honours were shared in the game between Russia and England, it was marred by hooliganism between rival supporters. Without dwelling on who was to blame or who came off worse; the point is that an opportunity for the two countries to ‘let off steam’ turned into an excuse for yet more bad feeling. Since it took place on her official 90th birthday, the Queen at the very least would have stayed informed of the score-line; inevitably therefore, the violent disturbances must have left her with some measure of disappointment. That’s why I believe the book, with its cheerful and affectionate birthday messages, and the card, would likely have helped restore her sense that far from wishing Britain any harm, Russians are naturally inclined to be friendly towards us.

So can one infer from all this that Inga played an indispensable role in the events which led to Patriarch Kirill being given a Corgi? In my opinion it’s reasonable to think so. I only wish it was possible to ask her what she thinks.

Figure 8: card and letter sent from Balmoral Castle, Scotland, September 2016

Figure 9: text of letter sent on behalf of Queen Elizabeth II, dated 14 September 2016

[1] Brian Cronin, Sports Urban Legends Revealed, 22-06-2014

[2] ‘Azerbaijan set to unveil golden whistle from 1966 World Cup final’, Gulf Times, 30-07-2016

[3] Nick Squires, ‘The Queen Meets Pope Francis on Visit to Rome’, Daily Telegraph, 03-04-2014

[4] ‘Patriarch Kirill is given a corgi puppy’, LENTA.RU, 17-10-2016. Photo: Alexander Volkov https://lenta.ru/news/2016/10/17/korgi_patriarha/

[5] Andrew Pierce, ‘Hug for Queen Elizabeth’s first corgi’, Daily Telegraph, 01-10-2007

[6] OOO «ЖИВЁМ» Калининград, 2012. ISBN 978-5-903400-24-9

[7] Australian colloquialism, meaning light-coloured beer

[8] ‘World Cup 2014: Russia goalkeeper targeted by laser’, BBC News, 27-06-2014

[9] See MacFarlane-Barrow, ‘The Shed That Fed A Million Children’, HarperCollins, 2015, pp.237-8. In May 2017 Magnus gained first-hand knowledge of Princess Anne’s interest in the work of Mary’s Meals, when he was placed next to her at a formal banquet at Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh.

Bear-baiting: NATO’s scurvy reboot of a long-reviled blood sport

In the midst of last month’s soaring temperatures, BBC Radio 4’s early evening news programme carried a salutary reminiscence from Allan Little. He was in France during the long hot summer of 2003.

“The dazzling light bounced off the pale bleached walls of the Paris boulevards, and the air rose from sticky molten tarmac in visible thermal currents. The mercury pushed above 40 degrees Celsius every day for a week. By the end of July, A&E doctors were screaming for help. The elderly were dying, they said, while many health professionals were on annual leave. The Health Minister said it simply wasn’t true, refused to recall staff, and like everyone else, went on holiday. The old and infirm can withstand punishing temperatures during the day, if there is some relief at night, when the body can recuperate during a good night’s sleep. But in early August there were three consecutive nights when the temperature didn’t fall below 26 degrees. It was catastrophic. We saw people stretchered into crowded hospitals, packed in ice, from shoulder to thigh. Refrigerated marquees were erected to store bodies because the undertakers couldn’t cope. Many remained unclaimed for weeks because younger relatives were still on holiday. Finally the government declared a public health crisis. Too late. On the day the plan came into force, the weather broke. The temperature plummeted, and Paris breathed again. And when they did the sums, they found that more than 12,000 French citizens had been killed by the heat.”

Clearly, this doesn’t show French politicians to their best advantage; though unlike their US and British counterparts of the time, at least their hands weren’t caked in the blood of untold tens of thousands of dead and maimed Iraqi civilians. Be that as it may however, it’s useful to be reminded of Allan Little’s reporting flair. He was one of the few western correspondents who took a more than superficial interest in Moscow’s reaction to the Kosovo crisis in the spring and summer of 1999.

“The Russian role… was absolutely vital to the ending of the war. I think by the end of April the NATO allies understood the importance of getting the Russians on board. They completely disregarded Russian objections at the UN Security Council… [emphasis added]”[1]

No biggie, but NATO’s humanitarian killing spree was therefore illegal, in contravention of its own Atlantic Charter and international law. Acceptance of Kosovo independence claims in 2008 also trampled on the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, enshrining the sovereignty and territorial integrity of European states. Returning though to Little’s analysis:

“…they disregarded Russian objections at Rambouillet, but by the end of April they realised that they couldn’t do it really without the Russians. They invited the Russians back in. The Russians opened up a new diplomatic channel and a secret back channel which we talked about in our programme. The result was that the signal went unambiguously to Milosevic that he couldn’t expect Russia to come to his aid and it was because of that signal, I believe, that Milosevic ended the war.

“What was most interesting to me was the nature of the deal that was done in Moscow between Yeltsin’s people, the political leadership, and the military. I don’t know the answer to that but there was clearly a deal at the end of May. Yeltsin in some way bought off the military. They were very unhappy with what was happening in Kosovo, public opinion was extremely unhappy, it’s clear that Yeltsin felt very threatened and challenged both by the rising tide of public anger and by the strength that this gave the military, and he did something to strike a deal with the Russian military. The price that the Russian military paid was to send the signal to Milosevic that they weren’t going to come to his aid. What the military got in exchange is not clear. There is all sorts of speculation in Moscow but it is only that as far as I know.”

The nuts and bolts of Yeltsin’s relationship with his top brass, as the bombing intensified and the range of targets widened, is potentially a fascinating topic for discussion. However the purpose of this article is rather to highlight the anger generated by NATO’s unprovoked murder rampage in Russia as a whole. Polling revealed that it was opposed by 94% of the population.[2] In November last year, onetime US diplomat and GOP Senate foreign policy advisor Jim Jatras tweeted an excellent summary of the situation:

“I remember Russians telling me afterwards, “You know, we never believed all that Soviet propaganda about ‘aggressive NATO’ because we knew what liars communists are. But then you attacked Serbia and we saw that everything we thought was lies about you was all true.””[3]

It’s quite likely this reflected the thinking of Boris Nikolayevich himself. Evidence that in the early days of his presidency he was little if at all exercised about NATO comes from former senior UK emissary Charles Crawford:

“In 1993 Russia’s President Yeltsin met Poland’s President Lech Wałesa in Warsaw during a visit to mark the final withdrawal of Russian forces from (formerly Warsaw Pact) Poland. Yeltsin was asked point-blank by Wałesa whether Poland could join NATO. He replied to the effect that as a free nation in a now undivided Europe, Poland could do what it liked. Yeltsin also issued a communiqué expressing ‘understanding’ for Poland’s NATO ambitions.

“Years later as UK Ambassador to Warsaw I asked Lech Wałesa about this momentous meeting and Yeltsin’s apparently affable acceptance of Poland’s NATO aspirations. Had the Russian President been, perhaps, over-infused with Polish vodka? Wałesa said no: Yeltsin had genuinely not been bothered, one way or the other.”[4]

But that was then. Kosovo represented a seismic shift. Not that there weren’t signs of disillusionment well before it hit the headlines. In a June 1997 article entitled ‘Adversaries or Allies?’, Irina Zhinkina of Moscow’s Institute for US and Canadian Studies asked:

“How is it that the new Russia, which has cast off its former ideology, remembered God, sworn loyalty to the new ideals of democracy and fallen into the embrace of its recent ‘probable adversaries’ is not accepted by western civilisation? What else must it do?”[5]

March 1999 though was the watershed moment. By throwing its weight around in the Balkans, NATO demonstrated it was precisely a law unto itself.

“NATO has proved that more or less it can do what it wants, where it wants, indeed when it wants.”[6]

This again provides necessary context for a claim made recently by Chinese Defence Ministry spokesperson Wu Qian:

“NATO is a war machine, a military tool in furtherance of US hegemony, and a systemic threat to world peace and stability.”[7]

Yet influential figures like former US State Dept mandarin Mike McFaul affect incredulity at the idea that Putin is genuinely concerned about NATO at all. Referring to the Kremlin leader’s rhetoric in February of this year, Obama’s Moscow ambassador would have us believe there was some tremendous significance in the fact that

“In [his] 7000-word speech, the first 4628 he doesn’t mention NATO once”.[8]

As if the way a speech is structured has any bearing on the importance of a particular theme (and no matter that once Putin got on to Ukraine NATO membership, he described it as being “like a knife to Russia’s throat”). In addition, McFaul has a mantra which he repeats ad nauseam:

“NATO is not a threat to Russia!”

That might have some kind of quasi legitimacy if Washington and Moscow agreed on what is and what is not Russia. Since the re-unification of Crimea in 2014 however, they don’t. In the words of distinguished IR specialist Prof John Mearsheimer:

“It’s really quite remarkable, when you listen to people in the Administration speak, and when you read editorials in the Washington Post, words like this are spoken: “This has absolutely nothing to do with NATO expansion”. I don’t know how anybody can say that. The Russians have been saying since April 2008, that this is all about NATO expansion, that NATO expansion into Ukraine is an existential threat to them.”[9]

In a helpful 2020 interview, Britain’s former ambassador to Moscow Sir Roderic Lyne (who always tended to be quite critical of the Kremlin) covered similar ground:

“And then we arrive to the 2008 Bucharest summit of NATO, which was a massive mistake on the Western side trying to push Georgia and Ukraine into NATO. It was stupid on every level at that time. If you want to start a war with Russia, that’s the best way of doing it […] The final compromise communiqué, to me, is one of the most stupid documents in modern diplomacy. The paragraph in the Bucharest communiqué about Georgia and Ukraine should be framed and put on the wall of every Western diplomat as an example of what not to do. It combines the worst of both worlds: it upsets the Georgians and the Ukrainians by not giving them a Membership Action Programme and it upsets the Russians by saying someday these guys are going to join NATO.”[10]

“But Americans simply refuse to believe that. [Mearsheimer again.] And instead what they have done, is they have created a story, that it’s not American policy, it’s not NATO expansion that’s driving this train. Instead it’s Vladimir Putin, and it’s that Vladimir Putin is either bent on recreating the Soviet Union, or he’s interested in creating a Greater Russia. But whichever one of those two outcomes you take, he is ultimately an expansionist. He is on the march. And thank God we expanded NATO, because if we hadn’t expanded NATO he’d probably be in Berlin by now, if not Paris. This is the basic argument. But of course we had to invent the story after the crisis broke out, so that we weren’t blamed for what happened. We had to blame the Russians, so we created this story.”[11]

Compounding everything over the past several years has been Ukraine’s disdainful attitude to the 2014-15 Minsk agreements; directly analogous to Britain’s contempt for the Northern Ireland Protocol in fact. Both governments were insisting the texts were unworkable before the ink had even dried. Kiev simply decided to use these agreements as an opportunity to carry out a slow-motion pogrom against the civilian population of Donetsk, with US/UK connivance.

What follows is a transcript of part of a CER (Centre for European Reform) podcast dated 13-07-2022.

Rosie Giorgi: “Charles Crawford in the UK asked:

“How far if at all do you think Russia can reasonably feel humiliated or cheated as such, by the new security and economic arrangements that emerged in Europe following the end of the Cold War and the break-up of the Soviet Union?””

Ian Bond: “Well, thanks very much Rosie, and thanks very much Charles. I mean, full disclosure, Charles was my boss in the British embassy in Moscow in the mid-1990s, so he and I saw many of the relevant events at that time, unrolling before our very eyes, and you could write a book about why things turned out the way they did and whose fault it was, and in fact, quite a few people have written such books. But here is my less than book-length answer, which is that the narrative of humiliation is one that Putin and those around him in the Russian leadership have chosen for themselves. It wasn’t an inevitable outcome of western actions. In fact in those early post-Cold War years, the West made enormous efforts to try to give Russia a higher status internationally than its post-Soviet condition really justified. So despite the fact that its economy was a basket case, it became a member of the G8 group of leading industrial countries. I mean, by no stretch of the imagination was 1990s Russia a leading industrial country, but it became part of that group. It was invited to join the major western powers in the so-called Contact Group, trying to bring peace to former Yugoslavia, and actually I could say it played quite a constructive role in that. And although it wasn’t invited to apply for NATO membership, it was given a special relationship with NATO through the NATO-Russia Founding Act. I mean, arguably more influence than any other third country had with NATO at the time. And it signed a partnership and cooperation agreement with the EU which gave it various trade benefits, and it joined the Council of Europe, the main European human rights organisation, even though its human rights record was still quite poor. So it got quite a lot in that early post-Cold War period. But what nobody could do, or what nobody was prepared to do, was to give Russia the kind of sphere of influence that the Soviet Union had had, in central and eastern Europe. And that’s because no western country could impose the kind of limits on the foreign policies of now-independent states in central and eastern Europe, that Russia wanted them to impose.”

The implication here is that all you had was a straight choice between the carving up of Europe at Yalta in February 1945, and the Helsinki Accords of 1975. A dumbed-down perspective surely, which doesn’t in any case take account of the coach and horses driven through Helsinki’s picturesque townscape by recognition of Kosovo independence.  

Rosie G: “And then so to ask Charles’s follow-up question: Did let’s say key western capitals get it wrong in terms of their perspectives, or drafting the arrangements, or in bringing Russia into the fold, or has Russia itself been unable to adapt, or a combination of both?”

Ian B: “Yes, so I think the West made some mistakes at the very beginning. So when the Soviet Union broke up at the end of 1991, the West could have done more to help democrats in Russia, and there were a lot of them around at that time. And in particular I would single out two areas where I think we didn’t do enough. One was in terms of helping Russia’s democrats to reduce the role of the former KGB and its officers, like Putin, because they were allowed to move from, you know, the KGB, a pretty brutal organisation, into positions of influence in Russia. That was problematic, and it became more problematic over time.”

What Ian Bond omits to mention here is that although Putin was a KGB officer, he resigned as soon as he heard about the August 1991 coup against Gorbachev. On top of that, as an associate of reforming St Petersburg mayor Anatoly Sobchak from 1990 to 1996, he had a decent claim to be one of the “democrats in Russia” deemed worthy of western help. This finds support in deeply unfashionable but nonetheless insightful remarks made by former BBC Moscow correspondent Martin Sixsmith in May 2012:

“If you take the presidential elections [of March that year] I thought there was a bit of disingenuousness about the way they were reported in Britain… When I was reading reports of the presidential election which he won with 56 percent or 60 whatever percent; the first line of every article, and even on the BBC which broadly is sort of objective about these things, was “Western election observers report that the elections were skewed towards Vladimir Putin”, and then they report that he got 65 percent of the vote. And actually the real story is that he got a majority which a western politician would give his right arm for. And even if there had been no vote-rigging – there was definitely vote-rigging, I know because I’ve spoken to people who were involved in the electoral process – even if there hadn’t been any vote-rigging, he still would have won a fantastic majority. Maybe not 65 percent – maybe 60, 59, 58 percent. And that’s the story I’m afraid. You know, the story is that he won a very big majority.”[12]

If Sixsmith is right, the Kremlin’s highest profile occupants had authentic democratic mandates from 1992 until at least 2018. Which isn’t to suggest the system is perfect. But Russia can be considered to be at least as democratic as South Africa, where the ANC has held power since 1994. Bond continues however…

“Secondly I think the West could have done more to help Russia establish the rule of law, rather than helping Russian oligarchs launder their money in the West. And that’s a process that began really in the 1990s, and we got that quite badly wrong. But fundamentally, we are where we are today, because of the choices that Russian leaders have made since then. Basically you get a choice over the sort of history that you tell yourself is your history. And Russia could have chosen to say, and it would have been justified in some respects to say, that its people were the heroes who had thrown off the yoke of Soviet totalitarianism after the 1991 coup, when Soviet hardliners tried to roll back the kind of democratic reforms that were coming in in the Soviet Union. So they could have said, you know, our people were the heroes who overthrew the Soviet dictatorship, and now we want to become a normal European democracy, and we recognise that we have some bridges to build with our neighbours who’ve suffered under the Soviet dictatorship for the last fifty years. And that would have been a bit like West Germany after the Second World War. But instead, particularly after Putin came into power, Russia chose, or the Russian authorities chose to blame the collapse of the USSR on the evil devious West, and then to try to reassert control over parts of the old empire as it were.

“And I guess what I would say, and I know Charles is a keen football fan, so I think he’ll recognise this; but I would say that basically, the Russian leadership under Putin has made a choice, that it is happy to be the Millwall of international relations. So Millwall are famous… Millwall supporters are famous for their chant: “Nobody [sic] likes us, we don’t care”, and that’s been Putin’s approach to the rest of the world since he came to power.”

Perhaps the author should declare an interest, as someone who taught English in the late 1990s to at least one future employee of the Russian MFA. But there’s no shortage of sound reasons to be sceptical of Ian B’s take, which isn’t even consistent with his own words. Unless he believes Putin transformed Russia into a “leading industrial nation”, its G8 membership remained an anomaly well into the twenty-first century. Yet this privileged status was at the same time almost entirely uncontroversial. There were no serious calls for Russia to be expelled until 2014, when relations came under an intolerable strain thanks to the US/EU-backed overthrow of Victor Yanukovych in Kiev.

In reality, the tale of Russia’s foreign policy in the Putin era has primarily been one of a constant search for customers for its oil and gas. And for instance there’s also this vignette from former head of the UK diplomatic service Lord McDonald of Salford:

“However difficult the political relationship, it is striking how the diplomats on the spot, the diplomats who have to work with each other every day, manage to keep their personal relationships going. And again an anecdote, from when our last ambassador to the United Nations in New York left, it was Karen Pierce, who is now our ambassador in Washington. She’d been in New York a couple of years, she left at the beginning of last year. The warmest tribute paid to Karen at the Security Council table, was from the Russian ambassador, which might surprise the audience.”[13]

It’s safe to assume Russia’s envoy didn’t suddenly remember basic principles of diplomacy forgotten since the Yeltsin era.

This was never in fact about Russian indifference to western interests. On the contrary, it’s always been about western scornfulness for what Russia sees as its core strategic interests. Joe Biden himself knows this far better than most. Two years before the bombing of Serbia, there’s footage of him giving a broad-gauge account of the damage likely to be done to US-Russian ties by NATO expansion:

“I think the one place, where the greatest consternation will be caused in the short term, for admission – having nothing to do with the merit, the preparedness of the country to come in – would be to admit the Baltic States now in terms of NATO-Russian, US-Russian relations. And if there was ever anything that was going to tip the balance were it to be tipped, in terms of a vigorous and a hostile reaction – I don’t mean military – in Russia, it would be that.”[14]

More recently, in an address last month in Langley, Virginia to mark the CIA’s 75^th anniversary, Biden raised the issue of US exceptionalism.

“We’re the most unique nation in the history of the world. That’s not hyperbole.”

Professor Mearsheimer dealt with this in a podcast interview he gave in 2020.

“Our elites, and the vast majority of the American public believes that the United States is an exceptional country. This is this whole notion of American exceptionalism. And when they say that we’re an exceptional country, what they mean is that we are morally an exceptional country, we are morally good in the extreme. And if we do something wrong-headed, it’s not because we didn’t have good intentions, because of course we always have good intentions. But this story that we tell ourselves bears little resemblance to reality. The United States is one of the most ruthless great powers that’s ever walked the planet. The number of people that we’ve killed over time is truly remarkable. All you have to do is look at the firebombing of Japan in WWII. Most people focus on the dropping of two nuclear weapons in August of 1945, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but the fact is the first night we firebombed Tokyo we killed more people than we killed in either Hiroshima or Nagasaki. And we were burning Japanese cities to the ground by the time we dropped those two nuclear weapons. Look at what we did in Germany, involving cities like Hamburg or Dresden. Look at the bombing of North Korea during the Korean war! Most people know hardly anything about this. There are some estimates that we killed twenty percent of the North Korean population. We bombed like crazy in Vietnam. We have a rich history of overthrowing governments. And just go back to how the US was created. It’s a story of conquest on a large scale. We murdered huge numbers of native Americans, stole their land. What's now the South-West of the US we stole from Mexico. I mean if you really look carefully at American history over time and the various wars we fought, it’s not a pretty picture! But this is not what Americans believe and it’s not what our elites believe.”[15]

Towards the end of his speech in Langley, Biden said:

“I know that you will continue to honor and uphold the highest traditions of the CIA and the highest values of this nation for the next 75 years and beyond.”

The CIA “upholds the highest values of the nation”. It’s just staggering that the POTUS can say this with a straight face. It would be no more ridiculous if he said the same about Hunter Biden.

---

[1] Allan Little’s Kosovo Forum, bbc.co.uk 15-03-2000

[2] Cited in ‘Oh What a Lovely War!’, Economist, 24-04-1999

[3] 29-11-2021

[4] ‘European Insecurity’, Charles Crawford, Diplomat Magazine August 2022

[5] «Противники или союзники? (партнерство США и России, НАТО)» (‘Adversaries or Allies? US-Russia partnership, NATO’), НВО (Независимое военное обозрение – Independent Military Review) 21 (48) 14-06-97. Cited in Stanley Kober, ‘Russia’s Search for Identity’; Ted Galen Carpenter and Barbara Corny, eds. NATO Enlargement: Illusions and Reality. Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 1998.

[6] Sky News correspondent Tim Marshall reporting from Belgrade, April 1999

[7] ‘Chinese spokesperson slams NATO for strategic concept referring to China’, China Daily, 29-07-2022

[8] Munk Debate: Russia-Ukraine War | Stephen Walt, John Mearsheimer v Michael McFaul, Radosław Sikorski, 12-05-2022

[9] Committee for the Republic, ‘Putin’s Invasion of Ukraine Salon’| Ray McGovern, John Mearsheimer, 02-03-2022

[10] University Consortium Interview Series: Sir Roderic Lyne. Interview by Nikita Gryazin, December 2020

[11] Committee for the Republic, op cit. 

[12] Former BBC Moscow correspondent Martin Sixsmith discussing Russia’s 2012 presidential elections, Watershed Bristol, 20 May 2012. He shared a stage with Guardian journalist Luke Harding, who got himself expelled from Russia in 2011. According to prevailing orthodoxy, this is something he should be proud of. In reality, his obnoxious antics simply made the world a slightly more dangerous place.

[13] Zoom lecture hosted by Keele University, “Statecraft and Diplomacy: Coping with the 21st Century”, 04-11-2021. The tribute paid to Karen Pierce in New York on 12-03-2020 was as follows: Mr. Safronkov (in Russian): “I too would like to express our sincere wishes for the success and future professional achievements of Ambassador Pierce. She has done a great deal personally and as a diplomat to ensure the productive work of the Security Council. We will certainly miss her.”

[14] Address to the Atlantic Council, Washington, 18-06-1997

[15] ‘Manifold’ podcast interview with John Mearsheimer, conducted in 2020 with Corey Washington and Steve Hsu. Exact date unspecified.