...
As someone says in
The Big Short: ‘The truth is like poetry. And most people fucking hate poetry.’
In particular, our failure to take Russia seriously, on both sides of the Atlantic, and our illusions about the permanence of the liberal order
Russia as a serious great power, not the ten foot tall monster but neither an inconsequential fading force
In SDSR 2010, the government understandably looked to make savings in the wake of a fiscal crisis. Britain’s credit-worthiness was a strategic priority.
This desire, however, encouraged a wishful assumption that the security environment would be benign, or benign enough, to take a breather and rebuild the economy. Security problems there would be, mostly in the realm of failed states and terrorism. A return of great power rivalries was an unwelcome suggestion.
SDSR 2010 mentioned Russia twice: once about reducing energy demand, and one about general ‘security dialogue.’
Consider, the multiple warning signs that had flashed by 2010:
- In March 2009, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned that NATO enlargement was a source of threat, and that Russia might find gas customers in Asia.
- In September 2009, Russia’s Zapad Military Exercise rehearsed a clash with NATO around Belarus, spreading and culminating in a first-use nuclear strike on Warsaw.
- Russia frequently probed Britain’s airspace and offshore waters. The highest number of contacts with Russian submarines since 1987.
- Russia military doctrine in 2010 designated NATO a source of military danger.
This was not a new Soviet Union or Cold War. It was the return of history. Russia was determined to dominate its back yard, to restore some imperial stature, to oppose Western expansion into its orbit. We can disagree about the wisdom of trade and military expansion into the region. We have no right, though, to be shocked.
Why then, did we miss these signals? Recall that this was the time of gestures, the ‘reset’ button, and high-minded NATO concepts. When Mitt Romney claimed Russia was a geopolitical foe with imperial ambitions, President Obama cheaply quipped that the 1980’s wanted their foreign policy back. Chancellor Osborne scoffed at the suggestion that we should retain kit designed for a clash on the German plains. Security minds assured us that interstate confrontation was an outmoded fallacy.
The state scrapped the Advanced Research and Assessment Group. ARAG’s Russia Analysis Section forecast that Russia with its mixture of subversion, force and propaganda would reassert itself in the Ukraine. Its loss was a blow to our intellectual ability to analyse the region. ARAG had to go, because, in the words of the Commander of Joint Forces Command, ‘the world had changed at that time’ and ‘the decade of campaigning around Iraq and Afghanistan’ overshadowed other things.
Because
we wanted a commercial, rules-based peace, combating only guerrilla insurgents of the Third World, we fancied other states did too.
...
