Gerald Warner: Realpolitik is the only cure for bleeding hearts

Published on Wednesday 23 June 2010 19:15

SAVE the Moscow one! The second conviction of Russian oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky last week for embezzlement from his company, Yukos, triggered protests in the liberal Western media, with sanctimonious contributions from the usual suspects.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton claimed Khodorkovsky's conviction "raised serious questions about the rule of law in that country". That was rich coming from a nation that thought trading in toxic derivatives was good clean fun and under whose benign legislation Bernie Madoff strutted his stuff.

Western liberals are determined to present Khodorkovsky and other beleaguered Russian oligarchs as martyrs in a battle to establish democracy. That is a difficult thesis to sustain. Khodorkovsky's real offence was to have taken on Vladimir Putin and lost. He and his fellow oligarchs coveted the power Putin so effortlessly acquired and exercised. Other than as a useful mantra to draw support from Western commentators, "reform" was never a priority for Khodorkovsky: Alexander Solzhenitsyn this is not.

Next to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the successive psychopaths who led it, no group of people has done more harm to Russia in the past century than its gangster oligarchs. Their unimaginable wealth in a country impoverished by 75 years of demented socialism under the command economy ruined any prospects of a balanced and stable reform. These were the new commissars - mostly they came out of the old Soviet nomenklatura - and they have perpetuated the influence of diktat by a ruling clique. So there is no call to rend Western garments in compassion for jailed oligarchs: there are no heroes in this scenario, only villains.

What is more concerning is the continuing delusional state of American and British received opinion, even after the catastrophe in Iraq and Afghanistan, in clinging to the fantasy that the West has a duty to export "democracy" to countries where it is culturally alien. That is the discredited programme of the swivel-eyed American neocons. They themselves have moved on to fresh fruitcake agendas, but they infected many minds that should have known better with a crusading mentality and they remain diseased.

Very few people in Russia understand or desire democracy. They want strong government, to guarantee the security of the nation and food on their tables. They want a tsar. That is why a huge proportion of the Russian population today reveres Stalin. He told them what to do and saw that it was done - at a cost of 20 million lives, but that testifies to the high priority Russians attach to firm rule. In Britain, a generation that would sneer down the notion of dying for honour, Queen or country has been brainwashed into believing it should be prepared to make the supreme sacrifice, if necessary, to preserve the right to one forty-millionth of a say, once every four years, in which bunch of political hoods runs our lives. How intelligent is that?

Russians are more realistic - they have to be. The whole "ethical foreign policy" Blairite drivel should be discarded and replaced by realpolitik. If Russia disintegrated under some kind of Liberal Democrat Heath-Robinson government, the consequences would be disastrous for the rest of the world. The same applies to China. You do not have to be an admirer of the Chinese Communist Party to recognise that if that massive nation disintegrated into warlordism, the global economic effects would be catastrophic.

We need to put away our priggish "human rights" preoccupations and play off our former Cold War opponents with Bismarckian cynicism. Whatever we think of Putin, his personal approval rating among his own people is mostly above 70 per cent - a figure of which Barack Obama could only dream. Until the recession struck, Russian economic growth ran at an average rate of 7 per cent from 1999 to 2008. Nor is it in our interests to see Russia decline when China is rising so aggressively. Last Wednesday, the Chinese defence minister Liang Guanglie said: "In the coming five years, our military will push forward preparations for military conflict in every strategic direction."

Even allowing for some preliminary manoeuvring prior to the visit to Beijing of Robert Gates, that is fighting talk. China has developed a "carrier-killing" ballistic missile - the Dong Feng 21 - that could end US naval hegemony in Far Eastern waters dating from victory in the Second World War. Instead of harassing Beijing with grandstanding Nobel prizes and denouncing Putin as "undemocratic", it is time we sat down at the table and started playing some serious poker. Bleeding-heart diplomacy focused on landmines and wet-hankie human rights campaigns belongs to the era of British delusion and impotence whose iconic characters were Diana Princess of Wales and the Great Charlatan Tony Blair. Let us put those days of fantasy firmly behind us.