Gerald Waner: The Great Game begins – and it's Russian roulette

Published on Saturday 30 August 2008 19:35

If the balloon goes up in the Crimea, what is Britain supposed to do?

WELL, it was nice while it lasted – the End of History, that is. Suddenly, though, history is back in business. The Cold War is with us again and this time the rhetoric is even more full-blooded than in the Soviet era. Vladimir Putin started the mouth music, now every swivel-eyed Muscovite general, active or retired, is joining in.

The most recent blast came from an armchair strategist who announced proudly that the Russian Black Sea Fleet could destroy the entire Nato force in that waterway in just 20 minutes. Uh-huh? And then? Would that be close of play, like a time-limited Olympic event? For a great chess-playing nation, that does not sound as if some Russians are looking as many moves ahead as one might expect.

One of them, however, most certainly is: Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. Here is a Russian imperialist of the old school, owing as much to the historical expansionist doctrines of the Romanovs as to those of the KGB in which he began his career. His rise to power has been predicated upon his deep understanding of the trauma inflicted on Russian national pride by the collapse of the Soviet Empire.

Britain lost its empire in the 1950s, its prestige fatally damaged by Suez. Only an older generation remembers what it was to be an imperial power and the memory is not one of unalloyed regret. Russia, in contrast, had vast colonies in Eastern Europe less than two decades ago. Then humiliation in Afghanistan was followed by economic and ideological collapse.

The transition from a command to an enterprise economy caused huge suffering. Russians saw their natural resources plundered; their once feared nuclear submarine fleet reduced to rotting, radioactive hulks on the Kola Peninsula; wealth concentrated into a few hands on a scale of inequality beyond Marxist caricatures of the capitalist system; their youth degraded by drugs, alcohol and pornography; gangsterism displacing law and order; and corruption rife everywhere.

Instead of recognising that so great a country would achieve at least a measure of regeneration even in the short term, Western nations piled on the humiliation. Of course the former Soviet satellites had to be prised out of the grasp of Russia, but it was done in a manner calculated to fuel Moscow's all-too-combustible paranoia. The greatest mistake was the unlimited eastward expansion of Nato.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation was founded in 1949 as a defensive alliance of 12 states, joined three years later by Greece and Turkey. Its purpose, as its first Secretary General, Lord Ismay, phrased it, was "to keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down". Today it has an unwieldy 26 members, with further applicants jostling at the door, and it has deployed forces not only in the former Yugoslavia, but as far afield as Afghanistan. Nato has lost the plot.

Those who claimed the alliance should be dissolved as soon as the Cold War ended were making an erroneous and premature judgment, as recent events have demonstrated. The admission of Poland and Hungary in 1999 made strategic and moral sense; likewise the Baltic States in 2004. There expansion should have halted.

The irresponsible behaviour of the Saakashvili government in Georgia, with armed forces 37,000 strong, calling the supposed bluff of Russia with an army of 1.1m, in the deluded expectation of Western military assistance if things went wrong, warns us we cannot allow Caucasian braggarts to exploit the alliance for their own local purposes. That is what Serbia did with the European powers in 1914. Do we never learn?

The real flashpoint is the Ukraine, where a Russian naval base is embedded until 2017 and where the president, Viktor Yushchenko, is aggressively provoking Russia despite the large ethnic Russian population in the east and south of his country. If the balloon goes up in the Crimea, what is Britain supposed to do? The Light Brigade is no longer available for futile heroics: David Miliband is the one-man contemporary equivalent.

Russia must be allowed a sphere of influence: that is dictated by realpolitik when we are dealing with a nuclear power possessing 1,600 warheads. By the same token, the West must face down potential aggression in non-negotiable spheres of Western influence such as the Baltic States as resolutely as the eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation in Berlin throughout the Cold War. Russia understands the rules of that game.

Oil and gas blackmail will sporadically be employed, but excessive use of that weapon will backfire on the Russian economy. Barack Obama makes absurd pledges about freeing America from dependence on Middle Eastern oil in 10 years: Britain must escape dependence on Russia within a shorter time scale. Suddenly, we are back in the Great Game: like the man said, it's dj vu all over again.