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The Nato powers are behaving as if they were the West European equivalent of the East European communist bosses in the 80s, who suddenly heard to their horror that the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, had decided that the USSR would no longer serve as their military protector and political supremo. In reality, the US continues to guarantee Nato states within the organisation’s current boundaries.
Outrage over Trump’s “betrayal of Ukraine” serves to obscure this policy vacuum. But, if European governments do not want to self-marginalise themselves, they must finally answer crucial questions about how they see the conflict.
But the crucial question that the war hawks, which in the UK includes the whole political class, fail to answer is how far backing for Ukraine means full support for a Ukraine war. Those opposing a ceasefire must keep in mind that Moscow also opposes it until a deal is done. It does so because it sees the present attritional warfare against a numerically inferior Ukraine as progressively tipping the military balance in its favour.
Wishful thinking
The second question the European powers, which now criticise Trump, need to answer concerns their future relations with Russia. Russia is the largest single state in Europe by population and occupies 40 per cent of the European land mass.
President Joe Biden and Nato evaded having achievable war aims over the last three years by vaguely supposing in 2022-23 that Russia might be defeated on the battlefield, or regime change in Moscow would solve their problems, or sanctions would lead to the collapse of the Russian economy. All these things turned out to be wishful thinking.
This might just have been a feasible strategy in 2022 in the months after the debacle of Putin’s invasion on 24 February, but the Ukrainian counter-offensive in 2023 failed to make headway. General Valerii Zaluzhni, the Ukrainian commander-in-chief who led the counter-offensive, said in an interview published on 1 November, 2023: “Just like in the First World War most likely we have reached the level of technology that puts us into a stalemate. There will most likely be no deep and beautiful breakthrough.”
So far there has not been a decisive Russian breakthrough, though this cannot be ruled out. The mass use of drones makes it difficult for either army to feed enough troops into the front line in order to achieve an overwhelming local superiority at any particular point.
Pledges
Trump's popularity is already cratering - bigly
Read MoreEuropean leaders show no signs of having learned any military or political lessons from the war. Suddenly, the air is full of pledges from Nato states to raise their defence spending by a percentage point or so, as if this would make well-equipped and trained army brigades spring magically out of the ground. In practice, this all takes time. Note also that it was not vastly expensive new generation aircraft, tanks and missiles which have transformed warfare in Ukraine, but the massive use of relatively cheap and not very sophisticated drones.
Trump may be the devil incarnate but, when it comes to peace-making it is a mistake, as the old saying has it, “to give the devil all the best tunes”.
It is an impossible dream, but it would be only fitting to send those fulminating European war hawks into the front line in eastern Ukraine and see how long they maintain their opposition to a ceasefire.
Further Thoughts
A misunderstanding among the 80 per cent of people ignorant of mental illness is that they believe that it is roughly the same as physical illness, but in crucial ways it is entirely different.
A further problem is that people do not understand that a psychosis, which means the defeat or retreat of the rational mind, is very different from mental ill health like most types of anxiety and depression. Talking therapies like cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) only work – and success is uncertain – if a mentally ill person is already stable on medication. There is never any magic bullet.
Yet governments were attracted by the idea that they could close all those big expensive Victorian asylums, often sitting on valuable property, under the progressive sounding slogan of “de-institutionalisation” in the US and “care in the community” in the UK. Liberals bought into this programme because they persuaded themselves that people were being unnecessarily confined for unconventional behaviour, as shown in the influential film One Flew Over the Coocoo’s Nest (1975).
Many of those denied a bed now end up in a prison cell. Nobody appears to know precisely what proportion of the UK prison population are mentally ill, but in the US an expert report on beds for the mentally ill notes sardonically that the biggest de facto mental institutions in the US these days are Los Angeles County jail, Chicago’s Cook County jail and New York’s Rykers Island jail.
Zelensky can rebut the allegation that he is an unpopular autocrat, but on corruption Ukraine is vulnerable. Much of American assistance comes through USAid, some 40 per cent of the agency’s total dispersals. But now USAid has been largely dissolved and is being denounced as a sink of corruption by Trump and Elon Musk.
Officials in the Biden administration despaired of stopping Ukrainian government corruption – and did not want to denounce it publicly for fear of undermining public support for Ukraine – but they hoped to get the amount of money being stolen down from 40 per cent to 20 per cent of the total.
Cockburn’s Picks
Striking to see the Financial Times calling for Thames Water, which has just been given permission by the courts to borrow another £3bn at high interest on top of its existing £17bn debt, to be effectively renationalised.
Curious to see privatisation, a centrepiece of Margaret Thatcher’s economic policy, laid to rest with so little ceremony.
This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.
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