The Russian Bear is coming to eat your children.
The leading political and military leaders in Europe are sounding the alarm: major war is coming to Europe; millions of soldiers could be fighting in the cities and plains of the continent within five years as a violent, expansionist Russia seeks to re-establish its empire. In the past fortnight alone we heard that:
"We are Russia's next target, and we are already in harm's way. Russia has brought war back to Europe, and we must be prepared for the scale of war our grandparents and great-grandparents endured." NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte.
"Russia is already a direct threat to the European Union... Europe is under attack." Kaja Kallas (EU High Representative).
"The shadow of war is knocking on Europe’s door once more." Al Carns, UK Armed Forces Minister.
The mainstream media swallowed this whole without bothering to chew it over. For a more sober assessment I contacted Anatol Lieven, the director of the Eurasia Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft in Washington. What’s really going on here, I asked.
“I once remarked to a Washington insider that deliberately lying to the electorate was actually wrong and should be considered illegal – to which he replied, “That's just adorable!” In other words, they are all in the business of lying.
“All this talk of Russia attacking Western Europe is cynical calculation. The European publics, remember, are facing economic stagnation, intense budgetary pressures, cuts to social services, threats to health services and so on. The only way to get them to pay for increased military spending, let alone the kind of increased military spending that the Americans are demanding, is to convince them that the Russian bear is coming to eat their children,” Lieven says.
A bit of paranoia may be useful in a spy agency or defence HQ, but you do expect them to have sound analysis, to also be shrewd thinkers – and that seems to be absent from the current crop in Western Europe. Lieven says the whole idea of Russia intending to attack Europe is fantastical. It has taken Russia years to control about 20% of Ukraine; their leadership from Putin down has made clear that they want a long-term political settlement with Europe that builds a security architecture for the continent that removes the root causes of the conflict (top of the list for Russia: an end to NATO expansion, neutrality for Ukraine).
“The Russians have said to me again and again: why on earth would we launch a direct attack on NATO?” Lieven says.
Secretly they tell the truth
Lieven is based in Washington, is a Brit, which he describes as being ‘a semi-detached European’. He held a professorship at Georgetown University and taught War Studies at King's College, London. A long-time foreign correspondent he also has ancestors, including Prince Anatol Lieven, who held high offices in Tsarist Russia. These and other mysterious reasons of human chemistry have made Anatol a person who prefers trenchant analysis over orthodoxy. He likes truth-tellers.
“You talk to people from think tanks, sometimes even ministries, in private, and they will say, ‘Yes, our policy towards Ukraine and Russia is disastrous. It's not going anywhere. Of course, we should be aiming at a reasonable peace settlement’. And then they will immediately say, ‘But you understand this conversation was completely off the record. You must not quote me on this or my job would be in danger’!”
So if the threat from Russia is real …
In the Spectator last week, military analyst and respected Russia watcher Mark Galeotti posed a very good question: “If the threat of a Russian invasion is so real, terrible and imminent, then how can one reconcile this with the relaxed pace of rearmament in so many European countries, not just the UK?”
Galeotti and Lieven are well-informed contrarians to the dominant Western narrative. Galeotti wrote: “Mark Rutte, the reliably alarmist secretary-general of Nato, evoked the spectacle of million-man armies clashing in apocalyptic fury, sternly instructing Europeans that they had to ‘be prepared for the scale of war our grandparents or great-grandparents endured’.”
Lieven gives Mark Rutte a history lesson
Lieven bristled when he heard Mark Rutte say in his December 11 speech: “During the Cold War, President Reagan warned about the ‘aggressive impulses of an evil empire’. Today, President Putin is in the empire-building business again.”
“Just after that speech,” Lieven reminds us, “ Gorbachev and Reagan negotiated an end to the Cold War. Gorbachev was adulated in the West; there was ‘Gorby mania’ precisely for withdrawing peacefully from Eastern Europe, drawing down the Cold War, withdrawing Soviet troops from Eastern Europe and introducing the whole reform program in the Soviet Union. And of course, Gorbachev did this on the basis that this program, this project of a common European home in which the Western countries and the Soviet Union would not threaten each other's security – was something the West also believed in. Sadly it was very naive of him – this idea that security would be in common. So Rutte, actually quoting this remark of Reagan's, is drawing attention to his own and his establishment’s lies and hypocrisy.”
What is refreshing in this observation by Anatol Lieven is that he is effectively sharing a Russian experience, a Russian perspective of the past 30 years. Gorbachev felt betrayed. Yeltsin felt betrayed. Putin felt betrayed. But our media goes to immense lengths to delegitimise that perspective. That includes ensuring that incredibly knowledgeable commentators like Lieven, Professor Geoff Roberts (who I interviewed for my last article), Ambassador Chas Freeman, John Mearsheimer, Glenn Diesen and other experts are more or less purged from the mainstream for daring to share assessments that challenge the orthodoxy.
Punishing the truth-tellers is now Western policy
The price demanded for honesty, for speaking truth to power, is getting higher and higher in the West. Just after I interviewed Anatol, Colonel Jacques Baud, a former Swiss intelligence analyst who served as Policy Chief for United Nations Peace Operations, has been accused by the EU Commission of “disruptive activities against the EU and the partner states” as a “mouthpiece for pro-Russian propaganda." Without due process, Baud is now under a travel ban, his bank accounts are frozen, and his property confiscated.
I have listened to Colonel Baud speak many times and he is clearly intelligent, thoughtful, knowledgeable and independently-minded – dangerous things today, obviously. Are dissenting opinions now Thought Crimes in the EU? Where is this heading?
As Professor Nicolai Petro, Senior Washington Fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy said in urging support for Baud and resistance to this Orwellian clampdown on legitimate intellectual dissent: “How one gets put on this list, and how one might be removed is not clear.”
Rewarding aggression? The West needs to find a mirror.
“Generations of European leaders have been absolutely schooled, inculcated by NATO with a fear of Russia,” Lieven says. “This goes back long before 2014. This has been made even worse, of course, by the introduction of the Poles and the Balts into NATO, and now the Swedes, who, for historical reasons – because they suffered so much under Russian rule in the past – hate and fear the Russians. On one hand, that’s understandable, but on the other hand, one hopes for more intelligence and balance from our leaders.”
Also beating the drum of war this month was the new head of MI6 Blaise Metreweli who warned against an aggressive, expansionist, and revisionist Russia : “The export of chaos is a feature, not a bug in the Russian approach to international engagement” she said in her first public comments in her new role. Anatol Lieven retorts:
“If you had the most minimal objectivity and distance you’d ask who's been exporting chaos for the past 30 years? You know, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Israel, my God, and now Trump in Venezuela. Who's been exporting chaos, actually?”
That’s a great question; in fact, it is the question we should all be asking.
Eugene Doyle
