NEWSLETTER (£) European leaders are still not thinking seriously enough about how peace should be made
Sir Keir Starmer pointed to the 642 British soldiers who died fighting beside American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan in response to an apparent jibe by US Vice President JD Vance about “some random country”, which had not fought a war for 30 or 40 years, providing a security guarantee to Ukraine. The Prime Minister went on to name six young soldiers killed on patrol in Afghanistan 13 years earlier.
What he did not say was that these soldiers died in failed wars and they were only in Iraq and Afghanistan because of miscalculations by British politicians. He should keep this fatal precedent in mind when talking about British “boots on the ground” in Ukraine and building “a coalition of the willing”, which is to have an ill-defined purpose of deterring Russia aggression in Ukraine.
Vance was obviously wrong in saying that the UK had not fought a war in recent decades, but he would have been right had he added that successive British governments have refused to learn any lessons from their mistakes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The significance of these errors should not be in doubt. Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, the British ambassador in Kabul from 2007-09, says in his memoirs that the worst mistake made by the Foreign Office in the previous 30 years was the invasion of Iraq, and the second worst was “its enthusiastic endorsement of Britain’s half-baked effort to occupy Helmand in 2006”.
The exhaustive Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war concluded that the sole consistent theme in British policy after joining an earlier “coalition of the willing” in invading Iraq in 2003, was how to get its forces out of the country without offending the US. Though the prime reason for the British presence was to show Washington that Britain was its most faithful ally, Chilcot found that British influence on the Americans was minimal.
The French prime minister and First World War leader Georges Clemenceau is quoted as saying that “war is too important to be left to military men”. Yet experience shows that it also too important to be safely left to politicians.
This is particularly true today, because for 80 years the default position of Western elites has been to go along with whatever the US wanted without making their vassal status too explicit. In a shift comparable to the bewilderment of communist leaders in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, when the Soviet Union ceased to direct their policies, Western leaders have to cope with a new political reality with which they are unfamiliar.
Is, for instance, the purpose of Starmer’s much vaunted “coalition of the willing” largely to boost the idea that the UK, France and their allies are serious players in what may be the endgame of the Ukraine war, or does it have a more serious purpose? Is it really intended to send soldiers from Nato countries into Ukraine, despite Russia reiterating that it will never accept this, and while President Donald Trump has refused to give a military guarantee for the coalition?
A weakness of British political leadership in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was that they believed far more of their own propaganda than was good for them. In Iraq, they failed to see that Iraqis might accept the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, but not a permanent occupation under a puppet Iraqi government. None of Iraq’s neighbours wanted a large American land army on their doorstep.
In Afghanistan, the US, with the UK traipsing along behind, persuaded themselves that the Taliban were permanently out of business, when anybody knowledgeable about real conditions on the ground could have told them different. The people who once were killing British soldiers in Helmand now rule in Kabul.
Gross ignorance about the nature of the political landscape in Iraq and Afghanistan was a key ingredient in Western failure there and was to produce years of slaughter and destruction from which neither country has recovered. A similar debacle faces European involvement in the Ukraine crisis unless its political elites adopt a more reality-based view of how the war began and how it might be ended.
Wars have always been fought on two levels: a military war and an information or propaganda war. Writing about the latter, George Beebe, the former head of Russian analysis at the CIA who is now at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, describes how “armies of information warriors have battled to shape the ways that Western publics think about the conflict”.
He argues that Western governments, mainstream media, the Ukrainian government and public relation firms have combined to present a misleading picture of the Ukraine war as essentially a re-run of the Second World War, with President Vladimir Putin and Russia as modern versions of Hitler and Nazi Germany, seeking to conquer Ukraine and sweep on into Central Europe.
Anybody doubting this vision, which these days includes Trump, is accused of being “an appeaser”, a ‘”betrayer of Ukraine“, or of repeating “Moscow’s talking points”. Until recently, compromise was ruled out as practical policy, meaning that the war could only end with a Ukrainian victory and Russian capitulation – though nobody seriously believed this was going to happen since, at the latest, the failed Ukrainian counter-offensive in the summer of 2023.
European leaders, for all their ceaseless conferences, have not yet replaced their Second World War picture of the conflict with a feasible plan to end the fighting, which, as Trump keeps saying, must be acceptable to both sides.
Beebe argues that the origins of the Ukraine war “much more resemble those of World War One”. Kaiser Wilhelm II launched an attack through neutral Belgium in 1914, aiming to capture Paris and win a quick victory over France. Putin attacked Ukraine in 2022 in the belief that his forces would swiftly seize Kyiv and defeat Ukraine. Both invasions utterly failed in their objectives. The Armistice in 1918, and the Versailles Treaty that followed, failed to put in place a stable security order in Europe with catastrophic consequences, and the US pulled back from its engagement with the continent.
A ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia is now in the offing according to Trump, though this is by no means a certainty. The Russians may decide to negotiate and fight simultaneously, believing that attritional Verdun-type warfare favours them because Russia has five times the population of Ukraine. At the same time, Putin will understand that Trump’s radical pivot towards Moscow by pausing US arms and intelligence supplies to Ukraine could go into reverse, or Trump could simply walk away from the whole messy conflict.
European states now propose to spend enormous sums to strengthen their armies, but they are not facing Hitler in 1939 or Stalin in 1945. The Russian army has scarcely advanced since the first weeks of the invasion, and it is an absurd piece of threat-inflation to imagine it sweeping through Europe.
In a speech at Verdun in 1919, Clemenceau said that “it is easier to make war than to make peace”. European leaders are still not thinking seriously enough about how that peace should be made.
British efforts to curry favour with presidents in the White House are always embarrassing – like the poor relative trying to gain acceptance by some grand family in a Victorian novel. Did Starmer and Downing Street really suppose that an invitation for a state visit from King Charles to Trump would really make the most ruthless politician on the planet go weak at the knees in gratitude?
British governments generally over-estimate their influence in Washington. I was a correspondent there in 1994, when president Bill Clinton gave a visa to the head of Sinn Féin, Gerry Adams, ignoring the furious opposition of the British government.
At first, British diplomats were cheerfully confident that the visa would be denied. Then it was granted and I, along with other correspondents, was summoned to the British embassy to be told by a visibly furious British ambassador how little he cared about Adams’ visa. We all reported that the British embassy was much angered by the American snub.
The following day, we were called back to the embassy, where the ambassador, by now incandescent with rage, berated us for suggesting that he gave a fig for the American action.
Beneath the Radar
The media is shameless in the way it forgets its past backing for calamitous government decisions, and often denies or ignores consequent disaster for as long as it can. The Vietnam and Iraq wars are cases in point of this self-serving amnesia by mainstream news outlets.
Even so, it is striking how swiftly the US media is today blaming everybody but itself for not reporting the cognitive decline of president Joe Biden from 2020 to 2024, something which opened the door for Trump’s return to the White House. Right up to Biden’s public meltdown in the television debate with Trump on 27 June, 2024, journalists who knew of his senility kept quiet about it – despite polls showing that most American voters believed, from the evidence of their own eyes, that he was too old for the job.
Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson are shortly to publish Original Sin: President Biden’s decline, its cover-up, and his disastrous choice to run again.
The synopsis from the publishers describes the book as being about “one of the most fateful decisions in American political history: Joe Biden’s run for re-election despite evidence of his serious decline – amid desperate efforts to hide the extent of that deterioration”.
Biden himself, his family, and his senior aides were so convinced that only he could beat Trump again, that, according to the book’s press release, “they lied to themselves, allies, and the public about his condition and limitations”.
A lot of people knew about Biden’s failing mental powers. The book relies on information “from White House staffers at the highest to lowest levels, to leaders of Congress and the cabinet, from governors to donors and Hollywood players”. Curiously, there is no mention here of White House correspondents, whose job it should have been to reveal that Biden could no longer think straight.
His decision to run again for re-election, the press release goes on, seems “shockingly narcissistic, self-delusional, and reckless, a desperate bet that went bust – and part of a larger act of extended public deception that has few precedents”. Critics of the book have already dredged up a clip of Tapper, a senior figure at CNN, slapping down on air an interviewee who suggested that Biden’s mind was beginning to give way.
Aside from the culpability of the US media for the debacle, it will be interesting to see how Tapper and Thompson handle an even more important issue: how far was Biden’s poor judgement on policy and choosing able subordinates responsible for the outbreak – and failure to bring to an end – of savage wars in Ukraine and the Middle East?
Cockburn’s Picks
In the age of Trump’s Maga, some are turning to Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for solace and enlightenment. Jeffrey St Clair quotes a telling passage about the Emperor Commodus and his vicious sidekick Cleander with an obvious parallel to the Trump-Elon Musk relationship.