This lying brute who has to be shackled
News of the destruction of Flight MH17 and the appalling murder of 298 people gave Russia’s president Vladimir Putin a chance to step back from a precipice.
Yesterday, he could have stood up before the world and denounced the crime; endorsed a full investigation and punishment of the guilty.
Instead – yet almost inevitably, given the nature of the man – he presented his stone face. He asserted, against all logic and evidence, that Ukraine and its rulers were the guilty parties.
He lied, as he has lied all his life since he was first schooled in deceit and brutality by those masters of the art, his old employers at the KGB.
Putin probably felt that no path was open to him save denial, because the facts point blame for this huge tragedy squarely at the Kremlin.
In March, Putin annexed Crimea, then embarked on a strategy of covert military support for pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, designed to sustain civil war and ruin the country.
Month after month, Western intelligence has tracked Russian special forces – ‘little green men’, as they are nicknamed, because they wear no uniforms or badges – working with the pro-Kremlin separatists.
Satellite photographs show heavy weapons and tanks trundling into eastern Ukraine from Russia.
Whether the Malaysia Airways plane was hit by a missile supplied by Moscow or captured from the Ukrainian Army is neither here nor there. Putin is the sponsor and puppet-master of the rebels. Thus, he must bear responsibility for this appalling act.
His apologists say the rebels thought they were firing at the Ukrainian military. That, too, is irrelevant. Putin has placed deadly toys in the hands of recklessly irresponsible people. For months, observers have expressed fears that Putin would find the separatists impossible to micro-manage. So it has now proved.
For those – almost all of us – who have hoped since the end of the Cold War that Russia could join the fellowship of nations, pursuing the values of democracy and freedom, this is a sad day.
It confirms what has seemed increasingly apparent since the Ukrainian crisis erupted: Putin’s Russia is not merely no friend to the West. It has chosen to make itself our enemy.
Whether the Malaysia Airways plane was hit by a missile supplied by Moscow or captured from the Ukrainian Army is neither here nor there. Putin is the sponsor and puppet-master of the rebels
On the credit side, there will be no return to the nuclear stand-off of the Cold War. Nobody among the Western powers wants to start shooting over Ukraine.
But Putin becomes more dangerous every day, because he has boxed himself into a corner from which it will be hard, if not impossible, for him to escape.
He has made Russia an autocracy in which free speech is a dead letter. It is now a crime to criticise the Red Army in history books as well as in modern speech.
All broadcast channels are state-controlled, and pour forth a torrent of deceits, not least about Ukraine. Russian viewers are obliged to feast on atrocity stories about alleged crimes by Ukrainian troops against Russian speakers, including public crucifixion of a three-year-old child.
In the mad world Putin has created, a dismaying number of his people are ready to believe such stuff. He may even do so himself: the Kremlin becomes ever more Stalinesque, with the president dependent for information and counsel on a slavish circle of intimates who tell him only what he wishes to hear. Enemies and critics are imprisoned after show trials, or liquidated by hitmen.
Unsurprisingly, Putin has failed in his efforts to modernise the Russian economy: 55 per cent of the nation’s budget now depends on foreign sales of gas.
Moscow’s Ukrainian adventure has caused growth forecasts to be slashed from 1.8 per cent to below 1 per cent this year, and at least £40billion of foreign capital has left the country.
Putin has constructed a narrative to explain all this: Russia is encircled by enemies, Nato and the EU foremost among them, forever seeking to extend their tentacles into Moscow’s rightful sphere of influence.
He said in March, justifying the Crimean annexation: ‘Russia finds itself in a position it could not retreat from. If you compress a spring all the way back to its limit, it will snap back hard.’ He tells his people that Russia is a proud nation, responding to Western threats, insults and expansionism.
So how should the West address this pocket Stalin? Since the end of the Cold War, US and EU diplomacy has been extraordinarily clumsy: wilfully humiliating the Russians; then making offers of partnership to Ukraine and other neighbouring states without considering their implications or impact on Moscow; and finally, responding feebly when Putin began to lash out.
But whatever the West’s mistakes in the past, these should not obscure the fundamentals today: Putin is a brute and a bully who must be shackled.
Since the spring, US rhetoric has been far more robust than that of Europe, and especially that of Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel. She seems morbidly afraid of taking any action that might tempt Putin to cut off her country’s gas supplies.
Back in March, the EU issued a solemn statement: ‘Any further steps by the Russian Federation to destabilise the situation in Ukraine would lead to additional and far-reaching consequences for relations in a broad range of economic areas.’
It seems hard for anybody in Brussels or Berlin to deny that the killing of 298 innocent people, most of them EU citizens, does indeed constitute ‘further steps’.
Putin has acted throughout his tenure of power on the assumption that European leaders are marshmallows, to be defied with impunity.
It is time, and beyond time, to prove him wrong. Baroness Ashton, the EU’s foreign policy supremo, has a last chance to show that she is not wholly ridiculous.
The first round of Western sanctions against Russia in the spring addressed only some named individuals. The list of Putin associates whose funds are frozen and whose family members are denied access to Western countries must be drastically extended, even if some of them own European football clubs and mansions in Kensington.
Graduated sanctions must be extended to Russia as a nation. France should refuse to continue construction of warships for the Russian Navy. There should be no EU finance for Russian projects.
There must be a carrot and stick: if the Russians pull back from eastern Ukraine, they get rewards. Dangerous state enemies should always be offered a way out. But if Putin persists on his current path, his country has to be punished economically for his actions.
Even though the West is rightly unwilling to consider military action against Russia over Ukraine, iron-clad and very public security guarantees must be given to Poland and the Baltic states.
It is just possible that Putin is reckless enough to raise the stakes, to try to create new regions of instability beyond his frontiers. He must be made to understand that if he does so, Nato will respond militarily.
Russia, and explicitly its president, are today complicit in an appalling crime in the skies over Ukraine. If the West fails to punish Putin for the ruthless adventurism which has caused this to happen, it will be a bad day for the security of us all.
A cruel and dangerous man is rampaging on the Eastern horizon. If he cannot be checked there, how can we trust our governments to protect us from such threats nearer to home?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2697942/MAX-HASTINGS-This-lying-brute-shackled.html
This weak and timid President talks big... and does nothing: A devastating attack on Obama by a top Washington insider
Clark S. Judge believes Obama’s reaction to the tragedy was ‘disconnected’
Immediately ‘reverted to script’ to praise his administration
Former adviser to Ronald Reagan says it confirms ‘chaos’ of foreign policy
At a political event in Wilmington, Delaware, on Thursday, President Obama devoted only 40 seconds to the shooting down of the Malaysian airline, his first statement to the world following the news.
His emotionless reference to the attack as ‘a terrible tragedy’ seemed disconnected from the horrific moment, particularly as he immediately reverted to script to praise his administration and criticise Republicans.
It was a far cry from President Reagan’s 1983 fierce denunciation of the Soviet shooting down of a Korean airliner as a ‘crime against humanity’.
But it only confirmed the chaos into which US foreign policy has descended since the summer of 2012 when reporters at a White House briefing asked Mr Obama about the security of chemical weapons in the Syrian stockpile.
The commander in chief went beyond safety and said: ‘We have been very clear to the Assad regime … that a red line for us is [when] we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilised.’
The term ‘red line’ is the kind of clear, emphatic language major powers use only when they are prepared to back words with action.
A little over a year later, the Assad regime utilised chemical weapons against its own people.
The number of blunders that the President and his administration committed in the ‘red line’ affair is hard to fathom.
Before the President spoke, no one vetted the term and its consequences in the White House policy process and, once the words came out, no one undertook preparations in case Syrian president Bashar al-Assad called Mr Obama’s bluff.
According to reports, no one made the diplomatic rounds to line up the support of allies just in case, or the congressional rounds to line up the support of Congress. No one developed military plans or sent quiet signals to Assad that the US was not to be trifled with on this matter.
These actions are routine when any White House makes as definitive a commitment as the President made, except, apparently, this White House.
Even bigger blunders came after the Syrian chemical attack. Mr Obama began signalling that, despite his remark, he did not want a response, any response. First there was the verification charade. Multiple eyewitness accounts of rockets rising out of Syrian army installations and falling into the stricken zones at the time of the chemical attacks were not enough to warrant quick action.
Then there was his call for a congressional vote, delivered just when the need to respond was most urgent if air strikes were to deliver an effective message.
Finally, there was the utter failure to attract congressional support, assuming Mr Obama really wanted Congress to endorse the proposed attacks.
That the Parliament of our closest ally, Great Britain, rejected an air campaign first gave Mr Obama an additional reason for inactivity. The flailing seemed to end when Russian President Vladimir Putin opened the door to a negotiated deal with Syria. But it was not the end; it was the beginning.
For as the administration rushed to that door, all over the world those who depended on America when in harrowing circumstances were asking themselves: How reliable is America now? How strong now?
Also asking was Mr Putin. He noted the contrast between Mr Obama’s bold talk and timid response. As the former head of a friendly government said in a small meeting I attended not long ago: ‘Putin is cautious. He will probe. If he encounters resistance, he will pull back.’
The US failure to follow through in Syria gave the Russian president confidence that he could move with impunity.
It was a far cry from President Reagan’s 1983 fierce denunciation of the Soviet shooting down of a Korean airliner as a ‘crime against humanity
SOON he was picking a fight with Ukraine. Like the scene in The Godfather – when, at his child’s baptism, Michael Corleone renounces the devil as the camera cuts back and forth to his men eliminating rival gangsters – Putin, before global television cameras, watched the opening ceremonies of the Sochi Olympics as Russian troops began movements preparatory to seizing Crimea.
This week, in the skies over Ukraine, we saw the consequences of the recklessness that the Russian godfather’s probing has unleashed.
Putin was not the only one to detect opportunity in American indecision. China stepped up its probes in the East and South China Seas. In the Middle East, with the US military presence drawn down nearly to zero in Iraq and soon Afghanistan, an army of ruthless fanatics gestating unnoticed in Syria’s east saw the chance to break out of national boundaries and within a few weeks occupied much of western and central Iraq.
Why has so much of the global order come apart so fast?
For the same reason that, as a friend reports, on the streets of San Salvador those who will smuggle your child to the Rio Grande have been securing an unprecedented volume of sign-ups. When asked about the chances of the child staying in America once the border is crossed, they tell parents: ‘It has never been easier.’
Now the word on weakness is everywhere, even the poorest barrios of Central America.
The fact that you have a crisis in Ukraine has nothing to do with Gaza,’ a deputy national security adviser to the President told an interviewer recently.
The current White House doesn’t understand how US fecklessness in Syria can reverberate to Ukraine, and from there to the South China Sea, and the Americas, and Gaza and elsewhere in the Middle East.
In all this I have referred to the United States as the primary shaper of world events, which is, in fact, a misleading shorthand. The US is not a superpower so much as the biggest player in a set of super-alliances, the most critical of which is with the UK.
Since the Second World War, when the US and Britain have been of one mind, liberal values have been secure and even advanced. When either has lost its sense of direction, neither has been nearly so effective.
The great danger in being the anchor to the global order is that when we lose our way the general peace itself is threatened.
This is just what we are seeing in theatre after theatre around the world. Perhaps it is time for a key ally like Prime Minister David Cameron to have a friendly talk with the President.
It is not just American interests that a flailing White House threatens. It is that of peoples everywhere.