Preparing For War: Nato forces in the former Soviet republic of Latvia as part of the 2014 "Silver Arrow" military exercises in the Baltic states. Such naked demonstrations of Nato's extended reach - right up to the borders of the Russian Federation - risk plunging the world into a full-scale nuclear war. Which poses the question: Is Western Civilisation really prepared to incinerate itself for ... Latvia?
A WEEK AGO, in London, the United Kingdom moved a step
closer to war with the Russian Federation. Launching his book, 2017: War With Russia, General Sir Richard
Shirreff (Retd) exhorted the Nato powers to dramatically increase their
military presence along Russia’s borders – or risk its opportunistic invasion
of the tiny Baltic state of Latvia. Shirreff’s dire predictions, informed by
his time as Nato’s deputy-commander, are intended to be taken seriously.
We would be wise to do so: not for the reasons Shirreff is
putting forward, but because the appearance of literature such as 2017: War With Russia has a very
worrying precedent. In the years leading up to the outbreak of the First World
War, the British people were assailed by a deluge of newspaper and magazine
articles identifying Germany as Great Britain’s imminent assailant. The
virulently anti-German publisher, Alfred Harmsworth, even went so far as to
commission anti-German novels. The title of the most popular example, The Invasion of 1910, even bears an
unhealthily close resemblance to Shirreff’s novel.
The motivation behind this sort of war propaganda – past and
present – arises out of concerns in elite circles that military spending has
fallen to levels inconsistent with the maintenance of national security.
Published in 1906, The Invasion of 1910
was credited by the authors of the 2001 study, Dressing Up For War, with “inducing an atmosphere of paranoia, mass
hysteria and Germanophobia that would climax in the Naval Scare of 1908–09”.
This latter event, also whipped-up by the British press, precipitated a
full-scale (and extremely profitable) arms race with the German Empire.
As Deputy-Commander of Nato, Shirreff aroused the ire of the
British Secretary of Defence, Phillip Hammond, by publicly declaring the
Cameron Government’s cutbacks in military spending to be a “dangerous gamble”.
The retired General was not alone. His fear, that inadequate funding will lead
to an anaemic Nato, is shared by many other military leaders across Europe.
Their greatest fear, however, is irrelevance. That Nato may
no longer possess a legitimate purpose has haunted its commanders ever since
the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. US Presidential hopeful, Donald Trump’s,
publicly voiced scepticism about Nato’s continued relevance will not have
allayed their fear. (It is, surely, no accident that the US President who rides
to Europe’s rescue in Shirreff’s novel is a woman!)
Of course, the disbanding of Nato would not be a nightmare
for its generals only. It would also be a disaster for British, European and
American arms manufacturers. In both cases, the prospect of a demilitarised
central and eastern Europe could only have been extremely alarming. And yet,
this was precisely the undertaking which the last Soviet President, Mikhail
Gorbachev, believed he had extracted from US President George H. W. Bush, in
return for terminating the Warsaw Pact and allowing a reunified Germany to
remain a Nato member.
That the Nato alliance has, since 1991, been extended all
the way to the borders of the Russian Federation, even incorporating the EU
puppet-states of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania (tiny “countries” which spring
into existence during periods of Russian weakness, only to be reabsorbed into
the territory of their giant neighbour the moment that weakness passes) is,
therefore, strategically highly significant. Indeed, it is difficult to
conceive of a more chilling demonstration of the enduring power of what US
President Dwight Eisenhower called “the military-industrial complex” – and its
European subsidiaries.
That Russia remains deeply aggrieved by what it regards
(with some justification) as Nato’s anti-Russian expansionism is entirely
unsurprising. Neither have its grievances with the West been in any way
diminished by what it sees as the Nato powers’ donkey-deep involvement in the
so-called “colour revolutions” which overthrew the Russia-friendly regimes of
Georgia and Ukraine. In the latter case, Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin,
felt sufficiently threatened by the prospect of an openly fascist EU and Nato
member on his country’s doorstep, that he first annexed the strategically vital
Crimean peninsula, and then extended his nation’s military protection to the
Russian-speakers of Ukraine’s breakaway eastern provinces.
Clearly Shirreff and his fellow Nato generals felt unmanned
by their Russian counterparts’ resolute military action. In provoking Russia’s
robust response, however, they did achieve Nato’s over-riding political
objective: the reinstatement of Russia as Europe’s (and the World’s?) bogeyman.
With the successful precedent of the build-up to the First
World War before them, the Nato “war party” is now attempting to leverage
public anxiety about Putin’s intentions into the stationing of beefed-up and
battle-ready Nato forces on Russia’s borders, provisioned by an EU-wide
increase in military spending.
After Shirreff’s book, therefore, the question which the
peoples of the United States and Europe need to ask themselves is existentially
clear: “Are we willing to see ourselves, and the rest of the world, undergo
nuclear incineration – for the sake of Latvia?”
This essay was
originally published in The Press of
Tuesday, 24 May 2016.
