Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks during a meeting with senior military officers in Moscow, Russia. Photo / AP
OPINION:
About this time last year, a British military delegation visited Kyiv to see how Ukrainian troops – who they had been helping to train – would handle a Russian invasion. They came back dismayed and terrified.
“It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that their plans were drawn in crayon,” was the verdict of one senior officer. It seemed like the Ukrainians were sitting ducks and Vladimir Putin’s offensive could be over in a matter of days.
It later turned out that the Ukrainians had shown fake plans to the British, paranoid that their real plans would leak. It’s not that Volodymyr Zelenskyy didn’t trust the UK. It was more that he knew Western governments compare notes – and you never know if, say, German intelligence has been infiltrated by a Russian mole (as now seems to have been the case). It’s likely that Zelenskyy’s fake plans were believed in Moscow, as well as in London. No one expected the extraordinary fight that Ukraine was ready to put up.
But on the day of the invasion – February 24, 2022 – the West was ready for surrender. The advice to Zelenskyy from both the UK and the US was to flee, to set up a government in exile. His response, that he needed “ammunition, not a ride”, may come to be seen as a moment that changed world history. Autocracy was resurgent. The democratic world was all set to fold, chastened by Afghanistan. Steel ended up being put in the Western spine by a former stand-up comedian, whose countrymen went on to show the sort of courage that defines and protects freedom for a generation.
This might sound overly optimistic; even naive. Philip Johnston recently argued in these pages that authoritarianism isn’t going anywhere and is part of human nature. He’s quite right: it’s democracy that seems daft and counter-intuitive. But democracy’s future is always in doubt. The case needs to keep being made: that countries are stronger when governments are weaker and power is split. It’s not always obvious. At the end of last year, who looked more powerful? The bickering, wound-licking West – or those decisive leaders in Moscow and Beijing?
A global poll taken at the time found the citizens of authoritarian regimes trusted their major institutions more than citizens of democracies trust theirs.
“We really have a collapse of trust in democracies,” said Richard Edelman, who ran the survey.
From Syria to Crimea, we all seemed to be living under Moscow rules. From The Lancet to the WHO, China was being praised for saving its people by locking them up. Authoritarian-envy seemed to be everywhere.
Jeremy Hunt had gushed about what happened to his sister upon arrival in Beijing.
“She was escorted from the airport,” he said, “and put into her home for two weeks’ quarantine. The door was sealed and she had a police car sitting outside her house.”
He was, then, advocating a zero-Covid policy for Britain. Tony Blair was hawking vaccine passports, which required a new deal: that free movement was no longer a basic right but a privilege to be granted by the state. Boris Johnson came very close to going along with this.
“You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism,” wrote the novelist John Buchan a century ago. “I tell you: the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Saturn.”
The general point, about the fragility of peace and freedom, was proven by the subsequent collapse of European democracies. I’d say it was proven anew when lockdowns showed just how easily British liberties could be swept away, with Wuhan tactics imposed instead.
Putin has ended up doing his bit for democracy, with his atrocities in Ukraine creating an alliance wider than any that went before it. Sweden and Finland refused to join Nato during the Cold War but both have now signed up. Putin has made neutrality a morally indefensible option. South Korea and Japan have started attending Nato meetings and joined sanctions against Russia – recognising that, if Ukraine falls, an emboldened China could take Taiwan. Putin has made “the West” a dated concept because the divide, now, is democracy vs autocracy.
Just this month, Japan published a new National Security Strategy defining itself against a Russia that had “breached the very foundation of the rules that shape the international order”. Given that the old security strategy was for “cooperation with Russia in all areas, including security”, it was quite a change. Japan is, meanwhile, doubling defence spending, ready to fight for this “international order” if needs be.
Interestingly, this new democratic alliance is one of nation states. The United Nations, with a Chinese and Russian veto, is useless. The G7 and G20 are talking shops but not much more. Zelenskyy did not stop by Brussels on his way back from Washington because the European Union, for all of its support for Ukraine, has not really spoken for Europe. Different countries react in different ways. But even China has ended up edging away from Russia in the end.
Boris Bondarev, until recently a Russian diplomat stationed at the UN, has explained how Putin has now ended up with everything he didn’t want. United democracies, tooled-up neighbours, a rejuvenated Nato: how could it go so wrong? But Putin’s dictatorial style, he said, means no one in Russia’s foreign service dares point out the flaws in his ideas. Just as it will be hard for any ambitious Chinese official to tell Xi Jinping that his vaccines don’t really work and that his flagship zero-Covid idea has failed.
In the end, authoritarian regimes stumble because they are authoritarian. Without debate and dissent, it’s harder to spot and correct errors. The arguments and protests that make democratic politics so messy are a feedback mechanism. Without this feedback, governments end up embarking on – or wedded to – calamitous mistakes.
This has been a pretty miserable year for Britain – but Ukrainian courage has made it a good year, perhaps even a decisive one, for the free world. We now have the widest democratic alliance the world has seen and a few more reminders why democracy, for all of its flaws, remains the world’s least-bad option.