This was the time when the US was loudly warning, wholly accurately – though to a still only half-believing world – that Russia was on the brink of an invasion. Suppose that Biden (maybe accompanied by then-German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, France’s Emmanuel Macron and, yes, Boris Johnson) had arrived at the Kremlin and told Putin that if his troops crossed the borders into Ukraine they would have to contend with the full force of Nato, a military power much greater than Russia.
And it just might have worked. After all, Nato had embarked on a bombing campaign to protect a non-Nato entity in Yugoslavia in 1999, in response to the ethnic cleansing of Albanians from Kosovo, and without UN cover.
Putin’s crime of aggression, followed in turn by several other war crimes, may have killed or injured over a million troops – both Russian and Ukrainian, including conscripts. And that’s before the death toll of Ukrainian civilians – over 13,000 according to UN estimates – and their injuries and suffering is accounted for.
But this is part of a much wider response, both to the all too real threat now posed by Putin’s neo-imperial fixations, and an equally urgent understanding that Trump expects much greater burden sharing of defence by the Europeans.
This has helped to make the Europeans significantly stronger players globally, not least because the new commitments were welcomed by Trump himself. Among them, Starmer made exactly the right call by welcoming Zelensky to Downing Street on 1 March, just 24 hours after the Ukrainian President’s televised White House car-crash meeting with Trump. Starmer’s warm embrace of Zelensky this week was similarly smart.
Given Trump’s depiction of Alaska as a “feeling out” meeting to be followed, if successful, by a three-way meeting with Zelensky, the Europeans had at least reasonable grounds for thinking the wildly unpredictable US President would for once stick to his own script.
In a much less noticed move than it would have been without the preparations for Alaska, Israel’s extremist finance minister Bezalel Smotrich this week triumphantly announced the go-ahead for the illegal E1 settlement between that of Maale Adumim and Jerusalem, resisted by US presidents for decades.
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It is Smotrich, along with his fellow Cabinet minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who is also driving Netanyahu on to expand and prolong the war in Gaza which has now killed 61,000 Palestinians, and which most Israelis – including several in the upper echelons of their military – believe has long outlived its purpose of avenging Hamas’ October 2023 murder of 1,200 Israelis.
It will be said that Israel’s government, unlike Russia’s, is an ally – and one with valued intelligence partners, including Britain.
Then it will be said that Russia poses a direct threat to Western security, as it unquestionably does – a huge one. But apart from the fact that Netanyahu’s relentless assault on Palestinians provides an excuse, however spurious, for global jihadists elsewhere, Starmer knows better than most how it can infect the politics of Western countries.
“What we must learn,” he said, “is that when people start in any society saying that some people are less than others, we should call it out for what it is.”
Flanagan may well not have had any modern conflict in mind. Yet the sentiment surely applies to innocent victims wherever they are – not just in Ukraine or Gaza, but certainly there too.
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