One of the more fanciful counter-factuals of the grim saga of the Ukraine war concerns what might have happened back in early February 2022, if former US President Joe Biden had dramatically flown uninvited to Moscow and delivered Vladimir Putin an ultimatum.
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.
Such a tangible threat would have been a stupendous gamble of course. It would have played into all Putin’s paranoia about Western intentions. It would have raised, if not immediately, the spectre of nuclear conflict. But it could have been a decisive step towards fulfilling the primary purpose of Nato: deterrence.
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.
Such a what-might-have-been may look more attractive in hindsight than it would have done then. And it’s nowhere near the circumstances last night in Alaska in which a very different US President, Donald Trump, confronted Putin.
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.
In that time much has changed in Western Europe too. Notably Germany, since Scholz’s 2022 “turning point” – Zeitenwende – speech three days after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, has shed many of its historic post-World War II inhibitions about military spending. That includes a constitutional decision, backed by his successor Friedrich Merz, to allow funding for it to be taken outside borrowing limits.
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.
Nato set itself a common target of spending five per cent of GDP on defence by 2035. This has been fully endorsed by Sir Keir Starmer, who in February raised defence spending from 2.3 to 2.5 per cent much faster than the Conservatives had intended (whether it was wise to pay for this by the inevitable reduction of soft power through cutting overseas aid is another matter.) And he indicated a further rise to three per cent in the next parliament, while endorsing the Nato target for 2035.
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.
There was widespread apprehension in European capitals at Trump’s decision to waive the deadline he had set for a ceasefire and award Putin a potential win by inviting him to last night’s summit – especially one without Zelensky. But the European leaders – with Starmer in a leading role – used what they were entitled to see as their leverage to impress on Trump the need not to cut one of his famous “deals” without Zelensky.
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.
But if – and it’s a huge if – the cohesiveness of Europe’s effort to influence Trump on Ukraine succeeds in the coming weeks, might it not also serve another purpose?
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 would sever the occupied West Bank from East Jerusalem, and is designed, as Smotrich gleefully put it, to finally “bury the idea of a Palestinian state”. For this, Smotrich claimed the backing not only of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but of Trump.
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.
How long are European leaders going to content themselves with rhetoric and mainly minor sanctions – the German bar on arms sales destined for Gaza being a notable though hardly decisive exception – in the face of almost daily violations of international law? If they can’t persuade Trump to finally secure the ceasefire he once said he wanted – and they should certainly try – then they may have to deploy the most powerful weapon they have: Europe’s importance to Israel as a trading partner.
It will be said that Israel’s government, unlike Russia’s, is an ally – and one with valued intelligence partners, including Britain.
Well, that didn’t stop successive British prime ministers from Heath to Blair and Brown banning arms sales at times – including Margaret Thatcher, who had more sensitivity to Palestinian aspirations than many of her successors and once compared Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to Argentina’s of the Falklands.
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.
But the case is also a human one. In a moving BBC interview yesterday to commemorate VJ Day, the Australian novelist Richard Flanagan talked about war and his father, who was a Japanese POW on the infamous Burma railway.
“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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