The Wages Of Fear

As is true of most crises, you can trace the progression of the western response to the crisis in Ukraine through a series of distinct emotional stages. Since the end of 2021, we have passed through arrogant indifference, disbelief and denial, smug superiority, blind hatred and the urge to extermination, followed by increasing panic, and now something approaching fear.

It’s curious that, whilst the effect on history of contingency and emotion is well understood by biographers and historians, it’s often absent from political science writing, whether that be deeply theoretical, or just an article on the Internet by some transient tank-thinker. The point, I suppose, is that it’s very hard to develop general theories about International Relations —even crude ones like Realism—if you concede that much of the international system actually functions through confusion, relative ignorance and emotion. And without general theories, some would question the value of having Departments of International Relations in the first place.

Now, when in the past I have tried to give a sense of the sheer complexity and confusion that typifies a lot of international politics, some have objected. They assume, or at least find it comforting to assume, that there are deep patterns, long-term strategies and clear objectives at work in crises, and never more so than in the apparently inexplicably chaotic mess over Ukraine.

I’m not going to argue that point again here. I will simply repeat that, though it’s very common for countries and even groups of countries to have reasonably consistent policies over periods of time, this is seldom deliberately planned in advance, and certainly not in detail. The consistency is partly because of sheer inertia: once policies on some subject are agreed and under way, they will continue unless a deliberate effort is made to change them, and such efforts are often not worth the trouble involved. Likewise, policies that arise from objective criteria—notably geography—tend to be reasonably stable over periods of time. Again, multilateral policies are often very difficult to agree between states with different interests, and so once a compromise of any kind is reached, it will tend to stick, because at least it’s something that is agreed on. Finally, policies have a habit of acquiring momentum with age: a new generation of decision-makers will take over the policies of the past, often in a vulgarised form, because they are part of the inherited political furniture.

So it was with Russia. To begin with, western leaders had already passed through a succession of emotional stages from about 1988-1995. The first was disbelief and denial, condemning anyone who believed that real changes were under way in Russia as an agent of Moscow and a “Gorbymaniac.” Then there was a kind of stunned, catatonic stupor as the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union collapsed, followed by a period of shallow triumphalism reminiscent of the supporters of a winning football team after a penalty shoot-out. At no point were any of these emotional reactions backed up by serious analysis, or even serious attempts at understanding. With Europe obsessed with its own “construction” post-Maastricht, and with the Balkans and the political changes in Eastern Europe, Russia was regarded as “solved:” a declining state now dependent on the West. We’d spare some time for it when we could, between more exciting things.

I have long said, and I believe it’s true, that a huge opportunity was lost in the late 1990s to bring Russia and the West into some kind of productive, or at least mutually non-threatening, relationship, and the inability to do this is probably the greatest foreign policy failure since 1945. Nonetheless, it still has to be asked whether such an outcome was practically possible, and I’m inclined to think it wasn’t. Whilst the current disastrous situation wasn’t inevitable, and even the souring of relationships after 2014 could have been avoided or mitigated with a bit of thought and effort, the underlying political, geographical, economic and security situation in 1991 was simply so complex that the greatest statesmen in the history of the world would have been challenged to handle it, let alone the modest set of talents we actually had.

There were plenty of ideas flying around at the time (replace NATO with the OSCE was a favourite) but they all had this in common; that no-one could explain how they would work in practice. It wasn’t just disunity in NATO, there were also powerful, but not uncontested, forces in the former Warsaw Pact states that saw the only possible salvation of their countries coming from a closer relationship with the EU, and perhaps NATO as well. There was the dizzying geometry of the problems arising from the end of the Soviet Union and its replacement by a series of suddenly-independent states, the implosion of Russia itself, and the complicated historical and security relationships of the ex-Warsaw Pact nations with their late patron and with each other. Maybe there was a path through all this, but I have to admit I couldn’t see it at the time and I’m not sure I can see it now. I’ve never been able to see the practical basis on which such an order could be constructed, and I’ve never come across any proposition that looked as though it might work. There were less bad outcomes available than the current disaster, but no objectively excellent ones, and the reasons for this, again, have little to do with cold strategic calculations, and much to do with emotion.

Since this essay is largely about the West, it’s reasonable to start by saying that the real damage was done in the late 1990s during the phase of arrogant dismissal of Russia as having any importance at all. In many ways this was a predictable reaction to the over-concentration on the Soviet Union and the genuine fear of Soviet military power that characterised the Cold War. To some degree, the fall of the Soviet Union resulted in the lifting of a terrible state of uncertainty and anxiety, and produced a kind of manic holiday mood in western capitals, mixed with the belief that they had won something, even if they weren’t quite sure what it was. All that drivel about a unipolar world actually persuaded some decision-makers and pundits that the West could now really do anything it wanted, and that reality would bend to its desires. The serial disappointments around the world that followed, for all that they were publicly made to disappear, festered away beneath the surface, and ultimately contributed to the hysteria over Ukraine. (We’re not going to lose this one!)

But that was only part of the picture. I’ve mentioned before the nervousness of many European countries at the possibility of a unified Germany no longer tethered to NATO, but in fact the whole of the European continent was riven with rivalries, jealousies, resentments, half-forgotten quarrels, murderous hatreds, contested histories and conflicting memories of bloodstained conflicts. The historian Marc Ferro pointed out long ago the huge practical effect that just one emotion—resentment—has had on history. The problem, of course, is that whilst we cling tightly to our own resentments against other countries, we systematically belittle their feelings of resentment (or any other negative emotion for that matter) against us. The larger and more powerful the country, the more such patterns of thought are ingrained and difficult to shift: the old Soviet Union, for example, was simply incapable of understanding that its massive military power genuinely frightened its neighbours, and this was one of the many, many factors which would have complicated any attempt to build a new European security order.

Indeed, of all of the emotions that have caused problems in history, the greatest is fear. As an explanation of historical action it’s been around a long time: everyone remembers the assertion of Thucydides that the Peloponnesian War began as a result of the growing power of Athens and the fear this produced in Sparta. Where fear is acknowledged as a factor today, though, it is usually glossed by words like “exaggerated, “excessive,” “misplaced” or “irrational,” and it is frequently suggested that fears were “stoked” or “fanned,” or some other physical metaphor by unscrupulous governments to mobilise public opinion. No doubt this is true in some cases.

Yet even the slightest acquaintance with actual historical crises demonstrates that these crises have arisen, and wars have broken out, more because of fear than for any other reason. Historians (and especially economic historians) have laboured mightily to wrench the events of 1914 into a frame of economic competition, and no doubt that was a minor contributing factor. But in fact, all the major powers were frightened of something. Germany was afraid of a two-front war, France was afraid of invasion by a more powerful Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia were afraid of the centrifugal forces in their Empires, Russia was afraid of invasion from the West once again, even the British, in their understated fashion, were afraid of German control of the Channel ports. And the problem with fear is that it is inherently destabilising. If I am afraid that you will attack, even without direct evidence, I may decide that it’s too risky to trust you, so I will prepare for conflict. But if I’m going to prepare for conflict, because I am afraid you will attack, why don’t I attack you first? And why not next year? Come to that, why not next week, or even tomorrow? To this extent, it’s pointless to argue about whether the Russians should “really” have been afraid of western policies in Ukraine recently. They were, and that’s it.

And such fears have a long history. Quietly forgotten now except by specialists, is the neurotic fear at all levels of European society after 1918 that the 1930s or 1940s would see a repetition of the First World War, and that this time Europe would not survive. This fear was entirely reasonable, since the underlying tensions of that War (notably between France and Germany) had not gone away, and an increasingly strong Germany would one day, under some leadership or other, demand a revision of the Versailles Treaty with menaces. Likewise, the multiplication of new states after 1919 had caused new problems without solving old ones. To this was added the new popular fear of aerial bombardment and the use of poison gas as a weapon. The next war was expected to start with an all-out aerial attack, with the reduction of most European cities to rubble, and millions of deaths in the first week. (My mother, then a teenager, carried a gas-mask to work every day for months in 1939.) Who on earth would want a war like that? What possible justification could there be for inflicting such suffering? The neurotic desire to avoid war at almost any cost (and how smugly superior we feel to that generation now!) led to the policy of non-intervention in Spain, and to the doomed attempt to use rearmament to coerce Germany into accepting a peaceful solution to the Sudetenland problem.

Doomed, because the Germans were scared as well. The post-war construction of Germany as a powerful, aggressive and confident state was not how Berlin saw things at the time. To the traditional fear of encirclement by France and Russia, and economic strangulation by Britain, was now added the paranoid, almost hysterical world-view of the Nazis, who took seriously the pseudo-scientific ideas of the time about the struggle for existence and the likely extermination of the weaker races. Historians have tried to construct a substitute Nazi world-view different from, and less frightening than, the one they actually held, but, no matter how hard it is to believe, there’s actually no doubt that they genuinely saw the Aryan race as threatened with wholesale extermination by its racial enemies, unless it could exterminate them first. And although Germany would not be militarily ready for war, according to the Generals, until 1942/43, fear led them to attack anyway. The longer they waited, the worse it would be.

Can we really imagine, today, then, how the decision-makers of the late 1940s must have felt after all this? After two apocalyptically destructive wars in which many of them had fought, after the prisons and the concentration camps from which some of them had returned, after the mass forced movements of populations, the forcible redrawing of boundaries and the appearance of millions of foreign troops on European soil, after revolutions, counter-revolutions, massacres without number, near-civil wars in western Europe and an actual civil war in Greece, Europe was as exhausted and wrecked psychologically as it was devastated physically. Now what?

First and most obviously, the fear that it would get worse, and that Europe would simply fall apart, perhaps into a mass of feuding ethnic statelets. The political leaders of those days, who had lived through events that sensitivity readers will soon no longer allow to appear in history books, were far from perfect, but they were at least adults, compared to the children in charge today. They managed, with a little help from the US, to reconstruct Europe economically, bit by bit, and the strong civil societies in most European states facilitated the return of something like normal politics. But there was a huge problem, and that was the Soviet Union.

As often with fear, the fear was more of one’s own weakness than of the strength of others. In the late 1940s, Europe was effectively disarmed. The only two military powers of substance, France and Britain, were busy abroad. Those European armies in existence at the end of the war had pretty much been demobilised, and the massive US forces had largely gone home. That would have mattered less had it not been for the inescapable effects of geography, which placed millions of Soviet troops a matter of a few hundred kilometres from western capitals. True, these were occupation troops, and their presence there was seen by Moscow as strategically defensive. True, western commanders did not expect an attack from that direction, although as was said at the time, the Red Army could in practice have “walked to Calais” and no-one could have stopped them.

But the extensive polemical literature about Whose Fault It Was That The Cold War Started misses the point. Europe was frightened of its own weakness, and on the point of collapse. Even a major political crisis with the Soviet Union, whose own fears had pushed it to occupy all the territory it could West of its borders, might finish it off. Europe was anyway divided between victors and vanquished, occupiers and occupied, those who had fought and those who had remained neutral, and most European countries were just as divided internally. The fear that the large French and Italian Communist Parties, with their prestige from the Resistance years, might provoke civil wars along Spanish lines in their own countries was perhaps “exaggerated” (whatever that means) but it was not irrational. Parts of the French Communist Party had only with difficulty been dissuaded from exactly that objective by De Gaulle’s emissary, the Resistance martyr Jean Moulin. In the event, Stalin’s habitual caution, and his determination that there should be no “socialist” states outside his direct control, won the day. But that’s all hindsight.

But these fears did not lead to headless chickenism. The decision-makers of the day were sufficiently rational to understand that they were far more at risk from intimidation than from the use of brute force. They therefore hoped to stabilise the situation by making use of the United States as a counterweight, and involving the Americans in European security issues just enough to give the Russians pause. The resulting Washington Treaty, less than the Europeans had hoped for, and without a military component, did nonetheless seem to provide some degree of comfort. From now on, it was thought, Stalin would have to reckon with the US reaction in any crisis that arose in Europe. Had the Korean War not then broken out, had European (and US) leaders not been afraid that it was just the prelude to an assault on the West, had NATO not been militarised in expectation of an imminent attack, had the Soviet Union not taken that act to be a potentially aggressive one … well, today’s world would be very different.

But mutual fear, far more than simple ideological differences, was behind the surreal misunderstandings which structured the Cold War, as I have pointed out elsewhere. I won’t repeat that here, save to emphasise just how central was the role fear played during that period, to the extent of overwhelming any rational judgement. It remains a mystery to me how units of the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany could be at a few hours’ notice to move out to meet a NATO attack, when the very competent Soviet Military Intelligence Services were quite aware that NATO had no such plans, let alone the necessary capabilities. Partly, of course, it was Marxist-Leninist military doctrine, that held that a final apocalyptic attack would be launched by the capitalist West in a desperate attempt to prevent the triumph of Communism. But mostly, I think, it was fear: supposing we’re wrong? Supposing they have secret plans and weapons we don’t know about? After all, we got it wrong in 1941. We can’t be too careful.

Fear was the thread that ran through Cold War politics, but not necessarily in obvious ways. One of the most distinctive features of NATO, curiously, was how little any European nation really trusted the US. Yet this was not the same as the fear of the peace lobby that the US would negligently start World War III: it was almost the reverse. The most common fear, in fact, was that the US, in one of its periodic tiffs with the Soviet Union, would get the West into a situation of crisis, after which it would cut a bilateral deal with the Soviet Union and walk away, leaving Europe to hang. US ownership of the military command system meant that, as a technical issue, it would actually be impossible for European states to continue fighting if the US decided to take its ball home. Fear that this might happen were behind the stationing of US forces as far forward as possible, so they would be among those who died first.

It was actually Suez that brought home to the Europeans, and especially the British and the French, that they could not rely on US support in a future crisis. For the French, this was compounded by lack of US (and NATO) support for their campaign in Algeria where, in the view of nearly the whole of the French political class, they were defending French territory against Soviet-directed insurgents. Suez hastened the French in their preparations for a purely national defence capability, based around the nuclear weapons then under development and on recovering national command over their forces. From then on, they cultivated a pragmatic but nonetheless independent relationship with the US based on national interest, but also on trying to avoid, so far as possible, being dependent on the US for anything critical. The British were equally afraid of being abandoned by the US, but their response was the opposite: to embed themselves so deeply and thoroughly in the US system that the Americans would do nothing without consulting them. Again, asking whether these fears were “excessive” is a question both unanswerable and pointless: they were genuinely felt fears which derived ultimately from a determination never again to be abandoned, as each considered they had been, in the summer of 1940.

It will be obvious by now that many of these historical fears, long unmoored from their original context, are at play in western reactions to the Ukraine crisis, and I’ll go a bit more into that in a moment. But fear is not the only emotion involved, and one of the keys to understanding European reactions to the crisis (less so the US, perhaps) is that European leaderships are actually the victims of whole floods of unconscious emotions, often contradicting each other. And we know from psychological studies that the unconscious has no sense of time: emotions that we had as children are just as powerful today as they were then. They do not even have to be based on real events that happened to us; they can come from books or films that we saw, or just our imagination.,

As I’ve pointed out, the response to the end of the Cold War and the lifting of the threat of nuclear annihilation, was, first, a dazed disbelief and a state of shock, then a kind of manic triumphalism that lasted well into the present century. In one of the more curious intellectual contortions of modern times, the economic policies inflicted on the new Russia in the 1990s, and which almost destroyed the country, were praised in public as the same economic policies that had “won” the Cold War for the West. But then among the many emotions unleashed by the end of the Cold War were anger and vindictiveness and the desire for revenge and destruction. The testosterone accumulated over decades in western capitals could not actually be satisfactorily discharged in the small-scale wars of the following generation, and much pent-up aggression remained: psychologically, I think, there were even those in the West who welcomed at least a political conflict with Russia, so there was somewhere this stored-up aggression could go.

Although the timing was largely coincidental, the end of the Cold War also saw the creation of the European Political and Monetary Unions, and the preparation of the Euro as a single currency. These moves to centralise power as far as possible in supranational organisations were guided by an ideology which was itself, at least in part, an emotional reaction against Europe’s bloody past. Although Britain was a member of the EU for more than twenty years, Anglo-Saxon politicians and pundits never really understood what the ideology of Brussels and Maastricht actually was, nor even that it was an ideology. I touched on this in an essay soon after the start of the conflict, and I won’t repeat it all here. It’s enough to say that it’s an ideology which sees the foundations of European society—nation, culture, language, history, religion—as causes of conflict, and as things to be controlled and domesticated, so that they couldn’t do any harm. The “free movement of people” and the right of non-citizens to vote in certain elections breaks the historic link between the citizen and their government, and the creation of an indistinguishable European political class means that national elections make little difference anyway. The ideology is a form of elite Liberalism, whose Plato-like Guardians will ensure that we common people, who cannot be expected to understand complex things, have someone to take decisions for us.

As I’ve often pointed out, Liberalism is a universalising philosophy, and its triumphant rampage through the countries of Eastern Europe produced a sentiment of invincibility and inviolability in Brussels, as one country after another started down what seemed to be a historically predestined road. Except Russia: but until a decade or so ago Russia could be treated with contempt. It was an economically and socially backward nation, weak and in decline, much like China in the nineteenth century.

So one important emotional component of the European emotional attitude towards Russia is anger and disappointment with a country that seems to be standing in the way of progress and history, a country that still, amazingly, values such things as history, identity, culture, language, religion, and all these other relics of the past that, when exploited by extremist politicians, have caused all these wars and this suffering (um, we’ll get back to you on the detail.) In Russia, European leaders see not only the fancied ghosts of their own dark past, they see an anti-Europe, a kind of Jungian Shadow of everything they most fear and reject.

So it’s not surprising that European attitudes to Russia have been complex and contradictory, built as they are on conflicting sets of emotions half-remembered from different historical moments, and uncomfortably superposed on top of each other. This perhaps is the explanation of the very obvious conundrum: how can Russia be at once laughably weak, and terrifying powerful, in the same article, or even in the same paragraph?

The answer, I think, is that the European elite view of Russia is an emotional mess, superposing, as I have suggested, different feelings about Russia from different historical periods, but unable to reconcile them. So Russia is the terrifying military juggernaut of the Cold War, but also the untrained peasants mown down by the Germans in 1914, the historically unstoppable mass of savages to the East but also the country that was thrown out of Afghanistan, a fearsome and ruthless dictatorship capable of overthrowing governments but also a comic-opera state with a GDP about the same as Belgium and dependent on oil exports. The sense of arrogant dismissal which characterised western thinking about Russia until about 2014 meant that going to the trouble of finding out the actual facts was not considered necessary. In the end, reality didn’t matter very much. We would deal with the Russians as we wished, and if they didn’t like it, well, there wasn’t much they could do.

All of these emotions, it hardly needs to be said, completely lack nuance. Individuals and nations slide from one to the other without any intermediate stage. Yesterday’s weakling becomes overlaid by todays’s frightening superpower, yet somehow our fear is also still mixed with anger and contempt. This is effectively what happened after 2014. No longer was Russia still the Russia of the 1990s, or for that matter of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky; or rather it was in certain ways, but now overlaid with memories of the fear of the Soviet Union in the Cold War. After Crimea and the fighting in Eastern Ukraine, for the first time, contempt for Russia was mixed with genuine fear. Whether this western fear of a newly irredentist Russia was “reasonable” or not is another pointless question, and one which the world’s largest AI with the world’s largest spreadsheet could not answer, because it has no answer. That Russian actions in 2014 played into historical western emotions, especially fear, and into historical stereotypes, is all that can really be said.

In some cases, these fears were quite specific: Merkel, for example was heir to the traditional German fear of the savages to the East, to stories of the atrocities of the Tsar’s Army in 1914, and to memories of the Soviet occupation of part of Germany. Hollande was a distant heir to the bitter anti-communism that characterised the French Socialist Party after the Conference of Tours in 1920. So the two of them, for different reasons and not necessarily in quite the same way as other European leaders, were afraid of what the events of 2014 might imply. But they were also, of course, worried about their own weakness. The NATO operation in Afghanistan had just ended, and NATO’s conventional armed forces were beginning to appear desperately weak and outmoded. It wasn’t even obvious what European forces, in particular, were for any more. So the idea of building up Ukraine which had actually retained a conventional high-intensity warfare capability as a protective buffer must have seemed a way of assuaging this fear.

The same was true on the other side, of course. Once more, the question of whether the Russian fear of Ukraine being used as a forward base for an attack on Russia was “reasonable” or not is irrelevant. It wasn’t a matter of nine-dimensional chess, but of the renewal of fears of invasion from the West which must by now have sunk deep into Russian DNA. OK, the West wasn’t basing nuclear weapons in Ukraine now. But it might in five years’ time, or in three years’ time. Or next month. Anyway, we can’t be too careful. If we are going to take out Ukraine, let’s do it now. Why wait?

The most dangerous feature of the whole Ukraine crisis has been the two sides’ (leave the US out for a moment) complete failure to understand each other, and the complex of emotions that drives each of them. But because leaders and pundits do not like to think of themselves as driven by atavistic emotions, especially those they only half understand, they have made up complex and elaborate theories which enable them to see the actions of the other side as driven by rational objectives and planning, at least to a degree.

Hiding behind all this is an enormous and frightening irony. The mixture of contempt and fear that drove the Europeans, even more than the US, into head-on confrontation with Russia, was based ultimately on the belief that Russia would crumble quickly, and that Russian adventurism, dangerous and frightening as it might be, was in fact playing into Europe’s hands. In a few weeks the economy would start to disintegrate, the government would fall, and the universalising dream of European Liberalism would be extended to Moscow. As the limitations and contradictions of this position became clear, as western equipment, training and planning proved to be essentially useless last year, the mood changed, from incredulity, to worry, to panic and now to fear.

They have every reason to be afraid, because through almost unbelievable incompetence, the Europeans have constructed for themselves precisely the situation that they have been afraid of since 1945, only worse. Consider: if we take 1948 to be the year of maximum fear, then in that year Europe, for all its many weaknesses, still had millions of men and women with recent military experience and immense stockpiles of weapons. Its civil societies and social structures had survived the war largely intact, social cohesion was still strong, and local and national governments were being rebuilt. Much manufacturing industry had survived the war, and many countries had retained the capacity to make their own armaments. Raw materials were either sourced in Europe or from countries with which European powers had close relations. Europe had large numbers of trained engineers and scientists. The Royal Navy and the US Navy controlled the seas and the commerce of the world. The US, though going through an isolationist phase, had a monopoly of nuclear arms, and was not easily going to let Europe fall under Soviet influence. On the other hand, the Soviet Union was exhausted, and mainly concerned to consolidate its hold over the countries it had already occupied.

Literally none of that is true today. Russia is emerging from this war almost like the US in 1945: economically and militarily stronger than at the beginning. Europe is economically and militarily weak and politically divided both within and between nations. I have dealt before with fantasies of “rearmament” and I will not repeat the analysis here. The idea of conscription is laughable from a social as much as a practical point of view. After all, here are societies whose populations couldn’t even be persuaded to wear a mask in confined spaces to avoid breathing dangerous germs over their fellow citizens. Did somebody say “national service”?

So let’s run the clock forward to, say 2028. What do we find? In the Red corner (if you like), a strong, confident, angry and resentful Russia, with large and powerful armed forces, conventional weapons capable of striking most parts of Europe, largely economically self-sufficient and with a close relationship with China. In the Blue corner, disunited and economically and politically weak European states with a scattering of understrength military units here and there, and dependent for raw materials on nations where relations are difficult, and for most of its manufactured goods on China

It’s not hard to see who will have the upper hand. I don’t think for a moment the Russians are going to invade Western Europe: they don’t need to. The nightmare scenario of political pressure, backed by military superiority and rendered more serious by domestic division—the exact scenario feared in 1948—will have come to pass. With one difference. Where is the US? Nowhere. Rather than being the counterweight to Soviet and then Russian power, as was always hoped, it has played itself out of the game, revealed itself as fundamentally weak militarily, and will no longer be able to influence security issues in Europe as it did in the past. So far as I can see, it’s going to cut its (considerable) losses and run, just as European nations always feared it would. This will leave Europe in what could be described as a rather tense situation.

In fact, if I were a European politician, I’d be scared stiff.