Copyright

William Collins

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2002

Copyright © Margaret Thatcher 2002

Maps and graphics by Peter Harper

Margaret Thatcher asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007150649

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Dedication

This book is dedicated to Ronald Reagan

To whom the world owes so much

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

List of Illustrations

List of Tables

Introduction

1. Cold War Reflections

2. The American Achievement

3. The Russian Enigma

4. Asian Values

5. Asian Giants

6. Rogues, Religions and Terrorism

7. Human Rights and Wrongs

8. Balkan Wars

9. Europe – Dreams and Nightmares

10. Britain and Europe – Time to Renegotiate

11. Capitalism and its Critics

Postscript: Runnymede

Keep Reading

Footnotes

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also By

About the Publisher

List of Illustrations

At Air Force Plant 42, Palmdale, California, March 1991. (Personal collection)

Receiving an honorary doctorate at Brigham Young University, Utah, March 1996. (Personal collection)

At the launch of Ever Result at the Mitsubishi shipyard in Kobe, October 1994. (Personal collection)

With Jiang Zemin in Beijing, September 1991. (Personal collection)

Being met by Li Peng, Beijing, September 1991. (Personal collection)

Meeting Lee Teng Hui, Taipei, September 1992. (Courtesy Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Taiwan)

Graffiti in Kuwait City, November 1991. (Personal collection)

Talks with Yitzhak Rabin, Israel, November 1992. (Personal collection)

Visiting Vukovar hospital, September 1998. (Personal collection)

List of Tables

NATO Defence Expenditure

Free Countries

Government Spending and Unemployment

International Labour Costs

Overseas Investment

Trade Blocs

Freedom and Prosperity

Fertility Rates

Introduction

For as long as there have been states, there has been discussion of statecraft or statesmanship.* The emphasis has changed over the centuries, as ideas of the state itself have changed – from the Greek city-state (or polis) with its narrow (and naturally all-male) citizenship; to the vastness of the Roman Empire with its enthronement of law; to the idealised, if not always idealistic, rulers of medieval Christendom; to the rumbustious politics of Renaissance Italy, home to Machiavelli’s Prince; to the absolute monarchies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the ages of Richelieu and Frederick the Great; to the French Revolutionary Wars and Napoleon, the clashing European empires, and the competing nationalisms of the nineteenth century; and to the democratic concepts and the welfare state of the twentieth century. To plot the course of statecraft over so long a period would require skills that I, for one, do not possess.† Yet just the sense of so much history lying behind the tasks and goals of statesmen today is sobering and provides perspective.

The early twenty-first century also has its distinctive features that govern the nature of statecraft now. These can conveniently, if not altogether satisfactorily, be summed up by the expression ‘globalism’. In the course of the rest of this book I shall examine, test and explore the realities behind that term in its application to strategy, international interventions, justice and economics. And I shall do this for different countries and continents.

I must start, though, with the state itself. If you were to heed some commentators you would believe that globalisation spells the end of the state as we have known it over the centuries. But they are wrong: it does not. What it actually does is to prevent – in some degree – the state from doing things which it should never have been doing in the first place. And that is something rather different.

A world of mobile capital, of international integration of markets, of instant communication, of information available to all at the click of a mouse, and of (fairly) open borders, is certainly a long way from that world favoured by statists, of whatever political colour, in the past. It is nowadays, as a result, more difficult for governments to misrule their peoples and mismanage their resources without quickly running into problems. Unfortunately, though, it is still not impossible. Many African governments get away with kleptocracy. Several Asian governments get away with disrespect for fundamental human rights. Most European governments get away with high taxation and over-regulation. Bad policies inflict damage on those who practise them, as well as those on whose behalf they are practised, but bad government is still eminently possible.

That somewhat gloomy reflection should be balanced, though, by three much more positive ones. States retain their fundamental importance, first, because they alone set legal frameworks, and having the right legal framework is enormously important – probably more important than ever – for both society and the economy. Second, states are important because they help provide a sense of identity – particularly when their borders coincide with those of a nation – and the more ‘globalised’ the world becomes the more people want to hang on to such identity. Third, states alone retain a monopoly of legitimate coercive power – the power required to suppress crime at home and to maintain security against threats abroad.* This final coercive function of the state, although it may in practice involve a degree of contracting out to private enterprise, can and must never be yielded up. The state is something different from society; it is ultimately the servant not the master of individual human beings; its potential for inflicting horrors remains as great as ever. All these things are true. But we need states and we always will.†

It is on the state’s role in the maintenance of international security that I concentrate in this book. This, in itself – at least until the events of Tuesday, 11 September 2001 – was slightly unfashionable. Today’s politicians, at least in the democracies, had become almost exclusively interested in domestic politics. Of course, in one sense that was understandable. In a democracy we first have to win the votes of the electorate before we strut the world stage – unless we are European Commissioners. As Disraeli once put it, a majority is the ‘best repartee’, and he might have added the ‘best basis for diplomacy’. But the fact remains that the great issues of war and peace which traditionally commanded the attention of statesmen down the ages should again command them today – and to a greater extent than they have in recent years. Riots, epidemics, financial crashes – all can be very frightening and disruptive. But war is still the most terrifying and destructive experience known to man.

Foreign and security policy, though, concerns much more than the two opposing poles of war and peace. It concerns the whole range of risks and opportunities which the far-sighted statesman must appreciate and evaluate in the conduct of his craft. Above all, foreign and security policy is about the use of power in order to achieve a state’s goals in its relations with other states. As a conservative, I have no squeamishness about stating this. I leave it to others to try to achieve the results they seek in international affairs without reference to power. They always fail. And their failures often lead to outcomes more damaging than pursuit of national interest through the normal means of the balance of power and resolute defence would ever have done. It is, indeed, a recurring theme in Western liberal democracies, this mixture of naïve idealism with a distaste for power – and we should be on our guard against it.*

One example. In 1910 Norman Angell, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, wrote a celebrated book called The Great Illusion. In this he argued that because of global economic interdependence – particularly between the great powers – and because the real sources of wealth that lie in trade cannot ultimately be captured, warfare conducted for material advantage is always pointless. There is a small kernel of truth in this. Peace, not war, promotes commerce, and commerce is the driving force for prosperity – other things being equal. But in the real world other things are quite often not at all equal. Aggression may make perfect sense to a tyrant or a well-armed fanatic in certain circumstances. It may even appeal to a whole nation. Trade protectionism, which stops countries from having access to the commodities they need for their industries, may also lead political leaders to launch ‘rational’ wars. In any of these conditions there is precious little point in either victims or onlookers protesting that everyone would be better off without war. The only alternatives on offer are to fight, or to raise the white flag. Concerns for a safer world and attempts to secure it are admirable. But when, as in the case of Norman Angell, they lead a writer to believe, four years before the most terrible conflict the world has known, that ‘it is absolutely certain – and even the militarists … admit this – that the natural tendencies of the average man are setting more and more away from war’ – then something is badly wrong.†

It is sometimes suggested, or at least implied, that the only alternative to such dangerous high-mindedness as this in foreign policy is the total abandonment of moral standards. The thought behind Sir Henry Wotton’s well-known definition of a diplomat as ‘a good man sent abroad to lie for his country’ has been applied more widely.* Yet I am not one of those who believe that statecraft should concern power without principle. For a start, pure Realpolitik – that is, foreign policy based on calculations of power and the national interest† – is a concept which blurs at the edges the more closely it is examined. Bismarck, its most famous practitioner, once remarked over dinner that conducting policy with principles would be like walking along a narrow forest path while carrying a long pole between one’s teeth. But even the Iron Chancellor had principles of a kind: after all, he accepted without demur that his loyalty was to his royal (and later imperial) master rather than to the German people – a large section of whom he left excluded from the Reich.‡ He upheld the system and the values of the Prussian state, not those of a liberal democratic Germany. Whatever you think of this policy, it was not mere pragmatism.

Moreover, in the age of democracy the pursuit of statecraft without regard for moral principles is all but impossible, and it makes little sense for even the most hard-nosed statesmen to ignore this fact. Since Gladstone’s Midlothian Campaigns in 1879 and 1880 – launched on the back of denunciations of Britain’s foreign policy as ‘immoral’ – politicians who try to appeal exclusively to national interest have repeatedly run into trouble with national electorates. And the rise of America, as a great power with an easily troubled conscience, has confirmed that trend.

The years of the Cold War also had a deep and lasting effect. In that period, when the world was divided into two armed blocs with opposing ideologies – capitalism and socialism – the upholding of national interest and the upholding of political principles were for most of the time a seamless web. And though much has been questioned since the end of the Cold War, there have been few attempts to suggest that considerations of national interest are all that matter in weighing up foreign policy choices.

For my part, I favour an approach to statecraft that embraces principles, as long as it is not stifled by them; and I prefer such principles to be accompanied by steel along with good intentions. I accordingly suggest three axioms which the statesman would do well to bear in mind today.

First, the extension of democracy through every country and continent remains a legitimate and indeed fundamental aspect of sound foreign policy. There are many practical reasons for this: democratic states do not generally make war on each other; democracy generally promotes good government; democracy generally accompanies prosperity. But I do mean true democracy – that is a law-based state with a limited government, in which the tyranny of the majority no less than that of a minority is banished. Furthermore, as I shall explain, I entertain deep reservations about some initiatives taken in the name of human rights and democracy, on grounds of both practicality and of legitimacy.* And I would also caution against making the best (perfect democracy) the enemy of the good (imperfect democracy).† Commonsense must always temper moral zeal.

Second, a sound and stable international order can only be founded upon respect for nations and for nation states. Whatever the flaws of particular nationalisms, national pride and national institutions constitute the best grounding for a functioning democracy. Attempts to suppress national differences or to amalgamate different nations with distinct traditions into artificial states are very likely to fail, perhaps bloodily. The wise statesman will celebrate nationhood – and use it.

Third, whatever stratagems of international diplomacy are deployed to keep the peace, the ultimate test of statesmanship is what to do in the face of war. Deterring wars, and being in a position to win wars that are forced upon one, are two sides of the same coin: both require continuous investment in defence and a constant and unbending resolution to resist aggression. Our present age is one in which even the thought of war has become anathema. Yet at any one time wars of varying intensity are being fought around the globe. For example, in 1999 alone there were civil wars of one kind or another taking place in nineteen countries around the world.* In addition there were four international armed conflicts between governments over sovereignty and territory: the Kosovo conflict (and subsequent NATO intervention); the war between Ethiopia and Eritrea; the clash between India and Pakistan over Kashmir; and the Arab—Israeli conflict in Southern Lebanon. Most such conflicts are in places remote from the daily concerns of Western electorates and politicians. But in today’s world, with its widely available weapons of mass destruction, its ethnic and religious fault-lines, and its propensity for international interventions, distant wars easily pose present dangers.

The first draft of this book was completed before the terrorist attacks on America of Tuesday, 11 September 2001. Any study of events always runs the risk of being overtaken by them.† This happened to Statecraft. In fact, so traumatic and far-reaching have been the consequences of that day’s vile outrages that an author may be tempted to follow some commentators in concluding that only entirely new approaches are relevant to an entirely different world.

But I resisted that temptation. Instead, I set about reconsidering my thinking and revisited my conclusions in the light of what we now know about the scale of the threat posed by Islamic terrorism. I also reflected upon how the requirements of the global war against terrorism, which President Bush and his allies have declared, altered the way in which we should handle relations with other world powers like Russia, China and India. I weighed up the case for a radically different approach to the Middle East. I tried to assess whether the crisis altered Britain’s role in Europe or Europe’s role in the Western Alliance. In fact, I sought to test everything.

On some questions I did indeed find myself altering my emphasis. In giving priority – as we now must – to beating terrorism, we inevitably give less attention to other issues. We have to achieve a somewhat different balance between individual liberties and the safety of the public at home. Abroad, our attentions will also be refocused. In forging a coalition to defeat one enemy we may have, at least temporarily, to deal more closely with unsatisfactory regimes which we have otherwise been right to criticise. But then, having a conservative rather than a liberal view of foreign and security policy, I agree with Winston Churchill, who once remarked of his alliance with the Soviet Union to defeat Nazi Germany: ‘If Hitler invaded Hell I would at least try to make a favourable reference to the Devil.’ Thankfully, we are not confronted with allies like Stalin, and the Devil’s hand is clearly recognisable in the works of Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network.

Yet, all that said, I do not in fact find myself altering my analysis in any very significant respect. And this is not mere stubbornness on my part. Let me explain why.

In the wake of America’s tragedy, we heard it said again and again that Tuesday, 11 September was ‘the day the world changed’. The headlines proclaimed it. The newscasters repeated it. The politicians, with a few exceptions, echoed it. It is easy to understand why the statement came to be made. What happened that day was the worst ever terrorist outrage. Westerners in general, Americans in particular, never felt more vulnerable or less prepared. The scale of the grief and the depth of the anger simply have no equivalent.

For those who mourn, of course, reality had changed – for ever. In time, perhaps, they will find new lives, new sources of consolation, blessed forgetfulness; but nothing politicians or generals do can recapture what they have lost.

But in a different way the world has stayed the same: it is just that years of illusion have been stripped away. Ever since the end of the Cold War, the West had come to believe that it was time to think and speak only of the arts of peace. With one great enemy – Soviet communism – vanquished, it was all too demanding and unsettling to think that other enemies might yet arise to disturb our prosperous calm.

So we heard more and more about human rights, less and less about national security. We spent more on welfare, less on defence. We allowed our intelligence efforts to slacken. We hoped – and many were the liberal-minded politicians who encouraged us to hope – that within the Global Village there were only to be found good neighbours. Few of us were tactless enough to mention that what makes good neighbours is often good fences.

Yet, the world we all view so much more clearly now, with eyes wiped clean by tears of tragedy, was in truth there all along. It is a world of risk, of conflict and of latent violence. Democracy, progress, tolerance – these values have not yet taken possession of the earth. And the only sense in which we have reached the ‘end of history’ is that we have gained a glimpse of Armageddon.*

We now know that bin Laden’s terrorists had been planning their outrages for years. The propagation of their mad, bad ideology – decency forbids calling it a religion – had been taking place before our eyes. We were just too blind to see it. In short, the world had never ceased to be dangerous. But the West had ceased to be vigilant. Surely that is the most important lesson of this tragedy, and we must learn it if our civilisation is to survive.

CHAPTER 1
Cold War Reflections
PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION

At the time of writing these lines I have just learned that my portrait has been moved from the ‘Contemporary’ to the ‘Historical’ Room of London’s National Portrait Gallery. This is perfectly fair. After all, eleven years have passed since I left Number Ten Downing Street. The world has, as they say, ‘moved on’ in all sorts of respects.

For example, in 1990 we could not have foreseen the huge impact which the information revolution would have upon business, lifestyles and even war. We could not have imagined that the mighty Japanese economy would have stalled so badly, or that China would have risen so fast. We could not have envisaged that perhaps the most chilling threat to Man’s dignity and freedom would lie in his ability to manipulate genetic science so as to create, and re-create, himself. Nor, needless to say, would even the most far-sighted statesman have predicted the horrors of 11 September 2001.

But it is always true that the world that is can best be understood by those conversant with the world that was. And ‘the world that was’ – the world which preceded today’s world of dot.coms, mobile phones and GM food – was one which saw a life-and-death struggle whose outcome was decisive for all that has followed.

Of course, just to speak of the ‘Cold War’ nowadays is to refer back to an era which seems a lifetime, not a mere decade and a half, ago. In truth, as I shall argue at many stages in this book, the underlying realities have changed rather less than the rhetoric. But changes there have been – and, on balance, ones of enormous benefit to the world.

DEBATES IN PRAGUE

People will continue to argue about the significance of the collapse of communism for as long as there are books to write and publishers to print them. But on Tuesday, 16 November 1999 a number of the main actors in those dramatic events – myself among them – met in Prague to put our own interpretations. It was ten years since the Czechoslovak ‘Velvet Revolution’ had led to the fall of one of the most hardline communist governments in Europe and its replacement by democracy.

I had not participated in the celebrations a few days earlier in Berlin held to mark the tenth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I would have felt uneasy doing so. This was not because I felt any nostalgia for communism. The Wall was an abomination, an indisputable proof that communism was ultimately a system of slavery imposed by imprisoning whole populations. President Reagan had been right in 1987 to demand of the Soviet leader: ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’

But nor could I then or now regard Germany as just another country whose future was a matter for Germans alone to decide, without involving anybody else. A united Germany was bound to become once again the dominant power in Europe. It would doubtless be diplomatic, but it would also be culpably naïve, to ignore the fact that this German drive for dominance has led in my lifetime to two terrible, global wars during which nearly a hundred million people – including of course nine million Germans – died. The Germans are a cultured and talented people; but in the past they have shown a marked inability to limit their ambitions or respect their neighbours.

Awareness of the past and uncertainty about the future led President Mitterrand and me, with not very effective assistance from President Gorbachev, to try to slow down the rush to German unification. In the end, we failed – partly because the United States administration took a different view, but mainly because the Germans took matters into their own hands, as in the end, of course, they were entitled to do. It was good that German reunification took place within NATO, thus avoiding the risk that it might have constituted a dangerous non-aligned power in the middle of Europe. It was also good that Germans were able to feel that they had won back control of their own country – as a patriot myself I certainly do not deny anyone else the right to be patriotic. But it would be hypocritical to pretend that I did not have deep misgivings about what a united Germany might mean. So I had no intention of going to Berlin in October 1999 to spoil the party.

Prague, though, was a different matter entirely – this was one party I hoped to enjoy. The Czechs, of course, have suffered the brunt of both Nazism and communism. And, having been failed by the democratic powers in the face of both totalitarian aggressions, they know a thing or two about the need for vigilance.

My favourite European cities all lie behind the former Iron Curtain – St Petersburg (for its grandeur), Warsaw (for its heroism), Budapest (for its leafy elegance). But Prague is quite simply the most beautiful city I have ever visited. It is almost too beautiful for its own good. In 1947 the historian A.J.P. Taylor asked the then Czech President Edvard Beneš why the Czech authorities had not put up stronger resistance to the seizure of Czechoslovakia by Hitler in 1939. Beneš might, I suppose, have replied that the Czechs were taken unawares, deceived by German promises. Or he could have answered that the Czechs were outnumbered and so resistance was useless. Instead, to Taylor’s surprise, he flung open the windows of his office overlooking the irreplaceable glories of Prague and declared: ‘This is why we did not fight!’

The Czech Republic has been one of the more successful post-communist countries, thanks mainly to the visionary economic policies of its former Prime Minister, my old friend and Hayekian extraordinaire, Vaclav Klaus. But he could not have succeeded as he did had the Czechs not retained an instinctive understanding of how to make a civil society and a free economy work. They gained these insights through the historical memory ingrained in their culture – it is, after all, worth remembering that before the Second World War Czechoslovakia enjoyed an income per head equal to that of France. The Czechs are a people who have never forgotten how to combine knowing how to live with knowing how to work. So, for all these reasons, when I was invited to Prague with George Bush Sr, Mikhail Gorbachev, Helmut Kohl, Lech Walesa and (representing her late husband) Mme Danielle Mitterrand, I eagerly accepted.

Our host was President Vaclav Havel. Czechoslovakia had been immensely fortunate in 1989 to have Mr Havel – someone of total integrity and enjoying near-universal respect – to symbolise popular resistance and eventually become its leader and the nation’s president. President Havel is the sort of leader you could not imagine coming to power in ordinary circumstances – which some people may consider quite a recommendation. He is a considerable playwright, an intellectual, a combination of gentleness and courage – he spent over five years in jail for his views. He speaks quietly but forcefully, no orator in the ordinary sense but with something of the preacher’s ability to convey moral certainty and to communicate inspiration.

Mr Havel’s office in the presidential wing of Prague Castle, where we met that afternoon, looks out onto the river and the old city beyond. The furnishing has doubtless changed since Beneš’s time. A large Egyptianesque nude female statue stands by his desk: for the President’s tastes in art, like his politics, are not altogether mine.

President Havel’s anti-communism is not in doubt. But he is a man of the left and his view of the world reflects this. As he would put it in a speech the following day: ‘The present calls for a new perception of the contemporary world as a multi-polar, multicultural and globally interconnected entity, and for a consistent reform of all international organisations and institutions in order that they might reflect this new understanding.’ This kind of utopian language, even from one so eloquent, worries me.

Mr Havel and I, though, agree entirely, I think, about what was wrong with communism – a system which (to quote him again) was ‘based on lies, hatred and coercion’. My first engagement on Wednesday morning allowed me to gauge how the President’s fellow countrymen thought. I was to unveil a new statue of Sir Winston Churchill – a life-size copy of that which stands in front of the Palace of Westminster in London. Also due to speak were Vaclav Klaus and Sir Winston’s nephew, Rupert Soames.

It was very cold indeed; a bitter wind cut through me to the quick. I had decided on a black wool suit with fur trim and black hat, but had rejected advice to wear a thick coat and quickly regretted it. Prague’s Churchill Square is quite large, but it was packed. Some seven thousand people stood there and more were hanging out of overlooking windows to get a better view. I made my speech:

Each time I come [to Prague] I seem to enter a world of majestic churches, mighty palaces and evocative sculpture. But I confess that I am very glad that you have found a place for this new statue. It will remind you here, as every generation has to be reminded – and amid all this beauty – that the price of freedom can be high, and that it may indeed require the sacrifice of ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’. This statue of Sir Winston Churchill will also remind you, as it reminds me, of something else – that liberty must never be allowed to perish from the earth, it must endure for ever.

The reception was tremendous. Some applause has a special quality that you remember for a lifetime. This had it. Finally, the Czech national anthem was played by the band and sung with passion by the crowd. I could only imagine what it meant – for the old people who recalled the Nazi invader, for the younger ones who had suffered under communism, for the very young who knew, without having experienced either of these totalitarianisms, what freedom truly was.

By now I had been standing completely still for almost an hour, and I was frozen. As we left the platform a Czech veteran who had served with the British in the last war stood forward to request an autograph. My hands were shaking so much that I could barely write. The almost illegible signature he has is certainly unique and will in future years probably be denounced by the experts as a fake.

It was apparent from the panel discussion that afternoon in Prague Castle’s huge, gilded baroque ball room, that whatever chord I struck with the Czech people evoked less harmony from some of my fellow guests, above all from Mikhail Gorbachev. The discussion was tactfully chaired by the historian Timothy Garton Ash, who had himself played a distinguished role in the events of ten years earlier. To his left sat Mme Mitterrand, George Bush, myself and Helmut Kohl. To his right were Vaclav Havel, Mikhail Gorbachev and Lech Walesa. The theme of the discussion was ‘Ten Years After’.

Interestingly, written down like that, the title looks strangely unfinished. Ten years after … what? The obvious reply, of course, is ‘Prague’s Velvet Revolution’. But it is not the only reply. One might say instead ‘the collapse of communism’, or ‘the triumph of freedom’, or – even more controversial for some – ‘the West’s victory in the Cold War’. It was a fundamental difference about these other possibilities that underlay the disagreement that followed.

All those present (with the exception of Danielle Mitterrand) had played a considerable part in securing the outcome ten years earlier. Lech Walesa’s leadership of the Polish Solidarity trade union was crucial in the fight for Polish freedom (I well remembered my visit to the Gdansk shipyard in November 1988 and my – as it turns out – successful attempts to persuade General Jaruzelski to negotiate with Solidarity*).

Mikhail Gorbachev began the reforms in the Soviet Union that opened the way – albeit unintentionally on his part – for the fall of communism. But perhaps the decision for which he should be given most credit is a decision not to do anything at all – when he allowed the Eastern Bloc countries to break free of Soviet control without sending in the tanks.

Helmut Kohl, for all the criticism that has since been made of him, must be ranked with Bismarck and Adenauer as one of Germany’s most successful statesmen. He showed great political courage in resisting the threats and blandishments of a Moscow that was desperate in the 1980s to drive a wedge between Europe and America. And, though I did not appreciate his tactics at the time, he also showed cunning and bravura in securing his country’s unity and freedom in 1989–90.

George Bush – looking drained from an overlong tour of European cities, but as always supported by Barbara – was also present. We are very different people, from different backgrounds and with different instincts. But I have always warmed to his decency and patriotism. He took over where Ronald Reagan left off, and then finished the job – combining sticks and carrots to induce the Soviets along the path of reform and then negotiating the reunification of Germany within NATO.

I have written elsewhere of my own part in the affairs of that time: without Britain’s wholehearted support for the Reagan administration I am not sure that it would have been able to carry its allies along the right path. I also think that the fact that Ronald Reagan and I spoke the same language (in every sense) helped convince friend and foe alike that we were serious.

All of our contributions were quite sufficiently substantial without needing exaggeration or distortion. But human nature being what it is – and academics, like politicians, being on this score quite especially human – a certain amount of revisionism had set in. In particular, the role of Ronald Reagan had been deliberately diminished; the role of the Europeans, who, with the exception of Helmut Kohl, were often all too keen to undermine America when it mattered, had been sanitised; and the role of Mr Gorbachev, who failed spectacularly in his declared objective of saving communism and the Soviet Union, had been absurdly misunderstood.

I was conscious of all this as I prepared my thoughts for the panel. But I tried to be diplomatic. I declared that ‘everyone on this platform was marvellous’. But I also said that it was America and Britain with their deep, historic commitment to the values of liberty which had been crucial in bringing about freedom. I added that what interested me now was to extend the rule of liberty everywhere:

We’ve got the greatest opportunity we’ve ever known to extend liberty and the rule of law to those countries that have never known them, and that’s what I think we should get on with. I trust I make myself clear!

I certainly had, it seems, to Mr Gorbachev, who became really quite angry and delivered an energetic and lengthy rebuttal. He denied that there had been any victor in the Cold War, accused people like me of having a ‘superiority complex’, asserted that no single ideology – ‘neither the liberal, nor the communist, nor the conservative nor any other’ – had all the answers, and informed us that ‘even the communists wanted to make the world a happier place’.

It followed, of course, that since no side had won (or, doubtless more important to Mr Gorbachev, no side had lost) and no single ideology was sufficient for the needs of the world today, the search for solutions must go on. And, not surprisingly perhaps, it was through resort to all the most fashionable nostrums that this search should be pursued – by turning (as he put it) to ‘new methods, a new philosophy, a new thinking that can help us understand one another and the conditions of the globalising world’.

Mr Gorbachev is lively, engaging and a great talker – a subject on which I am a good judge (on this occasion he spoke for about a third of the conference). But his remarks in Prague seemed to me, to say the least, of doubtful validity.

Yet nor should they be lightly dismissed. They represent the articulation of a strategy, common to the left in many countries, of seeking to escape all blame for communism and then going on to take credit for being more pragmatic, modern and insightful about the world which those who actually fought communism have created. It is a pressing necessity to expose and defeat both distortions.

Revisionism about the Cold War has taken various guises. But underlying them all is the assertion that the policies of Ronald Reagan towards the Soviet Union were, as you prefer, superfluous, dangerous or even counter-productive. It was not just loyalty towards my old friend that irritated me about this. It struck me – and still strikes me – as potentially disastrous, because learning the wrong lessons could still result in adopting the wrong responses.

With all this in mind, on the same evening in Prague I put to good use a short speech of thanks when I and the other distinguished guests received the Czech Order of the White Lion. I said:

Belief in the unique dignity of the human person, in the need for the state to serve and not to dominate, in the right to ownership of property and so independence – these things were what the West upheld, and what we fought for in the long twilight struggle that we call the Cold War. In the ten years that have elapsed since communism fell, much has been written of that great conflict. There has even, at times, been a little revisionism at work. But truth is too precious to become the slave of fashion.

As I receive this award today, I would like to refer to the man who more than any other – and more than me – can claim to have won the Cold War without firing a shot – I mean, of course, President Ronald Reagan. The fact that he cannot be here, for reasons that are well-known,* reminds us also of so many others who can’t be here – because they perished in prisons and by torture.

In the joy we now feel that Europe is whole and free let us not forget the terrible price that was paid to defend and to recover liberty. As the poet Byron wrote of another such prisoner of conscience:

Eternal spirit of the chainless mind!

Brightest in Dungeons, Liberty! thou art,

For there thy habitation is the heart –

The heart which love of thee alone can bind;

And when thy sons to fetters are consigned –

To fetters, and the damp vault’s dayless gloom,

Their country conquers with their martyrdom,

And Freedom’s fame finds wings on every wind.

I wanted to remind the politicians present – the ordinary Czechs needed no reminding, as the reception they gave me had demonstrated – that the Cold War was a war for freedom, truth and justice. And we anti-communists won it.

THE WEST WON

Above all, Ronald Reagan won it. Only when (and if) the full, undoctored records of the Soviet Union are released and studied will a full correlation be possible between the actions of the Reagan administration and the reactions of the Kremlin. But it is already possible to show that President Reagan deserves to be regarded as the supreme architect of the West’s Cold War victory. This is, surely, the deduction to be made from the remarks of the last Soviet Foreign Minister, Alexandr Bessmertnykh, at a fascinating conference reflecting on Soviet—American relations in the 1980s.*

Among Mr Bessmertnykh’s observations are the following:

On America’s deployment in the autumn of 1983 of Cruise and Pershing II missiles in Europe in the face of both the previous deployment by the USSR of its SS-20s and a fierce barrage of propaganda and threats –

… the decision was definitely a great disappointment … [T]he situation had tremendously deteriorated as far as Soviet interests were concerned. But looking back from today’s position, I think that the fact itself … helped to facilitate and to strongly concentrate on solutions.

On President Reagan’s announcement earlier that same year of his plans for the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) –

… I would say that one of the major moments when the strategists in the Soviet Union started maybe even to reconsider its positions was when the programme of SDI was pronounced in March of 1983. It started to come … to the minds of the [Soviet] leaders that there might be something very, very dangerous in that.

And, finally, on the relationship between the Reagan defence build-up (which both the deployment of intermediate range nuclear weapons in Europe and the decision to go ahead with SDI signified) and the internal weakness of the Soviet Union –

… When Gorbachev came to power in Moscow, the economic statistics already indicated that the economy was not doing so good. So when you were talking about SDI and arms control, the economic element … was sometimes in my view the number one preoccupation of Gorbachev, especially when we were preparing ourselves for Reykjavik. [Emphasis added]

The October 1986 Reykjavik summit, to which Mr Bessmertnykh here alludes, was – as I have written elsewhere – the turning point in the Cold War.* Mr Gorbachev already knew from earlier discussions with President Reagan how passionately committed he was to SDI, which he saw as not just practically necessary but morally right – a programme aimed at the defence of lives and one which did not rely only on a balance of nuclear terror. But the Soviet leader also knew from all the information available to him that the Soviet Union, with its stagnant economy and its technological backwardness, could not match SDI. He had to stop the programme at all costs. So he tempted President Reagan with deep cuts in nuclear weapons, before springing on him the condition – that SDI must stay ‘in the laboratory’.

Mikhail Gorbachev won and Ronald Reagan lost the public relations battle in the wake of the consequent breakdown of the talks. But it was the American President who had effectively just won the Cold War – without firing a shot. In December 1987 the Soviets dropped their demands for the abandonment of SDI and agreed to the American proposals for arms reduction – notably the removal of all intermediate range nuclear weapons from Europe. Mr Gorbachev had crossed his Rubicon. The Soviets had been forced to accept that the strategy they had pursued since the 1960s – of using weaponry, subversion and propaganda to make up for their internal weaknesses and so retain superpower status – had finally and definitively failed.

I still find it astonishing that even the left should try to deny all this. It is, of course, not a crime to be wrong. But it is not far short of criminal to behave as some of them did when they thought that the Soviet Union was on the winning side. These people were blind because they did not want to see, and because they were intoxicated with the classic socialist fantasy of believing that state power offers a short-cut to progress. Thus the American journalist Lincoln Steffens observed after visiting the Soviet Union in 1919: ‘I have seen the future; and it works.’

At the height of the famine of 1932, the worst in Russia’s history, the visiting biologist Julian Huxley found ‘a level of physique and general health rather above that to be seen in England’. Similarly, George Bernard Shaw wrote that ‘Stalin has delivered the goods to an extent that seemed impossible ten years ago, and I take my hat off to him.’ H.G. Wells was equally impressed, reporting that he had ‘never met a man more candid, fair and honest … no-one is afraid of him and everybody trusts him’. Harold Laski considered that Soviet prisons (stuffed full of political prisoners in appalling conditions) enabled convicts to lead ‘a full and self-respecting life’.*

Sidney and Beatrice Webb were similarly overwhelmed by the glories of the Soviet experiment. Their 1200-page book, which faithfully parroted any Soviet propaganda they could pick up, was originally entitled Soviet Communism: A New Civilization?: but the question mark was removed from the second edition, which appeared in 1937 – the height of the terror.†

The capacity of the left to believe the best of communism and the worst of anti-communists has something almost awe-inspiring about it. Even when the Soviet system was in its economic death throes, the economist J.K. Galbraith wrote of his visit in 1984:

That the Soviet system has made great material progress in recent years is evident both from the statistics and from the general urban scene … One sees it in the appearance of well-being of the people on the streets … Partly, the Russian system succeeds because, in contrast with the Western industrial economies, it makes full use of its manpower.*

Professor Galbraith was one of the exponents of the once fashionable notion of ‘convergence’, according to which the capitalist and socialist models were destined to become ever more similar to one another, resulting in a social democracy that reflected the best of each without the disadvantages. One large problem with this theory was that those who held it had constantly to be trying to find advantages in a Soviet system which had none that were apparent to Soviet citizens. As the former dissident Vladimir Bukovsky once remarked – referring to the Russian proverb to the effect that you cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs – he had seen plenty of broken eggs, but never tasted any omelette.

A similar error – which I discuss in a later chapter – was made by those Sovietologists who tried to analyse and predict events in the Soviet Union in terms of doves and hawks, liberals and conservatives, left and right† (I am still perplexed as to why we should be expected to call hardline communists ‘conservative’ or anti-Semite fascists ‘right wing’ – except that it is a useful device of the liberal media to embarrass their opponents). For the advocates of ‘convergence’ and for certain advocates of détente it was assumed that a particular action by the United States would draw forth a parallel reaction from the Soviets.‡ Thus if we wanted peace we should not prepare for war, if we wanted security we should not threaten, and if we wanted cooperation we should compromise. This approach was entirely wrong – at least while the Soviet Union remained a superpower with an expansionist ideology, which it did until some time in the mid-to-late 1980s.

The proof of this is clear. While the United States was led by administrations (Nixon, Ford and Carter) which were intent on compromise with the Soviets, the Soviet Union expanded its military arsenals and intensified its military interventions around the world. But once there was an American President who openly proclaimed his aims of military superiority, systemic competition and the global roll-back of Soviet power, the Soviet Union cooperated, disarmed and finally collapsed. President Reagan’s former critics, in their desperation to find someone else to credit for an end to the Cold War, summoned up Mikhail Gorbachev as a kind of deus ex machina who transformed everything. And indeed Mr Gorbachev’s role was positive and important. But what President Reagan’s revisionist detractors fail to explain is (to use the words of Professor Richard Pipes) ‘why, after four years of Reagan’s relentlessly confrontational policies the Soviet Union did not respond in kind … by appointing a similarly hard-line, belligerent First Secretary, but settled on a man of compromise’.*

To be so wrong quite so often does not, it seems, in the post-Cold War world constitute any impediment to promotion. Far from it. Yesterday’s critics of the strategy which so triumphantly destroyed the Soviet Union were then trusted to manage relations with its successor. Mr Strobe Talbott, in his previous career as a journalist on Time, variously attacked the Reagan defence build-up, dismissed SDI, mocked the idea that external Western pressures could be effective, described the Cold War as a ‘grand obsession’ which diverted the world from other more important matters and described NATO’s continued existence as ‘at best a stop-gap’.† Mr Talbott went on to become President Clinton’s Deputy Secretary of State.

And, yes, all this does matter now. If so many influential people have failed to understand, or have just forgotten, what we were up against during the Cold War and how we overcame it, they are not going to be capable of securing, let alone enlarging, the gains that liberty has made.

The Cold War has sometimes been portrayed as a struggle between two superpowers, the United States (and its allies) on the one hand, and the Soviet Union (and its puppets) on the other. The term ‘superpower’ was not one that I relished at the time, because it always seemed to suggest a moral equivalence between the two political poles. Of course, at one level this was, indeed, a competition for advantage between broadly equivalent powers. But the equivalence reflected might not right. Much more important, and significant for us today, the Cold War was a struggle between two sharply opposing systems, encapsulating two wholly contradictory philosophies, involving two totally different sets of objectives.

The Soviet communist system was, in a sense, simpler. Its central purpose was to achieve domination over the world in its entirety by an ideology, Marxism-Leninism, and by the Communist Party, which was that ideology’s supreme custodian and unique beneficiary. That purpose was, in the eyes of its proponents, subject to no moral constraints – the very notion of which appeared absurd. Communism recognised no limits except those posed by the power of its enemies. Within such a system individuals were only of value in so far as they served the role allotted them. Similarly, the expression of ideas, artistic endeavour, all kinds of ‘private’ activity, were judged and permitted according to whether they advanced ‘the Revolution’, which in practice increasingly meant the interests of the old men of the Kremlin. The pursuit of world revolution was at times largely suspended. At other times, notably in Soviet relations with China, disagreements broke out between the proponents of the great socialist ‘idea’ about its pace, conduct and immediate goals. But the objective of creating worldwide a fully socialist society, consisting of radically socialist citizens, remained.

Against this stood America and its allies. What we call in shorthand ‘the West’ was a reality as complex as ‘the East’ (in communist terms) was simple. First of all it consisted not of one power but of many. Within NATO, the institutional embodiment of Western defence resolve, individual states pursued constantly shifting policies, reflecting their own interests and the democratic decisions of their own peoples. America led; but America had to persuade its friends to follow. This reality reflected a fundamental philosophical difference. The very essence of Western culture – and the heart of both the strengths and weaknesses of Western policy during the Cold War years – was recognition of the unique value of the individual human being.

Put like this, it is easy to see why knowledge of the Cold War experience is important today. Still more important, though, is the fact that the struggle between two quite different approaches to the political, social and economic organisation of human beings has not ended and will never end.

Neither the fall of the Berlin Wall, nor victory in the Gulf War, nor the collapse of the Soviet Union, nor the establishment of free markets and a measure of democracy in South-East Asia – none of these has resolved the tension between liberty and socialism in all its numerous guises. Believers in the Western model of strictly limited government and maximum freedom for individuals within a just rule of law often say, and rightly, that ‘we know what works’. Indeed, we do. But equally there will always be political leaders and, increasingly, pressure groups who are bent on persuading people that they cannot really run their own lives and that the state must do it for them. And, sadly but inevitably, there will always be people who prefer idleness to effort, dependency to independence, and modest rewards just as long as nobody does better. There is always a danger that, as Friedrich Hayek put it in his Road to Serfdom, ‘the striving for security tends to become stronger than the love of freedom’.* It mustn’t.

Otherwise we will find ourselves in the circumstances of which that far-sighted French observer, Alexis de Tocqueville, warned, when considering how democracies might incrementally lose their liberty:

Over [the citizens] stands an immense, protective power which is alone responsible for securing their enjoyment and watching over their fate. That power is absolute, thoughtful of detail, orderly, provident, and gentle. It would resemble parental authority if, father like, it tried to prepare its charges for a man’s life, but on the contrary, it only tries to keep them in perpetual childhood … Why should it not entirely relieve them from the trouble of thinking and all the cares of living? Thus it daily makes the exercise of free choices less useful and rarer, restricts the activity of free will within a narrower compass, and little by little robs each citizen of the proper use of his own faculties. Equality has prepared men for all this, predisposing them to endure it and often even regard it as beneficial …

I have always thought that this brand of orderly, gentle, peaceful slavery which I have just described could be combined, more easily than is generally supposed, with some of the external forms of freedom, and that there is a possibility of its getting itself established even under the shadow of the sovereignty of the people.*

Only if we remain convinced that freedom – the freedom for which we strove in those Cold War years of struggle with socialism – is of abiding value in its own right will we avoid wandering down the inviting but dispiriting cul-de-sac which de Tocqueville describes.

That is why my old sparring partner, Mikhail Gorbachev, was wrong in what he said in Prague about the alternative to communism which the West offered in the past and which we still have to offer today. The politics and economics of liberty are not a kind of lucky dip from which one treat may be drawn out and enjoyed without tasting the others.

In truth, the Western model of freedom is something positive and universally applicable, though with variations reflecting cultural and other conditions. The theologian Michael Novak has christened that system ‘democratic capitalism’.* It is a good phrase, because it emphasises the link between political and economic liberty. And it is significant that it comes from someone whose profession is more associated with supernatural doctrines than political programmes. Later in this book I shall try to describe the Western model of liberty more fully.† But perhaps its most important defining feature is that it is based upon truth – about the nature of Man, about his aspirations, and about the world he can hope to create.

CHAPTER 2
The American Achievement
MY AMERICA

The America that I encountered on my first speaking tour after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington was more sombre, reserved and intense than the America I had known. Six weeks after the outrage, with the war against al-Qaeda and the Taliban entering a new phase, there was only one issue on everyone’s minds, only one message it was imperative to convey:

In Britain we know how much we owe to America. We understand how close our countries are. America’s cause is, and always will be, our cause. The message I bring to you today is that Britain is united with America in the war against terrorism.*

I have now been paying regular visits to the United States for more than thirty years. But there is something more subtle and less explicable than mere experience that binds me to America. I have reflected upon what this ‘something’ is.

Charles de Gaulle famously remarked that he had ‘a certain idea of France’.† In fact, more accurately, he said that he had ‘created for himself’ that idea. To have an idea of a country is not necessarily to have a distorted view of it. It is, if the idea is a true one, to gain an insight into the mystery of a nation’s identity.

I too have a certain idea of America. Moreover, I would not feel entitled to say that of any other country, except my own. This is not just sentiment, though I always feel ten years younger – despite the jet-lag – when I set foot on American soil: there is something so positive, generous and open about the people – and everything actually works. I also feel, though, that I have in a sense a share in America. Just why is this?

There are two reasons. First, in an age of spun messages and fudged options I am increasingly conscious that Winston Churchill was right about this – as about other things – in his famous speech in Fulton, Missouri in 1946:

We must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which are the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world and which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and the English common law find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence.

Consciousness of the underlying commonalities of that ‘English-speaking world’ and of its values has never been more needed.

But the second reason for my sense of belonging to America is that America is more than a nation or a state or a superpower; it is an idea – and one which has transformed and continues to transform us all. America is unique – in its power, its wealth, its outlook on the world. But its uniqueness has roots, and those roots are essentially English. Already at the time of their foundation, the settlements across the Atlantic were deeply affected by religious, moral and political beliefs.

This fact is unforgettably recalled by the words of John Winthrop delivered in 1630 upon the deck of the tiny Arbella off the coast of Massachusetts to his fellow pilgrims:

We must be knit together, in this work, as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities …

We shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all the people are upon us so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword throughout all the world.

The pilgrims were in search of freedom to worship as they chose, but, as Winthrop’s words demonstrate, they were by no means relativists or liberals. They were imbued with a deep sense of individual and collective responsibility. They practised self-discipline and lived according to a dogged, undoubtedly severe spirit of community. The pilgrims were Calvinists, whereas my own upbringing was against the somewhat less forbidding background of Methodism. But in and around my old home town of Grantham there were preachers who spoke in the tones of Winthrop, and we all lived in a not dissimilar atmosphere. So I feel that I understand the pilgrims, who symbolise for me one aspect of the American character, one feature of the American dream.

But America was not just the new Jerusalem. It could not have been made by the saints alone, or if it had been it would not have prospered. As the years went by more and more people left their homes in the Old World to seek a life in the New for straightforward material reasons. And they are not to be despised for that. They wanted better prospects for themselves and their families and they were prepared to make enormous sacrifices to achieve them. These men were fearless, tough, dynamic. They too, whatever their origins, their destinations or their hopes, are a vital part of the American story. They represent the risk-taking, the enterprise and the courage which endured every danger, natural and man-made, to bring virgin forests and open prairies into productive use. Whether trappers, farmers, traders or (later) miners, these are the men whose spirit underlies American individualism in all its manifold forms today.

A sense of personal responsibility and of the quintessential value of the individual human being are the twin foundations of orderly freedom. In the years before the American Revolution the colonists, because of circumstances, developed such awareness to a high degree. But the political culture from which the American colonies sprang – that is English political culture – had always been imbued with it too.

One American scholar, Professor James Q. Wilson, has listed the following factors as important in shaping English (later British) freedom: physical isolation (which helped protect us from invasion); a deep-rooted and widespread commitment to private property; ethnic homogeneity (which helped create a common culture) and a tradition of respect for legality and the rights it guaranteed.* The Founding Fathers of the United States of America inherited all this. Their thinking about the rights of the subject and the purposes of a constitution were developments of what had occurred over more than five centuries in the country whose yoke they were determined to break.

I advanced this thesis in the course of a speech I delivered on my investiture as Chancellor of William and Mary College in Williamsburg, Virginia in February 1994.†

The historical roots of our [Anglo–American] relationship are many. A shared language, a shared literature, a shared legal system, a shared religion, and a finely woven blanket of customs and traditions from the very beginning, that have set our two nations apart from others. Even when the founders of this great Republic came to believe that the course of human events had made it necessary for them to dissolve the political bands that connected them to Britain, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitled them, it was from our Locke and Sidney, our Harrington and Coke, that your Henry and your Jefferson, your Madison and Hamilton took their bearings.‡

These considerations are not just of academic importance. Their significance lies in the fact that they allow us to grasp an important truth about America – namely that it is the most reliable force for freedom in the world, because the entrenched values of freedom are what make sense of its whole existence.

That is why I felt equally entitled in another lecture on the same theme some two years later to make the following claim:

The modern world began in earnest on July 4th 1776. That was the moment when the rebellious colonists put pen to parchment and pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honour in defence of truths they held to be self-evident: ‘That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights … and that to secure these rights governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.’ Henceforth patriotism would not simply be loyalty to the homeland, but a dedication to principles held to be both universal and permanent.*

Similar claims have, of course, been made for other revolutions. But they cannot ultimately be sustained. The French Revolution sacrificed Liberty to Equality – Fraternity never really mattered at all – and then Equality quickly gave way to centralised dictatorship. Today the only constructive results of that upheaval are to be found in the administrative reorganisations which succeeded it. The Bolshevik Revolution can be seen in retrospect to have been a reversion to the most odious kind of age-old tyranny, supplemented by the technological apparatus of totalitarianism. And it had no constructive results whatever.

The American Revolution, however, was not a revolution in either of these senses. It was successful through war, but its intentions were to secure peace and prosperity. It broke the political link with Britain, but it contained no programme of social or cultural transformation. Its novelty was at once more limited and more radical, for on the basis of English thinking about the rights of the subject, the rule of law and a limited government, it pronounced a doctrine that would be the basis of democracy.

On frequent occasions, especially when I have a speech to make in the United States, I take in my handbag a well-thumbed little yellow volume – a Bicentennial Keepsake Edition of the United States Constitution, given me by President George Bush Sr and signed by the members of the United States Supreme Court. In the introduction to it, the late Warren Burger, one of the great American judges and the nation’s longest-serving Chief Justice, notes: ‘The [US] Constitution represented not a grant of power from rulers to the people ruled – as with King John’s grant of the Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215 – but a grant of power by the people to the government which they had created.’

And this really sums up what the American Revolution means to the world – and America to me.

These reflections lead me to certain conclusions about the conduct of international politics.

 America alone has the moral as well as the material capacity for world leadership

 America’s destiny is bound up with global expression of the values of freedom

 America’s closest allies, particularly her allies in the English-speaking world, must regard America’s mission as encompassing their own.

JUST ONE POLE

As I have argued in the previous chapter, however you look at it, it was the West which won the Cold War. But among the victors the United States emerged supreme. Because America is uniquely equipped to lead by its historic and philosophical identification with the cause of liberty, this is something I welcome. But many others neither welcome nor accept it.

As the jargon of the experts in geopolitics has it – and in such matters a certain amount of jargon must be permitted – we have moved with the end of the Cold War and the implosion of the Soviet Union from a ‘bipolar’ to a ‘unipolar’ world. Today America is the only superpower. No earlier superpower – not even the Roman, Habsburg or British Empires in their prime – had the resources, reach or superiority over its closest rival enjoyed by America today. Nor is this simply to be explained, negatively, by the outcome of the Cold War. It is also to be understood, positively, as the result of the dynamism inherent in the American system.

The Caesars, the Habsburgs and the British were in their day heartily disliked by those envious of their power: such is generally the fate of those who bestride the globe. America, by contrast, has until quite recently escaped such odium. This is because, at least outside its own hemisphere, it has refused the temptations of territorial expansion. Indeed, the potential of America has until the present day always exceeded its actual power.

The United States, as befits the world’s greatest democracy, is a reluctant warrior. In the two great wars of the twentieth century it was a late entrant. Even during the Cold War America was, it is sometimes overlooked, for much of the time far from aggressively anti-Soviet. The very doctrine of containment, which exercised greater influence than any other upon American foreign policy during those years, was at heart a defensive doctrine, aimed not at rolling back communism but rather at preventing its rolling remorselessly forward. For all these reasons, America has been a rather well-liked power.

But Americans have recently had to take more seriously the hostility which the United States faces from powerful forces outside its borders. The opponents of the American superpower do not, at present at least, have much in common except their shared hatreds. The more moderate or most discreet of them – in Continental Europe (especially France), Russia and China – express their opposition to America’s superpower status in terms of an alternative doctrine of ‘multi-polarity’. Thus President Jacques Chirac of France has evoked a new ‘collective sovereignty’ to check American power, and his Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, has complained that ‘the United States often behaves in a unilateral way and has difficulties in taking on the role to which it aspires, that of organiser of the international community’.* Beijing is particularly fond of such language. In April 1997 then-President Boris Yeltsin and President Jiang Zemin embraced a Sino–Russian ‘strategic partnership’ aimed at those who would ‘push the world toward a unipolar order’. The following month the ever-obliging French President agreed with his Chinese host that there was need of an international order with ‘power centres besides the United States’.† Most recently, the Swedish Prime Minister, host to the chaotic EU–US Summit at Gothenberg, extolled the EU as ‘one of the few institutions we can develop as a balance to US world domination’.‡

Very different in tone – and intent – from such grumblings from peevish statesmen have been the threats levelled against America and Americans from the proponents of Islamic revolution. Well before 11 September 2001 the Islamic terrorist supremo Osama bin Laden had left us in no doubt about his (and many others’) objectives:

We predict a black day for America and the end of the United States as the United States, and it will become separate states and will retreat from our land and collect the bodies of its sons back to America, God willing.§

Bin Laden and his associates were even then well advanced in their plans to fulfil those threats.

In the face of such hostility, any great power faces two temptations. The first, which has been much talked about, is isolationism. In fact, to judge from much of the rhetoric used about America one would easily think that the drawbridge had already risen. President Clinton, for example, described the Senate’s (entirely correct) decision in October 1999 to oppose the nuclear test ban treaty as ‘a new isolationism’. This was part of a broader campaign to portray the Republican Party as a whole as insufficiently committed to America’s world role. It is in this context worth recalling perhaps that the great majority of Democrats in Congress voted against the Gulf War of 1991. It is equally relevant that it was President Clinton’s own party in Congress which denied him fast-track negotiating authority on trade agreements. By contrast, President George W. Bush in his election campaign proposed an approach to American foreign and security policy which he termed ‘a distinctly American internationalism’ that involved ‘realism in the service of American ideals’. He affirmed that ‘America, by decision and destiny, promotes political freedom – and gains the most when democracy advances’. It was difficult to detect isolationism in any of that. Nor has there been any isolationism in the actions of the new administration, which has reaffirmed its commitment to the defence of Europe, proposed expansion of NATO to include the Baltic states, sought a new realistic relationship with Russia and advanced the idea of a vast free trade area covering North and South America. And in pursuit of the war against terrorism, President Bush has invested huge efforts and demonstrated great skill in assembling an international coalition to achieve America’s objectives.

What most of the conservative critics of America’s overseas engagements in the Clinton years were concerned about was the need to place national interest alongside, or ahead of, wider objectives. I disagreed with some of these critics on specific matters; but they were right to be concerned, and nine out of ten of them could not fairly be labelled ‘isolationist’.

I too was anxious about the second temptation that faced – and must always face – American foreign policy-makers, namely that of ubiquitous intervention in pursuit of ill-defined goals. My concern was not, of course, that America would become too powerful, but rather that it might dissipate its power, and eventually lose the essential popular mandate for the use of power.

How, where and on what criteria should the American superpower and its allies intervene? We should resist pressure to set out inflexible rules in these matters: one of the marks of sensible statecraft is to recognise that each crisis is qualitatively different from another and requires its own response. But acknowledging that fact makes clarity of strategic thinking even more important: it is in unknown territory that you most need a compass. This is amply borne out by experience of the interventions which America and her allies have undertaken since the end of the Cold War.

The Gulf War against Iraq, in whose preparation I was involved, seemed to many at the time to represent the shape of things to come. Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in the early morning of 2 August 1990 would probably never have occurred at the height of the Cold War. Moscow would have prevented such reckless adventurism by any of its dependants. But it is equally certain that there would never during the Cold War years have been a unanimous decision of the UN Security Council to back the use of force against Saddam, particularly when ‘force’ involved a US-led operation in the Middle East.*

These were the circumstances in which President George Bush Sr delivered an address to a joint session of the US Congress on 11 September, which introduced a new expression to the lexicon of international policy analysts. The purpose of the President’s speech was to rally support for the operation in the Gulf and its objectives, which he spelt out as follows:

Iraq must withdraw from Kuwait completely, immediately and without condition. Kuwait’s legitimate government must be restored. The security and stability of the Persian Gulf must be assured. And American citizens must be protected.

So far so good – indeed, excellent.

But the President went on:

A new partnership of nations has begun and we stand today at a unique and extraordinary moment. The crisis in the Persian Gulf, as grave as it is, also offers a rare opportunity to move toward an historic period of cooperation. Out of these troubled times … a new world order can emerge. A new era – freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice and more secure in the quest for peace. An era in which the nations of the world, East and West, North and South, can prosper and live in harmony. [Emphasis added]

So the ‘New World Order’ was born.

As I have already noted in the context of remarks by President Havel, this sort of stuff makes me nervous. President Bush, like any leader in time of war, was justified in raising the rhetorical temperature. But anyone who really believes that a ‘new order’ of any kind is going to replace the disorderly conduct of human affairs, particularly the affairs of nations, is likely to be severely disappointed, and others with him.

In fact, one of the first purposes to which I committed myself in the period after I left Downing Street (and after Saddam Hussein was left in power in Baghdad) was to throw some cold water on the ambitious internationalism which the Gulf War spawned. So, for example, speaking to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council in November 1991, I did not dispute that a new state of affairs had emerged as a result of the fall of Soviet communism and the advance of democracy and free enterprise – 1 did not even quibble with the expression ‘New World Order’. But I also urged caution. I recalled the eerily similar language about ‘New World Orders’ which characterised diplomatic discussions between the two World Wars, and I quoted General Smuts’ epitaph on the League of Nations: ‘What was everybody’s business in the end proved to be nobody’s business. Each one looked to the other to take the lead, and the aggressors got away with it.’

Had I been less tactful, I might have added that Saddam Hussein also ‘got away with it’ – at least to the extent that he was still causing trouble in Baghdad while President Bush and I were writing our memoirs.

There were important lessons to be learned from the Gulf War, but only some were absorbed at the time, and some wrong conclusions were also drawn. In one important way, the campaign against Saddam turned out to be untypical of post-Cold War conflicts. The degree of consensus about military action was the result of a temporary and fortuitous series of conditions. Once Russia and China became more assertive, the UN Security Council was unlikely to be an effective forum for dealing with serious crises. Equally untypical was the fact that Saddam Hussein had managed to unite most of the Muslim nations against him. Much as he tried, he was thus never able to rely on anti-Western feeling to provide him with useful allies. Saddam was a blunderer. But as a rule in the post-Cold War world it was more likely that events would follow Samuel Huntington’s thesis of a ‘Clash of civilisations’, where opposing religions and cultures wrestled for dominance, than Francis Fukuyama’s forecast of ‘the End of History’, where democracy was the inevitable global victor.*

The real lessons of the Gulf had nothing to do with New World Orders but a lot to do with the fundamental requirements for successful interventions. It was the decisiveness of American leadership under President Bush and the superiority of American military technology which ensured the defeat of Saddam. America’s allies – particularly Britain and France – helped. Diplomatic efforts to keep the coalition together were also valuable. But American power and the resolution to apply it won the war – and they could have won the peace too, if excessive concern for international opinion had not prevented America’s demanding the complete disarmament of Iraqi forces.

What the Gulf War really demonstrated was the necessity of American leadership. But this was not to everyone’s liking – not even, one suspects, entirely to the liking of the US State Department. Multilateralism – in effect, the use of force only under the authority of the United Nations and for international purposes – became almost an obsession in the years that followed.

It is worth recalling just how much of a contrast this was with earlier American interventions. Under President Reagan the actions against the regimes in Grenada in 1983 and Libya in 1986 were unashamed exertions of American power in defence of American and broader Western interests.* Nor had President Bush shown before the Gulf War any inclination to break away from this formula. When on 20 December 1989 the United States overthrew the government of General Noriega in Panama it acted decisively against a drug-trafficking thug who had apparently been planning attacks on American citizens and who was implicitly threatening vital American interests in the Panama Canal. It was a large operation involving twenty-six thousand US troops and it provoked an international outcry – I was almost alone among other heads of government in voicing strong support.

But with the emergence of the doctrine of the New World Order such robustness was diluted in the search for international consensus. The intervention in Somalia was the high – or perhaps low – point of this subordination of US national interests in favour of multilateralism. In December 1992 President Bush authorised the deployment of up to thirty thousand US troops to safeguard food supplies for the Somali population, suffering starvation largely as a result of the chaotic conditions that followed the overthrow of the previous President Muhammad Siad Barre in January 1991. President Bush justified his action to the nation in a televised address:

I understand the United States cannot right the world’s wrongs, but we also know that some crises in the world cannot be resolved without American involvement, that American action is often necessary as a catalyst for broader involvement of the community of nations. Only the United States has the global reach to place a large security force on the ground in such a distant place quickly and efficiently, and thus save thousands of innocents from death.

In fact, Somalia was the first of the ‘humanitarian interventions’. Later under President Clinton the multilateralist doctrine was pressed to its limit and beyond. In May 1993 the UN took control of the operation. Five thousand of the twenty-eight thousand troops were American: this was the first time that American soldiers had served under UN command – a radically new departure. Thus far eight Americans had been killed in combat in Somalia. But as opposition among the Somali warlords – particularly the most powerful of them, Muhammad Farah Said – grew, the situation deteriorated. In the end more than a hundred peacekeepers (including thirty US soldiers) were killed and more than 260 (including 175 Americans) were wounded. Six months after a gun battle that left eighteen American dead in October 1993, the US officially ended its mission in Somalia. By the time the United Nations operation was wound up a year later it had cost the UN itself $2 billion and the US some $1.2 billion in addition. The well-intended intervention left behind it chaos as bad as ever it found. Its legacy was also much agonised heart-searching about the components of a fiasco which had dented American prestige and rendered American public opinion extremely wary about other such ventures.

The Somalia intervention exemplifies all the classic features of what not to do. Its objectives were insufficiently thought out; it suffered from ‘mission creep’ – the tendency to expand involvement beyond what is originally envisaged, and beyond what available resources permit; and, finally, lines of command were blurred.

I suspect that the Bush and Clinton administrations had been keener to respond to the sufferings in Somalia by ‘doing something’, because since the late autumn of 1991 they had been doing little to prevent or remedy the sufferings in Croatia and Bosnia. (I deal with these and subsequent Balkan matters in a separate chapter, because they are so interlinked and because they contain their own lessons.*) But we should recall that until the Washington Agreements of March 1994, which ended the Croat-Muslim conflict, the US had been studiedly absent from the former Yugoslavia, arguing that this was a European problem for Europe to solve. And only in August 1995 was European-led diplomacy finally abandoned, as NATO bombing in support of Croat-Muslim ground forces established a new balance of power and paved the way for a kind of peace.

The intervention in the autumn of 1994 in Haiti marked the beginning of a gradual shift back towards an American foreign policy that reflected American national interests. More than sixteen thousand Haitian refugees had been intercepted by the US Coast Guard in the months preceding the US mission. These were mostly economic migrants, but undoubtedly the corrupt, authoritarian military government in Haiti had made things worse. Accordingly, the UN Security Council sanctioned an American-led military intervention to restore President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power. In fact, negotiations led by former President Jimmy Carter resulted in a peaceful handover by the Haitian military regime to a force of over fifteen thousand US troops, who then ensured the return of Aristide. The operation, code-named ‘Operation Restore Democracy’ and hailed by President Clinton as a ‘victory for freedom around the world’, was unfortunately in truth much less than either. Aristide was no democrat, but rather an extreme left-wing authoritarian, and Haiti has since made little progress under him or his chosen successor towards legality, honesty or stability. America has spent $3 billion in Haiti but the place is still plagued by ignorance, poverty and corruption, and is an active centre of drug-trafficking. The best one can say of the intervention in Haiti is that it was a modestly useful venture in US immigration control.

Since Haiti, it has been the situation in the Balkans that has dominated debate about the means, scale and objectives of international intervention. Sixty thousand US and European troops were deployed in Bosnia in the wake of the 1995 Dayton agreement and, despite Congress’s misgivings and the present administration’s evident impatience, there has so far been no large-scale withdrawal.

On top of the continuing commitment to enforce and maintain the peace in Bosnia came the NATO operation in Kosovo in spring 1999. That campaign signified three important further developments in the conduct of interventions.

First, military action was taken without clear authorisation by the UN Security Council. Admittedly, several earlier UN resolutions, which talked of the need to act to prevent a destabilising catastrophe, could be used to provide a degree of legal cover.* Kosovo was, however, different in that no attempt was made to gain UN Security Council authority for the use of ‘all necessary means’ (i.e. force) before the operation. In this regard, it marked a major departure from the approach adopted in the Gulf in 1990. Similarly, NATO, which had hitherto been considered a defensive alliance without an ability to act ‘out of area’, was the organisation in whose name the war was conducted. Thus there was a quite different legal and institutional framework for intervention to that in the Gulf.

Secondly, and consequently, the Kosovo campaign was described and justified from the outset as a ‘humanitarian intervention’. There was, of course, at one level a rather disingenuous reason for this: emphasis upon humanitarianism rather than the use of force avoided awkward questions about the need for explicit UN authorisation (which was not, in fact, forthcoming because of Russian and Chinese obstruction). Moreover, the notion of a humanitarian tragedy leading to a threat to international peace and stability, and thus to legitimate international intervention in a sovereign state’s affairs, had been evoked already in recent years in Somalia, Haiti and Bosnia. But coercive humanitarian intervention, which had hitherto been a novel doctrine of uncertain scope and fuzzy legality, now began to be declared the basis of a revived if undeclared New World Order.

Above all, the doctrine was warmly embraced and loudly proclaimed by such enthusiasts for assertive internationalism as Britain’s Prime Minister, Tony Blair. In his speech to the Economic Club of Chicago in April 1999, Mr Blair claimed to be ‘witnessing the beginnings of a new doctrine of international community’. He noted that ‘we cannot refuse to participate in global markets if we want to prosper’ – which is true. He added that ‘we cannot ignore new ideas in other countries if we want to innovate’ – which is not strictly true at all, though an unexceptionable piece of flannel. But his final thought, that ‘we cannot turn our backs on conflicts and the violation of human rights within other countries if we want still to be secure’, is patently an oversimplification.

We may believe that it is right to intervene to stop suffering inflicted by rulers on their subjects, or by one ethnic group on another: I am sure that it sometimes was, and is. And we may believe that we should be prepared to intervene in order to preserve our security, or in defence of an ally: I am convinced that we have to show resolution in doing so. But to pretend that the two objectives are always, or even usually, identical is humbug. The danger of swallowing it is even greater for America as a superpower with global interests than for a medium-sized military power like Britain. This doctrine of ‘international community’ à la Blair is a prescription for strategic muddle, military overstretch and ultimately, in the wake of inevitable failure, for an American retreat from global responsibility.

The third and last feature of the Kosovo operation that I want to mention here does indeed directly concern America’s capability to launch and carry through successful interventions: this was the degree of reliance upon advanced military technology, not just as a source of superiority over the enemy but also as a means of avoiding NATO casualties. Rightly or wrongly, most leading US politicians judged that American public opinion was not prepared to face the risk, let alone the reality, of losses in Kosovo.

This may not, in fact, have been true. And if it was true it may have reflected poor leadership, or uncertainty about the declared (and undeclared) war aims. Or again it may, paradoxically, have been the effect of the enormous importance of television coverage in modern crises. By making so vivid the suffering of people in distant lands, television greatly increases pressure for intervention. But at the same time, by dramatising even more the grieving of the families of servicemen who are lost, it undermines national resolve to fight and to risk casualties.

America’s commitment to the world’s security is so extensive, and the sacrifices it makes so considerable, that it ill behoves America’s allies to complain about reluctance by American families to sustain losses in other people’s wars. But American leaders should recognise that this reputation, however unjustified, has given encouragement to America’s enemies. This is all the more poignant when, as in Kosovo, the refusal to risk the loss of allied aircraft, and so to envisage operations below fifteen thousand feet, dented our effectiveness in preventing the ethnic cleansing of a civilian population we were committed to protect.

By contrast, the technological dominance of America, which had been such a factor in the Gulf, was by the time of Kosovo eight years later still more evident. In the Kosovo operation, however, it was less America’s superiority over the Yugoslav army, which actually proved quite adept at protecting itself, but rather America’s superiority over her NATO allies that was now most remarkable. The facts here speak eloquently for themselves.

Although all nineteen members of NATO made some contribution to the operation, that of the United States was overwhelmingly dominant. America paid for 80 per cent of the cost – Britain and France made up most of the rest. The US supplied 650 of the 927 aircraft that took part in the air campaign. The US flew two-thirds of the strike missions. Almost every precision-guided missile (PGM) was launched from an American aircraft. The US was alone in contributing long-range bombers, which dropped about half the bombs and missiles used in the campaign.

The cause of this imbalance was not generally, with the notable exception of the Greeks, any lack of commitment by the rest of NATO, and certainly not by Britain. The problem was rather that America’s allies had neither the quantity nor, above all, the quality of weaponry required to be effective partners of the US. Thus while the British flew more than a thousand strike missions, three-quarters of the munitions we dropped were unguided. When poor visibility interfered with PGMs that relied on laser-designation or optical guidance, only the Americans had the technology (in the form of the Joint Direct Attack Munition) which allowed them to attack targets in all weathers. Finally, it was US intelligence which identified nearly all of the bombing targets in Serbia and Kosovo.

Is Kosovo, then, the shape of things to come? In one respect, at least, it should not be. We should be extremely wary of the doctrine of humanitarian interventionism as the main, let alone the only, justification for the use of force. There is, after all, a far more traditional alternative. Sovereign states have a right of self-defence which precedes the United Nations Charter and is not dependent on it, or on votes in international forums. Other states have a right to come to the aid of countries which are the victims of aggression. That is what military alliances like NATO are about. The habit of ubiquitous interventionism, combining pinprick strikes by precision weapons with pious invocations of high principle, would lead us into endless difficulties. Interventions must be limited in number and overwhelming in their impact.

There is always a risk in attempting to make observations about conflicts that are still underway, as is the case of that against bin Laden and the Taliban at the time of writing. On the other hand, if broad conclusions about the conduct of interventions are to be of practical value they must also be applicable in special cases – even one as special as that which now confronts America.

Moreover, the experience of recent years does indeed help, if only in knowing the pitfalls to avoid. The action against bin Laden and his network and the state that has harboured them is morally just, legitimate and necessary. America does not require anyone’s agreement to act in self-defence against an unprovoked attack on its own people. It needs the support of countries whose territory or airspace are required for the conduct of operations. It may also find it valuable to receive practical help from its allies: Britain has been particularly active, for which the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, deserves much credit.

But it is important not to allow ever wider coalition-building to become an end in itself. As we saw in the Gulf War of 1990, international pressures, particularly those exerted from within an alliance, can result in the failure to follow actions through and so leave future problems unresolved. So far, though, I am heartened by the fact that President Bush seems to have concluded that this is an American operation, and that America alone will decide how it will be conducted.

When democracies go to war, it is natural that they invoke the highest moral principles. That is always especially true of America’s wars. And such principles are indeed truly involved in the present conflict. It is not mere rhetoric to state that democracy, liberty and tolerance are all under threat from violent Islamist fanatics embracing terrorism. But winning wars requires more than moral fervour: it demands clear thinking about targets and timetables, accurate estimates of the enemy’s strength and intentions, pre-emptive action to minimise risks and guard against consequences. That is all the more so in this war against terrorism, because we are primarily dealing with distant lands and, in large part, unknown conditions.

In such circumstances, the conclusions I drew above about the need to limit the aims of interventions, while maximising their effect, are especially germane. It is doubtless true that the West should have done more in earlier years to prevent Afghanistan becoming a political powderkeg. And we should now supply humanitarian aid. But I would caution against open-ended attempts at nation-building. What matters, above all, is to neutralise the threat which resulted in the outrages of 11 September. That means taking out the terrorists and their protectors, and not just in Afghanistan but elsewhere too – a large enough task even for a global superpower.

America’s action against bin Laden and the Taliban also demonstrates one other feature about interventions, which we should not overlook. The American people immediately understood that what happened on 11 September was an act of war against them. They responded accordingly. The military commitment by the United States and the willingness of its citizens to sacrifice their lives are testimony to how nations behave when their very survival appears at stake. They remind us that in the modern world only nation states will fight wars at sufficient cost in blood and treasure to achieve lasting victory.

The question of whether to act in Afghanistan was unusually clear-cut. But, more generally, knowing when and how to intervene is as much a matter of instinct as of reflection, although one does of course also need to reflect. The interesting arguments over foreign policies based on moral imperative versus those based on pragmatic national interest are really in the end only that – interesting. The greatest statesmen in the English-speaking world – men like Winston Churchill and Ronald Reagan – adopted policies that always contained both elements, though in different measures at different times. I should therefore prefer to restrict my guidelines to the following:

 Don’t believe that military interventions, no matter how morally justified, can succeed without clear military goals

 Don’t fall into the trap of imagining that the West can remake societies

 Don’t take public opinion for granted – but don’t either underrate the degree to which good people will endure sacrifices for a worthwhile cause

 Don’t allow tyrants and aggressors to get away with it

 And when you fight – fight to win.

MILITARY PREPAREDNESS – MATÉRIEL

Whatever cosy euphemisms we may want to adopt, defending our interests in battle is what our armies, navies and airforces ultimately exist to do. They are not well-suited to act as policemen, aid workers or civil engineers, and they should not be required to do so, except under extreme and temporary circumstances. They need the weapons to deter and destroy any enemy they may be called upon to face. They need to be well-trained, well-disciplined and well-led. And they need to be able to rely on wise and determined governments to see that the financial and other conditions under which they operate are conducive to these goals.

Democracies are actually quite good at fighting wars – as a series of dictators over the years have learned to their cost. Where democratic political leaderships are weak, however, is in their capacity for continuous military preparedness. Such weakness leads to unnecessary conflicts, because it undermines the will, and can exclude the means, to deter aggression. It also leads to wars being longer and more costly than they would otherwise be, because it takes years to build up the military might required to defeat an aggressor.

The end of the Cold War was in these respects more typical than the end of the Second World War. The defeat of the Axis powers evoked a huge sigh of relief. But it also brought the West to the very edge of a new conflict with the Soviet Union. Once it was known that the Soviets had the atomic bomb, it was clear to all but the very foolish and the fellow-travellers that military preparedness was the precondition for the West’s survival.

The end of the Cold War was quite different. International utopianism became the rage. As at the end of the Great War, there was a marked preference for butter not guns.

The figures for defence spending show this.* They demonstrate that America cut too far and that Europe was even worse. The West as a whole in the early 1990s became obsessed with a ‘peace dividend’ that would be spent over and over again on any number of soft-hearted and sometimes soft-headed causes. Politicians forgot that the only real peace dividend is peace.

America’s defence budget decreased every year from the end of the Cold War until 1998–99. It now stands at about 60 per cent of its peak of 1985. And this occurred during a period in which public expenditure on all other sectors of the federal budget rose. As a result, American active and reserve military forces in 2000 were more than a million below the levels reached in 1987. The Clinton administration reduced the number of active army divisions to ten, from the eighteen divisions under the Reagan administration. It reduced the airforce by almost half from the Reagan levels. And it reduced the number of naval ships and aircraft carrier battle groups by almost 45 per cent. Moreover, there was a severe shortfall in recruitment of service personnel – the US Navy missed its recruiting goal by nearly seven thousand in 1998.†

This steep decline in US military spending was more than mirrored elsewhere in NATO. Germany, Spain and Italy spend less than 2 per cent of their GDP on defence, while America spends 3 per cent. Put another way, the United States spent $296 billion on defence in 2000, compared with the European NATO members’ total contribution of just $166 billion. The Europeans have cut defence by 22 per cent in real terms since 1992, and they are still cutting.

Furthermore, as the International Institute for Strategic Studies notes in its 1999/2000 Strategic Survey: ‘Much of what is spent by European governments goes not towards new technology or better training, but towards the costs of short-term conscripts, pensions and infrastructure.’ European countries are not going to be able to match the United States at the cutting edge of military technology. (That is, of course, a further reason why they are not going to have the ability to field an effective European Union defence force.) But at least they can stop wasting resources on maintaining conscript armies that are inadequately trained and lack all credibility as fighting forces.

In America the dangers of underfunding defence have now been widely understood. Already under President Clinton (and also under pressure from the Republican-controlled Senate) the administration had begun to increase defence expenditure once more from the beginning of fiscal year 2000. In 1999 Congress also approved the first major increase in military pay since 1982 in order to improve recruitment. The new administration’s strong commitment to increasing America’s defence capability will doubtless also lead to further improvements. And doubtless lessons will be learned from the operations in Afghanistan.

By contrast, the European countries still demonstrate little or no sense of responsibility for upgrading the Alliance’s defence effort. Wealthy European Union countries like Germany and Italy have been cutting, not increasing, their already low levels of military expenditure.

Military planners always have a thankless task. In peacetime they are accused of dreaming up unnecessarily ambitious war-fighting scenarios, and then demanding the money to pay for them. But when dangers loom, they are criticised for insufficient foresight. Moreover, a global superpower’s military planners have a special problem. This is that a major threat to stability in any region is by definition a threat to the superpower’s own vital interests. And the nightmare is that several serious regional conflicts may occur simultaneously. To the question of what precise overall capabilities, and thus exactly what levels of defence spending, are necessary to cope with such scenarios I can only answer: ‘More than at present – and possibly much more than you think.’

So I conclude:

 The West as a whole needs urgently to repair the damage that excessive defence cuts have done

 Europe, in particular, should sharply increase both the quantity and the quality of its defence spending

 The US must ensure that it has reliable allies in every region

 Don’t assume that crises come in ones or even twos

 Don’t dissipate resources on multilateral peacekeeping which would be better husbanded for national emergencies

 Whatever the diplomats say, expect the worst.

MILITARY PREPAREDNESS – MORALE

Western politicians have also been failing our armed forces in another important respect. They have either championed, or at least failed to counter effectively, pressures to alter fundamentally the traditional military ethos.

The tasks of war are different in kind, not just degree, from the tasks of peace. This does not, of course, mean that the laws of commonsense – or indeed Parkinson’s law – are suspended in military matters.* Defence procurement programmes must be efficiently managed. Functions which can sensibly be contracted out should be. Unnecessary non-military assets should be sold. Reviews and scrutinies will be necessary to remove duplication and waste. These concepts were ones which I sought to ensure were applied when I was Prime Minister, and they are of universal application. But, for all that, it has also in the end to be recognised, I repeat, that the military is different.

One very obvious reason is that the defence budget is one of the very few elements of public expenditure that can truly be described as essential. The point was well-made by a robust Labour Defence Minister, Denis (now Lord) Healey, many years ago: ‘Once we have cut expenditure to the extent where our security is imperilled, we have no houses, we have no hospitals, we have no schools. We have a heap of cinders.’* For this reason, if the Chief of the Defence Staff (or his equivalent) declares that without certain military resources the country cannot be adequately defended only a fool of a politician refuses to listen.

But the military is also different because service life is different from civilian life. The virtues which must be cultivated by those who may be called upon to risk their lives in the course of their duties are simply not the same as those required of a businessman, a civil servant – or, indeed, a politician. Above all, courage – physical courage – is vital.

Servicemen need to develop a much higher degree of comradeship with their colleagues. They must be able to trust and rely on one another implicitly. Soldiers, sailors and airmen are still individuals – one has only to read their biographies to understand that. But they cannot be individualists. For those who live under discipline it is duties not rights that are the focus of their lives. This is why the military life is rightly considered a noble vocation, and also why over the years many of those who leave it for civilian careers find it difficult to adjust.

Soldiers also generally need to be physically strong. It is not enough to be clever – though to be cunning is certainly useful. No front-line forces can afford to have even a small proportion of their number who are not up to whatever tasks they may be called upon to perform.

So I am opposed to current attempts to apply liberal attitudes and institutions developed in civilian life to life in our armed forces. Programmes aimed at introducing civilian-style judicial systems, at promoting homosexual rights, and at making ever more military roles open to women are at best irrelevant to the functions that armies are meant to perform. At worst, though, they threaten military capabilities in a way that is actually dangerous.

The feminist military militants are perhaps the most pernicious of these ‘reformers’. The fact that most men are stronger than most women means either that women have to be excluded from the most physically demanding tasks, or else the difficulty of the tasks has to be reduced – something that is evidently easier in training than in combat. But it is, of course, this second course which the feminists demand should be adopted. And all too often their agenda is being accepted.

When it was recognised that women cannot throw ordinary grenades far enough to avoid being caught in the explosion, the answer was not to let men take over but rather to make lighter (and less lethal) grenades. When it was discovered that women on board warships require facilities that men do not, the US Navy had to ‘reconfigure’ their ships to provide them – on the USS Eisenhower alone that cost $1 million. And when most women (rightly in my view) choose not to take combat roles, the answer, according to one professor at Duke University, is for the military to get rid of traits like ‘dominance, assertiveness, aggressiveness, independence, self-sufficiency, and willingness to take risks’.* Women have plenty of roles in which they can serve with distinction: some of us even run countries. But generally we are better at wielding the handbag than the bayonet.

And warfare will always involve the use of bayonets, or their equivalents. It is unrealistic to expect that wars will ever be fought without physical contact and confrontation with the enemy at some stage.

With these considerations in mind, our political and military leaders should:

 Show some backbone in resisting the lobbies of political correctness that are out to subvert good order and discipline in our armed forces

 Make it plain that life in the services cannot take as its model the behaviour, legal framework, or ethos that prevail in civilian life

 Refuse to put liberal doctrine ahead of military effectiveness

 Demonstrate a little commonsense.

RMA

That said, we have reached one of those points in military history when the role of technology in fighting wars has taken on an altogether new importance. The Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) is a real revolution. The term refers mainly to two developments: the power of instantly available, networked information, and the large-scale use of precision firepower. One of the foremost experts on the strategic implications of RMA, Professor Eliot Cohen, has graphically described its reality:

Satellites beaming fresh pictures of targets to pilots in jet aircraft, tanks communicating their locations to computerized command posts, generals peering remotely over the shoulders of company commanders through the cameras of orbiting unmanned aircraft – these are all phenomena of today, not the military dreams of tomorrow.*

America is and will remain far ahead of any of her rivals in the use of these technologies – as long as she keeps on investing in them.

But RMA is not without its drawbacks. I have already referred to one of these – a feeling that technology can make war casualty-free. A more tangible danger is what (in the jargon) are called ‘asymmetric threats’. By these are meant threats posed by powers which, although generally lagging well behind America militarily, are able to concentrate their resources upon and exploit American vulnerability in one particular aspect of warfare. Thus China has on its own admission been developing plans to use networks and the Internet to cripple America’s banking system and disrupt its military capability.* Information- or Cyber-warfare has leapt from the television screen to the centre of the Pentagon’s preoccupations. That is absolutely right. It is a rule as old as warfare itself that every advance in military technology provokes counter-measures. And history is full of rich and technologically advanced civilisations which fell before a more primitive enemy who had seen and exploited a systemic weakness.

That is why we have to:

 Give top priority to investing in and applying the latest defence technologies

 Be alert to the dangers that America’s technological sophistication could be undermined by asymmetric threats from a determined enemy

 Never believe that technology alone will allow America to prevail as a superpower.

‘REMEMBER PEARL HARBOR’

Before, during and after my time as Prime Minister I have paid many visits to American military bases and other sites, but none like that which I made to the USS Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor on the morning of 11 May 1993. A tender took us out to the ship, upon whose shattered hull a special structure has been erected. For the last forty years, the colours have been raised and lowered each day in honour of the 1177 members of the Arizona’s crew who died in the Japanese air force’s attack of 7 December 1941. Some of the bodies were recovered, but the remains of nine hundred still lie in the depths of the water that now fills the ship. Standing over a square opening that leads down to the ocean, I lowered a bouquet of flowers. The petals drifted across the surface and I thought about the sailors who died in such terrible circumstances so that the rest of us could live in peace and freedom.

The USS Arizona should not only, however, be a place of pilgrimage: it should be a place of reflection. The immediate consequence of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor was, of course, to bring America into the Second World War. So it was, in that sense, the day the Axis powers began to lose. The circumstances of the attack swung an earlier sceptical American opinion behind the war effort. ‘Remember Pearl Harbor’ became the title of America’s most popular war song. Those words should also serve as a warning to us.

On that Sunday morning sixty years ago, just before eight o’clock, 353 Japanese aircraft began their devastating attack. Some three thousand military personnel were killed or wounded, eight battleships and ten other naval vessels were sunk or badly damaged, and almost two hundred US aircraft were destroyed in the space of just three hours. What made the attack on Pearl Harbor so shocking was the fact that it was entirely unexpected. Tension between America and Japan had been rising. But there was no suspicion of what the Japanese were planning and there had been no declaration of war. The inquiries launched after the event found that errors had been made by the US naval and army commanders in the Hawaii region. But the fact remains that what happened at Pearl Harbor reflected far more broadly on the unpreparedness of America for an attack coming (literally) ‘out of the blue’.

The colours raised over the Arizona on the day of my visit were given to me when I left by the Commander-in-Chief of the US Pacific Fleet. They are now framed in my office in London. They serve as a constant reminder. What troubles me, however, is that America and her allies now face a similar threat, and we have been doing too little to guard against it.

MISSILES AND MISSILE DEFENCE

The lessening of superpower rivalry in the final stage of the Cold War also resulted in a loosening of superpower disciplines. On the one hand, Soviet political satellites were released to seek their own irregular and eccentric orbits. On the other, as the Soviet Union itself crumbled, its weapons stockpiles were dispersed and plundered, new clients were found for weapons production, and existing experts with knowledge of advanced military technologies abandoned a state that could no longer pay its bills.

Saddam Hussein’s aggression against Kuwait in 1990 occurred a little too early for him. He had not quite been able to acquire the weaponry he needed to strike back at the West – his plans to develop the nuclear weapon having been seriously set back by Israel’s pre-emptive attack in June 1981. But if Saddam had been in a position credibly to threaten America or any of its allies – or the coalition’s forces – with attack by missiles with nuclear warheads, would we have gone to the Gulf at all? Just posing that question highlights how fundamentally the reality of proliferation can affect the West’s ability to exert power beyond our shores.

Subsequent experience in dealing with Saddam Hussein should also bring home to us the difficulty of trying to maintain a united front against proliferators – even against a rogue whom everyone in public characterises as a pariah. The recent book by Richard Butler, former head of UNSCOM, the body commissioned to inspect and eliminate Saddam’s weapons capability, provides new insights into how China, and in particular France and Russia, have played fast and loose with their international obligations. The Russians clearly still view Iraq as their gateway to the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, while the French have huge commercial interests in the Iraqi oil industry. All three powers have been driven by what Mr Butler calls ‘a deep resentment of American power in the so-called unipolar post-Cold War world’.* If this is a precedent for international cooperation in such matters it would be better to pursue other channels.

The more general, and even more important, lesson from experience in dealing with Saddam is that it is extremely difficult to prevent states that are determined to acquire weapons of mass destruction (WMD) from doing so. If it is so hard to monitor and control the activities of a country like Iraq, which has been defeated in war and subjected to repeated threats, sanctions and punishment, what chances are there of preventing the proliferation of WMD among states that are much less subject to scrutiny?

In fact, proliferation has proceeded, often assisted by the failure of the West to check the outflow of technologies. Nor have international arms control agreements helped much in this respect. The Biological Weapons Convention has been unsuccessful in preventing the development of this particularly horrible weapon, because its provisions are for all practical purposes unverifiable. The same is true of the Chemical Weapons Convention.

These agreements, though, are at least more or less neutral in their effects. The same cannot be said, however, of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which the United States Senate rightly refused to ratify. The fundamental truth here is that the nuclear weapon cannot be disinvented. A world without nuclear weapons is thus quite simply a fantasy world. The realistic question, therefore, is whether the West and America wish to stay ahead of potential nuclear competitors or not. If we do not, we hand power over regions where our interests are at stake to the Saddams and Gadaffis and Kim Jong Ils.

Faced with that prospect it is easy to see why America’s nuclear deterrent must be completely credible, which means that it has to be tested and modernised as necessary. We should have learned by now that no weapons technology ever stands still. For every idealistic peacemaker willing to renounce his self-defence in favour of a weapons-free world, there is at least one warmaker anxious to exploit the other’s good intentions. All those who shelter beneath the American nuclear umbrella should have been praising Senator Helms and his colleagues who defeated the CTBT – not having tantrums.*

Moreover, in the end nuclear weapons will probably be used. That is a terrible thought for everyone. It is also a novel thought for many who argued, as I did, during the 1970s and 1980s for an up-to-date deterrent as a means of keeping the peace.

During the Cold War’s ‘balance of terror’ it was always possible to argue that because both sides had powerful nuclear arsenals this provided an important stabilising factor, preventing not just nuclear but conventional war, at least in Europe. In truth, there was never any cast-iron guarantee against a nuclear exchange. We knew that we would never initiate a war of any kind against the Warsaw Pact. And we had good reason to believe that the Soviets would be too cautious to launch a nuclear war against the West. But we could never altogether rule out the possibility of miscalculation or technical error precipitating an exchange.

Since the end of the Cold War, it has been possible to cut back nuclear arsenals substantially, and it may be possible for America and Russia to cut back still further. But we should not forget that the START II and the proposed START III treaties, like earlier arms control (and, as in these cases, arms reduction) agreements, do not in themselves actually make us more secure. What they do is reduce the cost of our security, by lowering expenditure on surplus weaponry, and they arguably help ease tensions and mistrust. The last point is about all that can be said for agreements about the targeting of missiles – which can always be re-targeted.

With the end of the Cold War we entered what one leading expert has provocatively termed ‘the second nuclear age’. Among the fallacies which Professor Colin S. Gray lists as afflicting Western strategic policy planners today are that ‘a post-nuclear era has dawned’, ‘nuclear abolition is feasible and desirable’, and ‘deterrence is reliable’. He has also warned that ‘the less strategically attractive nuclear weapons appear to the United States, the greater the attraction of those weapons and other WMD to possible foes and other “rogues’”.* And he is right.

The most important threat of this sort today does indeed come from the so-called ‘rogue states’. This category usually refers to medium-sized (or even quite small) powers in the grip of an ideology (or of an individual) that shuns the existing international order, and is bent on aggression. The usual candidates are Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria and North Korea, all of which should certainly be included, as in the light of recent events should Afghanistan.* But we should not disregard either the chilling remark of a senior Chinese official made in 1995 at the height of confrontation between China and Taiwan. The official noted sarcastically that Beijing could take military action against Taipei if it wished, without worrying about US interference, because America’s leaders ‘care more about Los Angeles than they do about Taiwan’. Perhaps the Chinese too remember Pearl Harbor.

We also have to guard against the idea that the desire of non-nuclear powers to become nuclear is somehow irrational. Inconvenient and even dangerous it may be, but irrational it is not. After all, was Colonel Gadaffi unreasonable to draw conclusions from Libya’s inability to react to the punitive action that America took against him in 1986 when he said: ‘If [the Americans] know that you have a deterrent force capable of hitting the United States, they would not be able to hit you. Consequently, we should build this force so that they and others will no longer think about an attack’?†

By his own lights Gadaffi was talking sense – the folly is ours in letting him think he could get away with threatening us in this way.

But it is not just fanatics and revolutionaries who make this calculation. Every state that retains nuclear weapons makes it too. This is something that the utopian New Left internationalists simply refuse to grasp. Let me start close to home. Without Britain’s nuclear deterrent we would not be powerful enough to have acquired our status as a Permanent Member of the UN Security Council. And I have no hesitation in affirming that it is a matter of vital national interest that we retain both the weapon and the international standing it secures. If the present British government doesn’t understand that, they should – it is the main reason why the rest of the world takes notice of us.

Similarly, I fully understand India’s – and, in response, Pakistan’s – desire to demonstrate to the world that they too are nuclear powers. India has China on her doorstep and Pakistan has India. President Clinton was quite simply wasting his time when he advised India in the wake of its nuclear tests in 1998 to define her ‘greatness’ in ‘twenty-first-century terms, not in terms that everybody else has already decided to reject’.* But we haven’t left nuclear weapons behind, and if we did others wouldn’t.

The arms control treaty that undoubtedly does most harm and makes least sense – and was accordingly regarded by the Clinton administration as ‘the cornerstone of strategic stability’ – is the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. The ABM Treaty had some rationale when it was signed in 1972, though in retrospect not much. It prevented either the United States or the Soviet Union from deploying a strategic missile defence system capable of defending the entire national territory. It also prohibited the development, testing or deployment of anything other than a limited, fixed land-based system. The original treaty allowed for the deployment of two sites for such a system, though a protocol reduced this to one each in 1974.

The philosophy behind the treaty was that contained in the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (otherwise and rightly known as MAD). Essentially, the belief was that as long as each superpower was totally vulnerable to nuclear attack it would not be tempted to start a nuclear war. Practice never entirely followed this theory. The Soviets cheated by secretly building an early-warning station at Krasnoyarsk. NATO, through its doctrine of ‘flexible response’ – that is a graduated conventional and nuclear response rather than total nuclear war – also inched away from MAD. Not even the Cold War froze strategy entirely.

But there was, in any case, a deeper and more pervasive logic at work. The history of warfare, viewed from a technical perspective, is that of an unrelenting competition between offensive and defensive weapons and strategies, with progress in the development of one being countered by corresponding improvements in the other. Thus swords were countered by armour, gunpowder generated new techniques of fortification, tanks were opposed by anti-tank weapons and the bomber – known at the time as ‘the ultimate weapon’ – led to the development of radar systems capable of tracking its flight and the use of anti-aircraft guns and fighter planes to shoot it down. It was, therefore, written into the essential nature of warfare that exclusive reliance on that other ‘ultimate weapon’, the nuclear deterrent, could not last indefinitely: at some point the technology of defensive weapons would catch up. The ABM Treaty could not ultimately prevent that.

The treaty was also, of course, meant to contribute to arms control, because assured vulnerability should, the theory went, make it less necessary to build ever-increasing numbers of long-range missiles. On this point too it failed. The only time the Soviets slowed down the arms race was once they knew they had lost it.

The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty is a Cold War relic. It is, therefore, rather surprising that today’s liberals show such misplaced affection for it. In fact, the best international lawyers tell us that the treaty has in any case lapsed, because one party to it, the Soviet Union, has ceased to exist. (Even if one takes a contrary view of the present legal position, it is clear from the treaty itself – Article XV, paragraph 2. – that either side is able to withdraw from it, giving six months’ notice.) Whatever purpose the ABM Treaty had has certainly ended, now that an increasing number of unpredictable powers can threaten us with weapons of mass destruction.

This consideration also bears upon the frequently heard assertion that discarding the constraints of the ABM Treaty and building missile defence would precipitate a new arms race. I argued in a speech to a conference of experts on missile defence in Washington in December 1998 that such fears were groundless. On the contrary, a failure to deploy a ballistic missile defence system (BMD) would provide an incentive for the leaders of rogue states to acquire missiles and develop weapons of mass destruction. Conversely, the deployment of a global BMD would dampen the desire of the rogues to stock up their arsenals – because the likelihood of their missiles getting through would have greatly diminished. I concluded that seen in this light such a system actually had a ‘stabilising potential’.*

Two broader objections, though, can and doubtless will be raised against my advocacy of missile defence.

The first is that I am exaggerating the threats. But I am not. I base my arguments on the work of acknowledged experts. And all the experience of recent attempts to assess these threats is that the experts have consistently been inclined to underrate them. For example, the US administration’s 1995 National Intelligence Estimate, while taking current developments in missile proliferation seriously, concluded that the US would be free of threat for at least another fifteen years. Other evidence was, however, already by then emerging that caused me and my advisers to doubt whether this (relatively) comfortable judgement was soundly based.

Accordingly, in 1996 I warned in a speech at Fulton, Missouri – the site of Churchill’s famous ‘Iron Curtain’ speech fifty years earlier – that there was a ‘risk that thousands of people may be killed in [a ballistic missile] attack which forethought and wise preparation might have prevented’. The seriousness of the danger was highlighted when in April the following year the Japanese Foreign Minister spoke of reports that North Korea had deployed the Rodong-i missile, with a range of 625 miles, and was therefore able to strike any target in Japan. Other reports highlighted the fact that proliferating rogue states were cooperating with each other – that Rodong missile was believed to have been financed by Libya and Iran. The Iranians were reported to have tested components of a missile capable of striking Israel, and Russia had been selling them nuclear reactors.

These ominous signs could still be discounted by those who chose to do so. But 1998 was the year in which much harder evidence emerged.

The authoritative report of the Rumsfeld Commission, appointed by Congress to assess the threat posed by ballistic missiles to the US, woke even the sleepiest doves from their dreams. Donald (now US Defense Secretary) Rumsfeld noted that, apart from Russia and China, countries like North Korea, Iran and Iraq ‘would be able to inflict major destruction on the US within about five years of a decision to acquire such a capability, ten years in the case of Iraq’, adding that for much of that time the United States might not know that such a decision had been taken. He concluded that the threat was ‘broader, more mature and evolving more rapidly’ than reported by the intelligence services, whose ability to provide such warnings was in any case ‘eroding’.

Simultaneously, events were lending further gravity to the report’s conclusions. Although neither country poses any threat to the West, India’s and Pakistan’s nuclear tests in May 1998 took American intelligence by surprise, showing just how little we can expect to know about the new nuclear powers’ capabilities and intentions. Still more seriously, in July Iran test-fired a nine-hundred-mile-range missile and was discovered to be developing a still longer-range missile, apparently based on Russian technology. This constituted a threat to Israel, America’s closest ally in the Middle East. Most serious of all, in August North Korea took the world by surprise by launching a three-stage rocket over Japan. This represented a direct threat to America’s most important ally in the Pacific, to American forces stationed there, and indeed by implication to the American homeland. One of Thatcher’s laws is that the unexpected happens: but I doubt whether we can really still consider a missile attack as unexpected.

The second objection to my argument is quite the opposite of the first: it is that nothing we do will make any difference. This is turn comes in several variants. That most often heard today, especially since the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington and the later fears of biological terrorism, is the suggestion that an aggressor does not need to acquire missiles in order to attack us. He can rely on other means closer to hand – whether passenger aircraft loaded with fuel, or anthrax, or a smuggled-in so-called ‘backpack’ nuclear weapon. In these circumstances, it is argued, missile defence is a waste of time and money.

But this argument is flawed at several levels. The first is at the level of basic logic. It does not follow that because we have been shown to be vulnerable to one threat we should simply accept vulnerability to another. Second, no one argues that BMD offers a substitute for other measures. We need a layered defence so that we are able to guard against a range of threats. Of these the danger posed by an incoming missile is only one. But, third, it is by no means the least of the dangers we face; indeed, the likelihood that it will be employed against us must have increased as a result of the events of 11 September. Although we must avoid complacency, it is surely much less likely that hijacked aircraft will again be used as a means of mass terrorism against the West. In response to all that has happened, security has already been increased; a range of further measures will doubtless be adopted; air crews will be more alert; passengers will be less compliant; suicidal terrorists will find fewer collaborators to dupe; in short, the chances of a successful hijack will diminish. The attraction to terrorists or to a rogue state of an attack by the alternative means of a long-range missile has accordingly grown.

Moreover, that attraction was always considerable, for reasons that are often overlooked. We can never be sure that some fanatic may not seek to detonate a small nuclear weapon in a Western capital. We can, though, take some comfort from the fact that such acts of terrorism are not much favoured by the leaders of rogue states who want to use their weapons to maximum political effect. Ballistic missiles are attractive to them because they are designed to ensure that the weapon remains, from the moment of its launching until its impact, within the sole control of the power that fired it.

But in answer to the broader objection, I would simply say that no system is guaranteed perfect. I was never as optimistic as President Reagan seemed to be that even a fully-fledged Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI) would render nuclear weapons obsolete. But in the post-Cold War age we are, after all, most unlikely to be faced with a full-scale nuclear exchange with a major power. Far more probable is that a rogue state may fire one or more missiles with nuclear or chemical warheads at one of our major cities. Another ever-present possibility is that an unauthorised launch could occur. In such cases, missile defence offers the only protection we have – though I certainly would not rule out preemptive strikes to destroy a rogue state’s capabilities.

The truth is that the global system of ballistic missile defence, which I am proposing, is by far the best chance we have of preventing missiles and their warheads reaching our cities. This is because unlike other less comprehensive systems a global ballistic missile defence system has the ability to target and destroy missiles in each of their three phases of flight – the boost phase, mid-course, and the terminal phase. The first phase, directly after launch, is naturally the best from the point of view of the intended victim – and the worst from that of the aggressor, on whom the warhead’s destructive elements fall.

I believe that the best way to achieve such a global system is probably along the lines suggested by the excellent and authoritative report of the Heritage Foundation’s Commission on Missile Defense. This would be based upon a combination of a sea-based missile defence system and a space-based sensor system. By contrast, it seems highly unlikely that a single land-based system, or indeed any system which accepts the constraints of the ABM Treaty, could provide America with an effective defence.*

I also believe that the British Missile Proliferation Study Report was right to underline the effect that restricting America’s missile defence in that way, as proposed by the Clinton administration, would have on the rest of the Alliance. Britain, as America’s closest ally and most effective military collaborator, would be particularly vulnerable to missile attack from a rogue state if we were not within the defensive shield.* The British and other European governments should be pledging their full support to those in America who wish to create an effective global ballistic missile defence. America’s NATO allies should also be prepared to bear a fair share of the burden of the expense: so far there is little sign of this happening.

Though you would not guess it from President Putin’s well-publicised objections, Russia too has a strong interest in America’s building such a system. Its cities are closer to the potential threats than are most of the West’s. For its part, America by offering to protect Russia has the potential to achieve the visionary goal of President Reagan who saw SDI as a benefit to share.

I was delighted that George W. Bush, in the course of his US presidential campaign, made his position on this matter so clear, saying:

It is time to leave the Cold War behind, and defend against the new threats of the twenty-first century. America must build effective missile defences, based on the best available options, at the earliest possible date. Our missile defence must be able to protect all fifty states – and our friends and allies and deployed forces overseas – from missile attacks by rogue nations, or accidental launches … A missile defence system should not only defend our country, it should defend our allies, with whom I will consult as we develop our plans.†

As President, Mr Bush energetically set about honouring this pledge. I hope that Congress will see fit to support his endeavours. I also trust that America’s allies, above all Britain, will take full advantage of the President’s proposal to protect our populations too. And no one should pretend that the events of 11 September made effective missile defence any less important, or its acquisition any less urgent.

So I conclude that:

 We must recognise that the threat from ballistic missiles carrying nuclear or other WMD warheads is real, growing and still unanswered

 We should acknowledge that diplomatic and other means aimed at curbing proliferation will have little effect

 Politicians should stop talking as if a world without nuclear weapons were a possibility and begin to accept that nuclear weapons need to be tested and modernised if the nuclear shield is to be maintained

 They should recognise that though political conditions make proliferation and the threat of missile launches more likely, the advance of science has made coping with them more possible

 The only way to do this is to build a system of global ballistic missile defence.

TAKING THE STRAIN

Given leaders of resolution and foresight, and with the support of her allies, the American superpower has the material resources to prevail. But does it have the moral resources? I predict that this question will come to be asked even more frequently in the wake of the terrorist onslaught of 11 September. That outrage was aimed directly at the heart of America’s culture, values and beliefs.

Osama bin Laden once described Americans as ‘a decadent people with no understanding of morality’.* His contempt for America’s fighting spirit has already been shown to be misplaced. But what of his and his fellow fanatics’ scorn for our kind of liberal society?

It should be said at once that remarkably few Westerners view all that constitutes Western society today as perfect. Indeed, with us self-criticism is second nature. We worry openly about family breakdown, the dependency culture, juvenile delinquency, drug abuse and violent crime. We are all too conscious that a rising standard of living has not always brought with it a higher quality of life.

But at this point the critics and the enemies of our society part company. What conservative-minded Westerners want to see is the strengthening of personal responsibility in order to make our free society work. What our enemies demand is altogether different: it is the imposition of a dictatorial system in which neither freedom nor responsibility is valued, one where all that is required of individuals is obedience.

The Founding Fathers believed that although the form of republican government they had framed was designed to cope with human failings, it provided no kind of substitute for human virtues. For them American self-government meant exactly that – government by as well as for the people. James Madison knew that democracy presupposed a degree of popular virtue if it was to work well. In Number 55 of the Federalist Papers he wrote:

As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence. Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form* [Emphasis added]

The Founding Fathers and those who came after them had different religious beliefs, and sometimes none. But they were convinced that the way to nourish the virtues which would make America strong was through religion.

It is beyond my purpose to describe the complicated and still-evolving story of relations between Church – however defined – and state in America.* But when Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in 1835 that Americans held religion ‘to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions’ he was recording a very wise observation.

Whenever I go to America I am struck by the unembarrassed way in which the divinity keeps making an appearance in political discourse. And this reflects the fact that so many Americans are so deeply religious. Surveys have shown that two-thirds of Americans say that religious commitment is either the most important or a very important dimension of their lives, and America, far more than Britain or Continental Europe, is a church-going country.† And the natural, collective response of Americans to the tragedy of 11 September was to fill the nation’s churches. America’s faith, including its faith in itself and its mission, is the bedrock of its sense of duty.

That is yet another reason why we non-Americans can make our own the words of the poet Henry Longfellow:

Thou, too, sail on O Ship of State!

Sail on, O Union, strong and great!

Humanity with all its fears,

With all the hopes of future years,

Is hanging breathless on thy fate!‡

CHAPTER 3
The Russian Enigma
A VISIT TO NIZHNY NOVGOROD

Russia is so large that its overall conditions at any one moment almost defy generalisation. Indeed, it may be that the only way to understand the reality of Russia is to experience just a little of it at a time. Certainly, the impressions I gained from the visit I made in July 1993 have proved as instructive as anything I have read before or since.

I had been invited to receive an honorary degree from the Mendeleev Institute in Moscow, which specialises in chemical engineering and is one of Russia’s leading scientific institutions. My own early background as a research chemist meant that the invitation was of special interest to me. But I was also impatient to see for myself how much progress Russia, after almost two years of Boris Yeltsin and his reforms, was making. There were so many contradictory reports in the West that it was difficult to know quite what to think. Sir Brian Fall, one of Britain’s very best Ambassadors, had therefore prepared a programme that took in something of the old and the new. But even I was really not quite prepared for the resulting contrast.

On the afternoon of my first day in Moscow (Wednesday, 21 July) I was taken around a run-down shopping centre in one of the suburbs of Moscow. There was food on the shelves. But I could see that the choice was very limited and the quality, particularly of the fresh produce, was poor. The surroundings were as dreary as only socialist architecture can be. The locals were friendly, but half an hour of this was enough. Returning to the British Embassy for a working supper I reflected that though there were no evident shortages, neither was there much materially to show for reform. I had expected better, and I learned from the experts round the table that evening that a lot of Russians shared my view.

The following day I had another, more uplifting, rendezvous with the past in the form of several hours’ enjoyable conversation with Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev, at the palatial Gorbachev Foundation (whose purpose I have never altogether understood) and then over lunch at the Residence. I was glad to see that both were in good form, though still somewhat shaken and embittered by the circumstances of Mr Gorbachev’s removal from power. Raisa told me about the discomforts of their three days of ‘exile’ in Crimea during the abortive coup in August 1991. There had apparently been little or no food, and she was lucky to have some sweets in her handbag to give to her granddaughter. In fact, I later learned that the mental pressure of the time had caused Raisa to have a stroke.*

After lunch we all went to the Mendeleev Institute. The ceremony was splendid. There were speeches. In mine I referred to the close relationship between science, truth and freedom. This relationship was, in fact, far from theoretical in the old Soviet Union, where independent-minded scholars of integrity often took refuge in the natural sciences, which were somewhat less contaminated and distorted by Marxist dogma.

An orchestra accompanied some wonderful Russian singing to round off the occasion. I could not though avoid noticing that the Gorbachevs were ignored by many present. Beneath the celebration political wounds ran deep.

At dinner that evening I had my first opportunity to discuss the Russian government’s reform programme with one of its main proponents and activators, the immensely able economist Anatoly Chubais. His ideas sounded admirable. But I could not quite forget the previous day’s dismal supermarket. Which was Russian reality? More importantly, which was the future?

Early next morning I and my party – which included Denis and our daughter Carol, who had shrewdly arranged to cover the trip for the European newspaper – left by plane for the city of Nizhny Novgorod. Under communism it was known as Gorky and was a closed city dedicated to secretive nuclear weapons research. Its very existence had long been concealed as far as possible from prying Western eyes. Indeed, the British crew of the private jet we were using had to take on board a Russian navigator in order to locate the airport, which did not appear on any of the usual maps.

But Nizhny Novgorod, I was aware, once symbolised a very different tradition in Russian history. In 1817 the city hosted its first trade fair, which quickly established itself as the most successful in the whole of Russia. The Russians, who are the world’s most adept inventors of popular proverbs, used to say that Moscow was Russia’s heart, St Petersburg her head and Nizhny Novgorod her pocket. With the end of the Cold War had also come an end to reliance on the defence budget to provide employment. The ‘pocket’ rapidly emptied. So there was every reason for the citizenry to return to their old entrepreneurial ways in order to earn a living.

Successful entrepreneurship is ultimately a matter of flair. But there is also a fund of practical knowledge to be acquired and, of course, the right legal and financial framework has to be provided for productive enterprise to develop. I had heard back in London that the Governor of the province, Boris Nemtsov, was someone who understood all this and that he was committed to a radical programme of what some call Thatcherism but what I had always regarded as commonsense. So I had decided to see for myself, and our Embassy made the arrangements.

Nizhny Novgorod’s saviour was, I found, frighteningly young (in his mid-thirties), extraordinarily energetic, extremely good-looking and gifted with both intelligence and shrewdness (which do not always go together). He was a good talker and spoke fluent English. His background was in physics, on which he had written some sixty research papers. He was extremely self-confident, and with good reason.

Indeed, as we sat in his offices in the Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin building, the more I listened to Mr Nemtsov’s account of his reforms the more impressed I was. He explained to me that he had been using his powers as Governor to promote a real free-enterprise economy. At that time the Russian Duma had still not passed a law to create secure title to private property, but in Nizhny Novgorod he had already decreed a local law on private ownership of land. The soil, as I would later see for myself, was rich and well-cultivated. The prime difficulty was not therefore in growing crops – in fact, Nizhny Novgorod was already more than self-sufficient in grain – but rather in selling the produce. Under communism, decisions about distribution and marketing had, naturally enough, been left to the Party bureaucrats. But once that system collapsed, networks which in the ordinary conditions of capitalism would have evolved over time had to be created all at once from scratch. Mr Nemtsov had made it quite clear to the local farmers and traders that it was they who now had to fend for themselves: the state offered no answers. But he had made a large contribution to solving the problem by auctioning off the entire fleet of government-owned lorries – later that afternoon I visited one of the privatised transport firms and was extremely impressed with all I saw, not least the enthusiasm of the manager and his staff.

It was now time to gain some further information and some exercise, as amid what seemed a large proportion of the population of Nizhny Novgorod, the Governor and I took a walk down Bolshaya Pokrovskaya street. All the stores here were privately owned. Every few yards we stopped to talk to the shopkeepers and see what they had to sell. No greater contrast with the drab uniformity of Moscow could be imagined. One shop remains vivid in my memory. It sold dairy produce, and it had a greater selection of different cheeses than I have ever seen in one place. I ate samples of several and they were very good. I also discovered that they were all Russian, and considerably cheaper than their equivalents in Britain. I enthusiastically expressed my appreciation. Perhaps because as a grocer’s daughter I carry conviction on such matters, a great cheer went up when my words were translated, and someone cried, ‘Thatcher for President!’ But the serious lesson for me – and for my hosts – was, of course, that in this one privately owned shop in this distant Russian city, a combination of excellent local products, talented entrepreneurs and laws favourable to enterprise applied by honest and capable political leadership could generate prosperity and progress. There was no need of a ‘middle way’ or of special adjustment to Russian conditions. In that cheese shop was proof that capitalism worked. The doubters would have been astonished.

THE PERILS OF PREDICTION

But then, Russia has always had a unique capacity to surprise. Every prediction about it should be hedged around with qualifications if whoever makes them would be secure from embarrassment. And before going any further I would like to make my own modest contribution to the current wave of apologising. For I too was wrong – about some things.

I never had any doubt that the communist system was doomed to fail, if the West kept its nerve and remained strong. (On occasion, of course, that seemed a very large ‘if’.) I believed this simply because communism ran against the grain of human nature and was therefore ultimately unsustainable. Because it was committed to suppressing individual differences, it could not mobilise individual talents, which is vital to the process of wealth creation. It thus impoverished not just souls but society. Faced with a free system, which engages rather than coerces people, and so brings out the best in them, communism must ultimately founder.

But when? We did not know how desperately incompetent, indeed how near total breakdown, the Soviet system was in the 1980s. Perhaps that was for the best. Had some in the West been aware just how limited and over-stretched were the Soviet Union’s resources the temptation would have been to drop our guard. That could have been fatal, for the USSR remained a military superpower long after it had become a political and economic fossil. I would, though, never have predicted that within a decade of my becoming Prime Minister the countries of Central and Eastern Europe would be free, let alone that two years later the Soviet Union would itself have crumbled.

I must also confess to being at least half-wrong about another important aspect of the Soviet Union in my time, namely its durability. I was never attracted by the idea of deliberately trying to hold the Soviet Union together. Such strategies were, in any case, bound to fail because we in the West lacked the knowledge and means to give effect to them. As I have related elsewhere, I was thus alone in opposing an attempt by the then President of the European Commission to have the EEC ‘guarantee’ the integrity of the USSR in the face of independence movements by the Baltic states.*

But like just about everyone else, I underestimated the fundamental fragility of the Soviet Union once the Gorbachev reforms had begun. A non-communist Soviet Union, which was what we at that time wanted to see, even though we did not put it like that, was actually an impossibility. This was because what held the USSR together was the Communist Party.

The Sovietologists, with their subtle analyses of Soviet society, were wrong: the dissidents with their emphasis on the role of a monolithic party ideology were right. Communism was, in fact, like a parasite, occupying merely the shells of state institutions. These institutions were thenceforth effectively dead and could not be revived.

In the period which has elapsed since those dramatic events, other confident predictions have exploded, though not I think any of mine. Some economic liberals were, for example, led astray by too much confidence in the prescriptions of their own ‘dismal science’. It was not actually, as I shall explain, that the prescriptions were wrong. Rather, they took insufficient account of non-economic factors. The liberal economists assumed that with the Communist Party shattered and Western-style ‘reformers’ in the Kremlin it would be quite easy to instal the institutions of a free economy with rapid benefits for the Russian population. There appeared to be encouraging parallels with Poland, another former communist state where precisely such a crash programme of economic reform, masterminded by Leszek Balcerowicz in the early 1990s, had brought positive results within two or three years. But Russia was not Poland.

On the other hand, the gloomiest predictions about Russia have also been largely – though it is premature to say permanently – disproved. Some foresaw a new Russian imperialism set on achieving by force the recreation of a Russian-centred Soviet Union. So far, at least, this has not happened. Tensions remain between Russia and her neighbours. But there have been no large wars, no use of weapons of mass destruction, no return of communism, no turn towards fascism. It is right that among the many criticisms which can be made of Western policy such important if negative achievements should also be acknowledged.

In truth, the story of Russia over the last decade is not one of progression or even regression along a clear path, rather it is a tale of twists and turns, accelerations and occasional derailments, of integration countered by disintegration, of reform and reaction, all alternately or even simultaneously in play. We have to try to understand what has happened and why, because only by doing so can we predict, let alone influence or steer, what happens in the future.

And that is important. Russia cannot and must not be written off. Personally, I feel this with a conviction bordering on passion. The Russian people suffered so much in the twentieth century – and they were so frequently left to their unhappy lot by those Westerners who lied and collaborated with their oppressors – that we must be indignant at the state in which they remain. In the Cold War the West’s greatest allies were always the ordinary Russian people. They now deserve better.

But taking Russia seriously today is also a matter of calculation. When ex-President Yeltsin went to Beijing in December 1999 and reminded us undiplomatically that Russia still had a formidable nuclear arsenal, he was only telling the truth. Whether weak or powerful, an opportunity or a headache, Russia matters.

THE BURDEN OF HISTORY

The best analyses of the Soviet Union were by and large those of historians rather than Sovietologists, because the historians had the benefit of perspective, while the Sovietologists had to glean most of their material from the turgid and mendacious statements of one or other Soviet authority. With Russia’s recent return to an older shape and identity, history is even more important as a basis for our assessments.*

It has been well-said that ‘of all the burdens Russia has had to bear, heaviest and most relentless of all has been the weight of her past’.† Russia might have developed differently. The course of history is not inevitable. But it is unarguably irreversible. One would have to go far back through the centuries to find a glimmer of any indigenous Russian tradition that might have spawned liberalism of the kind that has flourished in the West. From the late Middle Ages the tsars ruled their vast expanding domains in a fashion which explains much about modern Russia.

First, they recognised no property rights except their own, because they treated all their realm as if they owned it, and they regarded all secular lords as their tenants in chief. With no private property – above all, no private land – there could be no law, other than the tsar’s autocratic decrees. With no law, there could be no flourishing middle class, because there was lacking the security required for the accumulation of wealth, for the continuation of commerce and for the development of enterprise. Russian towns remained accordingly few, backward and small.

Secondly, the tsars admitted no institutional or even theoretical checks upon their power. They did not need to seek the consent of their subjects in order to raise revenues. Late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Russian representative institutions thus had little resonance with most of the populace and were treated with scant respect by the tsar.

Thirdly, the tsars established an odd symbiotic relationship with the Russian Orthodox Church. On the one hand, the tsar exercised total control over it: the traditions of Orthodoxy – inherited from practice in Byzantium – were highly conducive to this, recognising no clear division between the ecclesiastical and political spheres. On the other hand, Russian Orthodoxy, claiming Moscow as ‘the third Rome’, deeply infused the whole Russian state with attitudes which were viscerally anti-Western.

These three elements combined uniquely with a fourth – the way in which Russia’s development as a state more or less coincided with its acquisition of an empire. Both were intricately connected for, to quote one leading authority, ‘since the seventeenth century, when Russia was already the world’s largest state, the immensity of their domain has served Russians as psychological compensation for their relative backwardness and poverty’.*

Westerners who visited tsarist Russia immediately knew that they had to deal with something utterly alien and un-European. More open-minded than those intellectuals who a century later made their pseudo-pilgrimages to the Soviet Union was the Marquis de Custine, who wrote his recollection of a visit to Russia in 1838. He went there as a sympathetic admirer of Russia; he returned an outraged critic:

The political state of Russia may be defined in one sentence: it is a country in which the government says what it pleases, because it alone has the right to speak. In Russia fear replaces, that is paralyses, thought … Nor in this country is historical truth any better respected than the sanctity of oaths … even the dead are exposed to the fantasies of him who rules the living.†

If this reads like a description of the Soviet communist dictatorship, that is more than coincidence; for it was grafted onto a Russian police-state tradition that was already well-established.

Custine’s picture of backwardness and repression is not, though, the whole story. The depredations which communism later made upon Russia – and even from its political coffin still makes – went far beyond anything devised by the tsars. Furthermore, economically at least, things had begun to change well before the Bolshevik Revolution. Russia’s belated but dynamic industrial revolution took off with a vengeance from the last decade of the nineteenth century. Indeed, as Norman Stone points out:

By [the eve of the First World War], Russia had become the fourth industrial power in the world, having overtaken France in indices of heavy industry – coal, iron, steel. Her population grew from just over sixty millions in the middle of the nineteenth century to a hundred millions in 1900 and almost 140 million by 1914; and that was counting only the European part, i.e. west of the Urals. Towns, which contained only ten million people in 1880, contained thirty million by 1914.*

Russia lacked the social and political institutions to cope with the strains of such rapid economic change. Moreover, the empire was about to enter a terrible war which exposed its weaknesses, and which led first to anarchy, then revolution, and finally to the imposition by the Bolsheviks of the most total dictatorship that the world has known.

THE LEGACY OF COMMUNISM

The system was as much the work of Lenin as of Marx. The wordy, flawed analyses of the German were applied with ruthless violence by the Russian, who already lived and breathed the repressive atmosphere of the tsars.

The Soviets took the traditional tsarist hostility towards alternative sources of authority, towards freedom of thought, towards private property and towards a rule of law much further. While the tsar had demanded that he be treated as God’s representative, the Party actually usurped the place of God Himself. Communism’s war against religion – even one so politically amenable as Russian Orthodoxy – was pursued with the same aim as that against the richer peasants and against all the habits and ties of private life: the state must seize, possess, and ultimately absorb all.

For seventy years this system was imposed on the Russian people. Of course, like all that is human, it had its less bad moments. In time, the frenzied campaign against religion abated, to be replaced under Stalin by an uneasy modus vivendi between Church and state, because the latter found the former’s influence useful. Similarly, after Stalin’s purges a certain stability descended on the Soviet system, which became more bureaucratic, stratified and corrupt – this was the period of the emergence of what Milovan Djilas called the ‘new class’.* The monster of communism mellowed a little as sclerosis set in. Under Khrushchev, the errors of Stalin were admitted. Under Gorbachev, the conduct of Lenin was eventually debatable. In the last few years of the Soviet Union the pressure for free speech and free elections grew and – to his credit – Mr Gorbachev responded.

There was also talk of economic reform. But it never came to anything. This was essentially because, for communists – from Lenin to Gorbachev – ‘reform’ simply meant making the Marxist-Leninist system more efficient, not adopting a different system. Perhaps the last moment at which such an approach could have yielded positive results was under the intelligent Yuri Andropov (1983–84), who at least understood the economic abyss before which the Soviet Union tottered. But he was too sick – and his successor Konstantin Chernenko (1984–85) was both too sick and too dull – to make any impact. By the time that Mikhail Gorbachev took over in 1985 any attempt to reform the system was bound to fail and likely to result sooner or later in its dissolution.

And this, of course, is what happened. Mr Gorbachev’s programmes of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) were intended to be complementary, but that is not how they worked out. Openness about the failures of the system and of the people, past and present, who were responsible, was immensely liberating for the Soviet citizenry who had for so long been denied the chance to debate the truth. But restructuring the ramshackle institutions of the state, let alone replacing the mediocrities who battened on them, was really out of the question. In any case, the basis of the Soviet Union was still the Communist Party (which also controlled the military-industrial complex and the security apparatus), and the Party would not meekly yield up the one thing it valued above all – power.

This fact also explains the personal tragedy of Mikhail Gorbachev, who was feted by the West – and justly so – but who was rejected and reviled by his own fellow-countrymen. For all his talk of the need for ‘new thinking’, in the end he just could not practise it. Faced in 1991 with a choice between continuing along the path of fundamental change on the one hand and a return to repressive communism on the other, he dithered. I do not believe, though this has sometimes been said, that he secretly supported those hard-line communists who temporarily seized power in July 1991. But he had himself appointed them to their positions. And even when he returned to Moscow he proclaimed himself a communist. So for all my admiration for his achievements, my sympathy for his predicament, indeed my liking for him as a man, I am sure that his replacement by Boris Yeltsin was right for Russia.

The deep hostility between these two men who between them have done more for their country’s freedom than any other Russians was doubtless partly to be explained simply by political rivalry. But it also, I am convinced, represented something deeper. Mr Yeltsin knew in his heart that the system in which he had risen and then fallen, only to rise again, was fundamentally wrong – and not just because it failed to give people a reasonable standard of living, but also because it was based upon a structure of lies and wickedness. This, I think, is why Mr Yeltsin looked so large as he stood on that tank in central Moscow when he led the heroic battle for Russian democracy. And it is why Mr Gorbachev looked so diminished as he returned three days later from his Black Sea coast retreat in the Crimea. Cameras often lie, but this time they told the truth: not just a tale of two Russians, but also a tale of two Russias.

The collapse of the August 1991 coup provided the opportunity for a triumphant Boris Yeltsin to order the banning of the Communist Party and to oversee the orderly dissolution of the Soviet Union. In recent years it has become the fashion to scorn Mr Yeltsin’s weaknesses, which were doubtless real enough. But they were more than matched by astonishing courage and large reserves of political wiliness. And had bravery and cunning not also been accompanied by a typically Russian ruthless streak he could never have scored victory after victory against the communists who wanted to drag Russia back to its Soviet past.

Boris Yeltsin’s shoulders were broad. But history’s burden was still too heavy for them. The habits, instincts and attitudes developed by Soviet communism made the transformation of Russia into a ‘normal’ country immensely difficult. This has been glaringly apparent in the growth of lawlessness.

Long before the end of the Soviet era, Russians had come to regard the state itself as their enemy. For those who chose to proclaim their individuality it was an oppressor. But for many more the state was essentially a thief.

There was, of course, no law in a Western sense in communist society. Indeed, though there were rules and regulations at every turn there was no concept of equity, according to which a single set of obligations based on what each was due as a human being was applied to all equally. As the writer and dissident Alexandr Zinoviev strikingly put it: ‘In Communist society a system of values prevails which is founded on the principle that there should be no general principles of evaluation.’*

In fact, the only dominant principle was that of predatory egotism. Such habits die hard, or not at all. It is important to stress that although the scale and violence of Russian crime have snowballed since the end of the USSR, its psychological and systemic roots were planted under communism. In the last years of Leonid Brezhnev’s presidency corruption in high places became notorious. But from the mid-1980s, crime became fully institutionalised, not least through the activities of the KGB which, according to a senior CIA source,

sold cheaply acquired Soviet commodities abroad at world prices, putting the proceeds into disguised foreign accounts and front companies … [Its] lines of business came to include money laundering, arms and drug trafficking and other plainly criminal activities.*

There was, understandably, little confidence that this disordered state of affairs would change under the new dispensation: most Russians had grown so accustomed to it that criminality appeared the ordinary way in which things were done. How could it be otherwise when so many of the same people who had held high positions under communism re-emerged under capitalism as the new masters?

Russia has accordingly become a notoriously criminal society. It is thought that between three thousand and four thousand criminal gangs operate there. The Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs says that organised crime controls 40 per cent of the turnover of goods and services; some estimates are higher. Half of Russia’s banks are thought to be controlled by criminal syndicates. Not surprisingly, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) considers Russia the most corrupt major economy in the world. Public opinion polls have suggested that Russians despair of honest effort as the means to advance. Instead, 88 per cent listed ‘connections’ and 76 per cent dishonesty as the best ways to get ahead.†

Estimates of the size of the black economy – always difficult to gauge – put it at between a quarter and a half of Russia’s national income. Much of this is, of course, a matter of unpaid or badly paid Russian workers trying to earn a decent income; much of the rest reflects the chaotic circumstances in which all enterprises have to operate. But it is still a recipe for extortion and gangsterism.

In such circumstances violence has become a tempting method of settling scores, instilling fear, and deterring both competition and criticism. Russia’s murder rate is now probably the highest in the world. Those who speak out against abuses in high places must expect to be targeted.

Such, for example, was the fate of that brave and principled lady, Galina Starovoitova. I first met her in London during the 1991 attempted coup, when she and I discussed how to help rally support for Boris Yeltsin. Mrs Starovoitova was a leading figure in the biggest political party at that time, ‘Democratic Russia’. She became a personal adviser to President Yeltsin on inter-ethnic issues – a position she relinquished because of her opposition to the Chechen War. She was later elected as a member of the Duma representing St Petersburg, where she denounced the anti-Semitism and corruption which had become unpleasant facets of the life of that great city. She also proposed a draft Law of Lustration intended to prevent high-level former Communist Party and KGB members from occupying high state positions. This, though, was rejected by the communist majority in the Duma.

Galina Starovoitova was murdered on the night of 20 November 1998 as she climbed the stairs to her apartment. It was a well-prepared assassination with what her family later told me had all the marks of the old KGB style. I was horrified by this and wrote to President Yeltsin. But her murderers have never been brought to trial. She is a martyr to the ideal of the Russia most Russians long to see. It is impossible to have much confidence in the Russian authorities’ promises to stamp out crime while her, probably well-connected, murderers remain at large.

ECONOMIC REFORM AND THE IMF

Lawlessness in all its forms has impinged on attempts to reform the Russian economy. And this should be remembered as a background to the agonised debates which have taken place since the crash of August 1998 on the theme of ‘Who lost Russia?’ In fact, the question is badly put for three rather obvious reasons: first, Russia is not necessarily lost; second, it was certainly not the West’s to lose; and third, the loss for which the International Monetary Fund (IMF), senior politicians and advisers should be required to answer is that of billions of dollars by Western taxpayers in futile bail-outs.

Elsewhere, I consider more fully what might constitute a proper role for the IMF.* But it is worth rehearsing the arguments for and against its deep and costly involvement in Russia. The main argument for relying on an international organisation rather than, say, the Group of Seven (G7) major economic powers to help Russia out of the mess it inherited from communism, was that the IMF allegedly had the expertise to undertake the task and the neutrality to avoid outraging Russian sensitivities about the country’s sovereignty.

In fact, things have not worked out that way. The IMF’s decisions were increasingly politically motivated, clearly intended to keep President Yeltsin in and the communists out of power; and it found itself increasingly pilloried by Russians as an agent of malign Western intervention. Of course, the prior question is: did such massive programmes of assistance make sense in the first place?

The argument against the provision of loans and other aid to insolvent sovereign borrowers is well-known: it mirrors in many respects the problem involved in lending to insolvent individuals. Quite apart from whether the money will be repaid – which may not be the first consideration – such action creates what is called ‘moral hazard’. This means that it is assumed by the recipient of the aid – or by others who benefit from it indirectly, or may wish to benefit in the future – that irresponsibility will not be penalised. And that, of course, increases the likelihood of its recurring.†

Taken to its extreme, this argument would suggest a policy of rigid international non-intervention in Russia’s economic affairs. It should be said at once that this argument has its merits. Insofar as the West’s billions of dollars have helped shore up a structurally unreformed economy and a corrupt plutocracy they have done harm not good. But the fact remains that Russia is too great a potential danger to her neighbours and the world to be allowed to fail entirely. In these circumstances, the needs of politics will always tend to override the requirements of economics. The practical challenge is to ensure that intervention is correctly timed, targeted, monitored – and known to be limited. Unfortunately, with Russia this has not been the case.

Looking back, there was only a very narrow window of opportunity for the West and the IMF to act decisively. The Soviet Union was in discussions with the IMF as early as 1988. Two years later the Fund produced its recommendations for fundamental economic reform. President Gorbachev was presented with a number of possible reform programmes, but he had little understanding of economics and his preoccupations were mainly with his own and the Soviet Union’s survival. From the beginning of 1991 the Soviet administration actually moved away from political and economic reform, a course which culminated in the August 1991 putsch.

Perhaps more could have been done in this initial period. I was very keen to see Mikhail Gorbachev rewarded and encouraged. That is why I wanted to see the Soviet Union/Russia associated with the G7 economic powers, in spite of its difficulties.* I was not keen to see open-ended credits supplied, which would just build up more debt. Instead, I believed that Sir Alan Walters (my old friend and economic adviser in government) had been right to argue for the setting up of a currency board to stabilise the rouble by backing it with dollars. I also thought that Western companies might be invited to use their expertise to reform a whole sector of the collapsing Soviet system – ideally, food distribution.

Conditions changed fundamentally for the better with the accession to power of Boris Yeltsin, who immediately declared his intention to liberalise the Russian economy and brought in committed expert reformers as ministers and advisers to help him do so. The following January, price controls were removed, internal trade was freed, the rouble was floated and measures were taken to slash the huge budget deficit. But the consequences for the Russian people of this necessary programme were severe. Once the first enthusiasm for change passed it was inevitable that political pressures on the President and his team would mount. The communist-dominated parliament became the centre of resistance.

This was the point at which the West should have been generous. But it was not. Western politicians and bankers seriously misread the situation, imagining that the small print of an economic programme was more important than the political reality. By the summer of 1992 President Yeltsin had felt compelled to drop the reformist Prime Minister, Yegor Gaidar, and instal the representative of the industrial cartels, Viktor Chernomyrdin, in his place. At the same time the former chief of the Soviet Central Bank was appointed to the post of chairman of the Russian Central Bank, where he immediately set the printing presses rolling. The IMF only now agreed its first big loan to Russia – seven months after the reform programme was launched, and after the true reformers had been ousted.

For a variety of reasons, that missed opportunity never recurred. Even during the periods when economic progress seemed to be made, the underlying conditions were actually deteriorating. Politics was largely at the root of this. The struggle between the President and the parliament was waged with increasing ferocity, largely over economic policy, with Mr Yeltsin’s opponents (who had control over the Central Bank) trying to secure as strong a dose of inflationary socialism as possible. Western hopes rose, after the defeat of the parliamentary rebellion in October 1993, that the President would now be able to impose a full-blooded reform programme. To some extent, this was what happened. But the success of the communists and nationalist extremists in the parliamentary elections of December demonstrated how deep was popular disillusionment with the course proposed by the IMF. During 1994 the Chernomyrdin government pursued a policy which pushed up spending, borrowing and inflation, resulting in a collapse of the rouble in October.

Both the IMF and the Russian government now made greater efforts to agree a detailed programme of economic reform sustained by IMF financial support. The largest loan yet given to Russia – $6.8 billion – was announced on 11 April 1995. This was more than a matter of economics: it represented an investment in President Yeltsin, who faced an election in April 1996.

Mr Yeltsin won, but at what turned out to be a huge cost to himself, to Russia and to the West. First of all, he destroyed his health and could never recover his former energy and authority. Second, in order to win he made a large number of promises for extra spending which could not be afforded. Third, he had to rely on the support of Russian plutocrats whose interests lay rather in securing control over cartels in a corporatist economy than in creating a properly functioning free-market system.

For these reasons, Mr Yeltsin’s second term was a serious economic disappointment. The appointment of Anatoly Chubais and Boris Nemtsov as First Deputy Prime Ministers seemed to signal an attack on the vested interests which stood in the way of change. But it was all too late. The rouble came under pressure as a result of fall-out from the East Asian financial crisis. In March 1998, in a move intended to signal a renewed drive for reform, Yeltsin appointed a new young Prime Minister, Sergei Kiriyenko, in place of Chernomyrdin. The concentration now was on measures to increase dwindling tax revenues and defend the rouble. The international market pressure on Russia continued to intensify and the IMF together with the World Bank and Japan provided $17.1 billion of new loans.

But the market would not be bucked. In August, after $4.8 billion of the loan had disappeared across the exchanges, the rouble was devalued and then floated. It lost over half its value against the dollar in just two weeks. The Russian stock market fell by 80 per cent. Some experts estimated the rate of capital flight as at least $17 billion per year.* Money poured out of Russia, doubtless much of it ours. Russians lost, perhaps permanently, faith in their own currency.

The political consequences were not slow in coming. Mr Yeltsin’s authority was fatally weakened. Prime Minister Kiriyenko was dismissed and, after a delay in which Chernomyrdin’s reappointment was rejected by the parliament, Yevgeny Primakov, backed by the Communists, took his place. He was joined by other throwbacks to the Soviet era.

The Primakov period, which lasted until his surprise dismissal in favour of Sergei Stepashin in May 1999 – and then Vladimir Putin in August – was a time of stagnation. Economic reform in any meaningful sense was suspended. In Russia it was a time for political manoeuvring. In the West it was time for recrimination.*

WHY ECONOMIC REFORM HAS FAILED SO FAR

What is clear from this sketch of the tangled events of the period between the proclamation of reform at the start of Yeltsin’s presidency and its effective abandonment some time before the end is that the IMF lacked the knowledge and the means to effect the major changes required to bring free-market capitalism to Russia. All they could be expected to do – and what they should have tried to do – was to support positive moves from within Russia and refrain from supporting negative ones. Having lost the only real opportunity to achieve transformation of the Russian economy by those who believed in the project, Westerners consistently overrated the prospects of half-baked reform at the hands of halfhearted reformers. The idea that a government run by Viktor Chernomyrdin, let alone by Yevgeny Primakov, could be relied upon to pursue the same objectives as Western economic liberals was laughable. Yet the rhetoric was always the same: ‘reform’ could only be achieved by more Western money and still greater Western forbearance.

The errors of wishful thinking were compounded by a failure to understand that the Russian economy depended upon Russian power structures. If the power structures remained inimical to reform, reform would simply not occur.

Without a proper rule of law, honest administration, sound banks and secure private property, it is not possible to create a free-market economy. President Yeltsin is often criticised for giving in to political pressures and slowing down or sidestepping the necessary appointments and measures. Perhaps someone with a less mercurial personality would indeed have made a difference. But politicians have to find backing if they are to make changes. If Yeltsin could not gain the support he needed among an increasingly disillusioned electorate he had to find it from the powerful figures that have come to be known as the ‘oligarchs’. With no previous experience of patience being rewarded, the Russian people became increasingly unwilling to go on making sacrifices.

The conditions in which most Russians live are hard indeed. They deserve better. But some of the statistics bandied about are somewhat misleading. When we hear (as we sometimes do) that the country’s economic output is about half the level of a decade ago or that real incomes have fallen sharply, it is worth recalling that economic statistics under the Soviet Union were hardly more reliable than any other official statements. Moreover, a country that produces what no one wants to buy, and whose workers receive wages that they cannot use to buy goods they want, is hardly in the best of economic health. Comparisons between living standards in the last years of the Soviet system and living standards now suggest that measured by the most important criterion – what people are actually able to spend – there has been some improvement. *

Yet it has been very uneven, and there have been terrible moments. The harshest pressures, as public expenditure controls were imposed, were upon people dependent on the state for their living. There were large arrears in payments of wages and pensions and sharp falls in their value, as inflation soared. Probably the worst blow has been against savings. Nothing does more to undermine a society than when savers are impoverished, as the history of Germany’s Weimar Republic shows.

But perhaps the most telling indices of misery are not economic but social – for Russia is sick, and at present it is really no exaggeration to say that it is dying. As one expert has remarked: ‘No industrialised country has ever before suffered such a severe and prolonged deterioration [of public health] during peacetime.’† Death rates in Russia are nearly 30 per cent higher than at the end of the Soviet Union – and public health was already bad in Soviet times. Deaths are now exceeding births by well over half, some seven hundred thousand a year. Life expectancy for Russian men today is about sixty-one – worse than Egypt, Indonesia or Paraguay. The main causes are extraordinarily high rates of heart disease and injuries, in which the common factor is apparently alcohol abuse. Life is simply so bad that the bottle offers the only refuge.

What makes so many ordinary Russians this depressed is, one suspects, not just frustration at their own prospects, but also anger at the way in which a minority flaunts huge wealth acquired from successful speculations, insider trading, cartels and gangsterism. The root of the trouble was that in Russia in the early 1990s, when reform was under way, there was no middle class in the European sense. Tsarist Russia never developed a substantial middle class anyway, but what there was fled or were impoverished or killed by the Bolsheviks.

Under communism no such class could emerge and ‘bourgeois’ values were, naturally, deplored. There were ‘managers’ of course. But these were just political bureaucrats, not entrepreneurs and owners. Consequently, those who found themselves with the knowledge, means and position to flourish in the early years of reform were the class of apparatchiks.

The prospering of this elite renders in the eyes of many Russians the mere notion of ‘reform’ suspect and its proponents odious. And though they are wrong, who can blame them?

Beneath the formalities of memoranda, declarations of intent, statistical projections and neatly typed balance sheets, a series of struggles for power have been conducted. Among the most important players have been: the bureaucracy; the armed forces, whose frustration at their penury has on occasion threatened the security of the state; the magnates, in control (directly or indirectly) of Russia’s vast natural resources, particularly oil, which they bought cheaply and then obtained licences to sell at much higher international prices; and banks, which performed none of the functions of normal Western banks, but rather bought up in rigged auctions the shares of privatised companies.

In fact, a kind of economic theatre of the absurd was functioning well before the 1998 crash. Industries, which because of their inefficiency were incapable of making a profit, were kept afloat because their bosses used influence and connections to escape paying taxes to the government, gave worthless promissory notes to their creditors and often remunerated their workers in barter. The absurdities of the Soviet system were being recreated. As the joke ran in those times (referring to the fact that both industrial products and industrial wages were effectively worthless): ‘We pretend to work – they pretend to pay us.’ But now, as often as not, no one was paid. Such are the circumstances in which – in spite of the fact that 70 per cent of industry is notionally in private hands, that consumer prices have been deregulated and that a return to socialism is probably impossible – we have to conclude that economic reform has so far largely failed.

One of the most crushing verdicts on what has occurred is that of the economist and current adviser to President Putin, Andrei Ilarionov:

… [S]ince the summer of 1992, with few exceptions, the political struggle has not been over whether the government should implement more liberal or more interventionist economic policy. The real struggle has been over a different issue: who or whose team (group, gang, family) would control the state institutions and instruments that control the distribution and redistribution of economic resources … The only distinction among the groups participating in the Russian transformation was their ability to camouflage their deeds to make them suitable for public consumption in Russia and abroad.*

The West cannot behave as if this were not the case. We have to learn from our mistakes. We have to face up to their consequences. And we have to do better.

Developments since the crash of 1998 have provided Russia and the West with a breathing space. As one would expect after a dramatic fall in the currency, Russian goods are now cheaper and exports have soared. The economy has been growing again (by 5.4 per cent in 1999 and 8.3 per cent in 2000). The trebling of oil prices has also benefited Russia, one of the world’s major oil producers, and the government is now raising US$5.5 billion annually from the energy sector.

These favourable conditions offer a new opportunity to tackle the fundamental obstacles to prosperity. As a basis for future action to shift Russia back on course towards becoming a ‘normal country’ I suggest the following:

 There must be no more self-deception. If the people and policies dominant in Russia at any time are opposed to real reform there should be no financial cushion provided by the West or the IMF. Such aid is worse than useless – it’s doubly damaging, because it associates the cause of reform with failure

 We must keep the long-term goal in view, which is to create a real free-enterprise economy based on sound money, low taxes, limited government and above all a rule of law. Barely a start has been made on achieving these things. And while the foundations are rotten, so will be the economic edifice

 While connections, corruption, crime and cartels form the basis of the Russian system there can be no true freedom and no genuine democracy. The West must speak the truth about this openly to the Russian people

 We have to stop regarding the only people who matter as being the political and bureaucratic elite in Moscow. Russia is naturally extremely rich – with major deposits of coal, oil, gas, timber and strategic minerals. But its greatest potential wealth lies in the millions of young would-be Russian entrepreneurs. They must be helped to understand what capitalism is about – and what it is not about. Above all, perhaps, we have to be patient. Today’s Russians face the Herculean task of undoing the harm done, not just by seventy years of Soviet communism but by previous centuries of autocracy. And ultimately only the Russians themselves can perform that task.

RUSSIA AS A MILITARY POWER

If almost a decade down the track from the end of Soviet communism we were now dealing in Russia with a ‘normal country’, that is a stable democracy with a functioning market economy, the West could afford to take a relaxed view of Russian military power, strategic interests and political intentions. Of course, even in those happy circumstances, the operation of the balance of power in Europe and possibly Asia would mean rivalries and tensions between Russia and the United States and its allies. But such problems would be more manageable and the reactions of Russia more predictable.

The worst error, as always in dealing with Russia, is naïveté. The Clinton administration initially sought to treat Russia as a ‘strategic partner’. But, however important Russia remained in its own backyard, the Russians had neither the will nor the means to enter into any global partnership with the United States. Moreover, Russian Cold War rhetoric between 1995 and 1997, when it tried and failed to block NATO’s expansion to take in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, revealed the emptiness of any such project. This, it will be recalled, was when President Yeltsin warned: ‘NATO will get as good as it gives. We have sufficient deterrent forces, including nuclear forces.’*

For as long as they could afford to do so, the Russians also frustrated Western aims in the countries of the former Yugoslavia. If Russia was supposed to be the West’s partner there no one seems to have told the Kremlin. As a result of NATO’s Kosovo air campaign against the Serbs in March–June 1999 Russia suspended all military contacts with NATO. But most revealing of the emotional temperature among Russia’s military and political elite was the threatening language they again used. The chief of the General Staff pointed out that he supported ‘the use of nuclear weapons to protect Russia’s territorial integrity’. The chairman of the Defence Committee of the Duma helpfully suggested that the state’s strategic concept should be amended to include the option ‘to deliver pre-emptive nuclear strikes’. Another retired general demanded Russia’s withdrawal from the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty.

The fact that the Russians acquiesced in Kosovo and eventually seem to have helped bring President Slobodan Milošević to the negotiating table reflected their weakness rather than their good will. Above all, it reflected their economic weakness, for the IMF was about to release a further tranche of $4.5 billion over eighteen months when the campaign began. Even then, the Russian generals (with or without the knowledge of President Yeltsin) sent Russian troops to seize Pristina airport, for the sake of swagger, so risking with no apparent concern a major international confrontation.

Russia has for centuries grown used to compensating for its economic underdevelopment by means of its military strength. For the Soviet Union, particularly in the last decades of its existence, such an approach was the only means of remaining a superpower. Today’s Russian leaders appear to have inherited something of that outlook.

But only something – for although it has over a million military personnel, and its defence spending still probably runs at over 5 per cent of GDP, the state of Russia’s armed forces as a whole is pitiful.* Non-payment of wages or payment in kind has left soldiers and sailors in some areas forced to grow cabbages or to engage in black-marketeering to avoid starvation. Morale and discipline are generally bad.

This has made some Russian generals and politicians keen to maximise the effectiveness of their most sophisticated weaponry. Both President Yeltsin and President Putin have emphasised the central importance of Russia’s nuclear defence. In November 1993 Russia’s new military doctrine both ended the previous Soviet pledge of ‘no first use’ of nuclear weapons and outlined more flexible options for their use. In April 1999 President Yeltsin responded to the opening of NATO’s bombing campaign against Serbia by holding a special meeting of his Security Council on the subject which he opened by stating that ‘nuclear forces were and remain the key element in the national security strategy and Russia’s military might’. Mr Putin chose to make one of his first visits as President to a centre for nuclear weapons research at which he told his audience: ‘We will retain and strengthen Russia’s nuclear weapons and its nuclear complex.’ The symbolism and the message were clear.

Russia has been concentrating on the development of a new generation of missiles and warheads, while seeking to extend the life of existing weapons systems. The most important new programme is that of the SS-27 Topol-M Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile (ICBM). Russia’s problem is that the cost of maintaining any kind of nuclear parity with the United States is likely to be prohibitive, given the rate at which Russia’s existing arsenal is becoming obsolete.

President Putin was widely praised in the West for having secured the Russian Duma’s endorsement of the START II treaty. He has more recently called for further substantial reductions to America’s and Russia’s nuclear arsenals. The driving force for these proposals is penury rather than mere goodwill. But they may well make sense all the same. For as long as Russia continues to hold a nuclear arsenal which it cannot afford properly to maintain, the rest of the world will be at risk of such weapons falling into the wrong hands or of an accidental launch. Furthermore, Russian scientists and advanced technology must if at all possible be kept in Russia to be productively redirected, not put up for sale to the highest international bidder.

Another potential worry for the West is posed by the former Soviet Union’s chemical and biological weapons capability. Such weapons are notoriously difficult to detect by ordinary verification techniques. They can be easily hidden, as we know from Saddam Hussein’s activities in Iraq. They can also be developed alongside or under cover of ordinary commercial, civilian processes. Three Russian officials have been reported as saying that Russia has twenty-four poison gas factories, six of which it plans to destroy and eighteen of which it has either converted or will convert to non-military uses.* Unfortunately for us, the Soviet Union’s biological weapons programme was very closely integrated into ostensibly civil programmes of research. There are worries about how far the necessary disentanglement has gone. Above all, however, it is the possibility of such weapons developed covertly in a Russian laboratory falling into the hands of rogue states or terrorists that is the main worry.

In the end, it is probably upon the massed if uneven ranks of the Russian army that any credible projection of Russian power depends. At present Russia’s armed forces are demoralised and their resources depleted. But it would not be wise to assume that this will always be so. The Russians are traditionally a martial nation. While it is most unlikely that Russia will ever again be a global superpower, it will remain a great power – too big to rest content within its own borders, too weak to impose itself far beyond them. All of which makes for troubling instability.

But the West has to cope. How?

 We must never forget that Russia has a huge arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. So some of the most important Western aid programmes are those, like the Nunn—Lugar programme aimed at ensuring proper oversight of Russia’s nuclear weapons, which satisfy our own security needs. Indeed, in all our dealings with Russia, the right approach is to put our security interests always and everywhere first

 We must try to persuade Russia that its willingness to sell military technology to rogue states may well rebound against Russians – both for reasons of basic geography and in view of Russia’s problems in its relations with much of the Muslim world

 Finally, we dare not take Russia for granted: the seeds of danger are often planted in the soil of disorder, as the world has learned to its cost before.

NATIONALITY PROBLEMS AND THE ‘NEAR ABROAD’

Russia is a huge country that covers eleven time zones. Its border – thirteen thousand miles of it – is the longest in the world, running from Europe to Eastern Asia. This gives Russia a unique opportunity to interfere in other countries’ affairs – particularly because so many of its neighbours were for so long subject to Moscow’s domination.

The fact that Russia’s nation-building and its territorial expansion were in tsarist times so closely interlinked means that Russia has traditionally regarded its frontiers as fluid not fixed. The Cold War stasis lent an appearance of permanence to the Soviet Union’s external perimeter. But with the disintegration of the USSR into Russia and fourteen other independent states that situation ended.

Russia itself felt vulnerable, and this vulnerability explains some – though not all – of the subsequent aggressive rhetoric and manoeuvring. Some twenty-five million ethnic Russians remained living outside the frontiers of the new Russian Federation after the winding up of the Soviet Union. For Russians this diaspora’s existence is both a reason and an excuse to claim the potential right to intervene in other former Soviet republics. On the other hand, the population of the Russian Federation is far from homogeneous: almost 20 per cent of the Federation’s inhabitants are non-Russian. The loyalties and aspirations of these non-Russian nationalities are among Russia’s least soluble problems.

In facing up to such problems, today’s Russian Federation and its neighbours find themselves once more living in the sinister shadow of the old Soviet Union. Stalin’s policy towards the peoples of the USSR was a mixture of calculation and spite. Altogether he uprooted some two million non-Russians, about a third of whom died directly or indirectly as a result, and deported them to Central Asia and Siberia. There was also a planned movement of Russians in the other direction, out of the Russian heartlands, to take up industrial and other jobs in far-flung but important parts of the Soviet Union. These Russian minorities enjoyed a (relatively) privileged existence. Indeed, a policy of promoting Russian interests against those of other nationalities, while trying to avoid any upsurge of ‘bourgeois’ Russian nationalism, was an important part of Moscow’s policy towards the Soviet Empire.

Of course, it failed, and long before the end anyone outside the Kremlin knew it. Surely one of the most memorably stupid pronouncements of any Soviet leader was Leonid Brezhnev’s of 1972 on the fiftieth anniversary of the formation of the USSR: ‘The national question, as it came down to us from the past,’ affirmed Brezhnev, ‘has been settled completely, finally, and for good.’* Within twenty years nationalism would have helped abolish the Soviet Union ‘completely, finally, and for good’. It remains to be seen whether it will do the same for the Russian Federation.

Against such a background, it is not surprising that ethnic and national suspicions are easily generated. In the years after the end of the Soviet Union a series of crises erupted in the territories of the Russian Federation and its neighbours. The common factors were threefold: Russia’s concern for the Russian minorities in what it called, in a phrase with alarming overtones, the ‘Near Abroad’; Russia’s attempts to use the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) as a means of re-integrating the former Soviet republics into a Russian-led confederation; and Russia’s struggle to control its own nationalities and their subordinate republics and regions.

Each region has had its own distinctive features. In some areas stability has returned. In others the outlook is uncertain. And in some of the latter the implications for the West are important.

Western countries have naturally been most concerned with events on Europe’s – and now NATO’s – eastern flank. The fate of the Baltic states was immediately bound up with that of the Soviet Union. One of the most reassuring acts of the new regime of Boris Yeltsin was his statesmanlike acceptance that Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – which had only been snatched by the Soviet Union by force and fraud under the Molotov—Ribbentrop Pact in 1940 – had the right to be independent sovereign states. The difficulties which subsequently arose about the Russian minorities – particularly in Estonia and Latvia where they represented about 30 per cent of the populations – were a direct result of the previous Soviet policy of swamping the local population with Russians. Naturally, the Estonians and Latvians were determined to restore control of their countries and their culture, which left Russians disadvantaged. Tensions are real and could still become extremely dangerous.

Left to themselves, the Baltic states will increasingly gravitate away from Moscow and towards their Scandinavian neighbours. These highly advanced, extremely talented and profoundly European peoples see themselves as part of the West and want closer integration with it. Russia has no right to stand in their way. Post-imperial hangovers affect all former great powers and are also a headache for their neighbours. It is perfectly understandable that Russia is concerned to secure decent treatment for its Russian minorities in the Baltic states. But it cannot expect to determine their potential orientation.

For our part, Western countries have to make this clear to Moscow, so as to reduce any Russian temptation to bully. The best way to do this will be to take the Baltic states into NATO. The timing, though, is important. We should always aim to inform the Russians of our intentions well in advance and try to reassure them that our actions pose no threat to Moscow’s interests. President George W. Bush was, therefore, right to signal very clearly before he went to Slovenia for his first meeting with President Putin that he believed that the Baltics must indeed be brought within NATO.* It will be necessary to reiterate this at some point, so that Moscow is not misled into thinking that its cooperation in the war against terrorism has won for it a veto on NATO’s expansion. But when we do take the final step, bringing the Baltics or indeed any other state within the Alliance, we should know what we mean and mean what we say – for, let us never forget, NATO membership is not merely symbolic. It implies that we would fight to preserve the territorial integrity of each and every member state.

Equally important from the viewpoint of Western interests is the future of Ukraine. There was rather more excuse for the Russians to begrudge Ukraine its independence than the Baltics. Kiev was, after all, from the ninth to the twelfth centuries the centre of Kievan Rus, the predecessor of the Russian state. Large numbers of Russians still regard Ukraine as part of Russia. Mainly Orthodox Eastern Ukraine feels closer to Russia than does the fiercely independent west, which is predominantly Uniate. Potentially serious disputes between the new Ukrainian state and Russia existed as regards the fate of the Black Sea fleet and the future of Crimea. The fact that in the first years after independence Ukraine made even less progress along the path of economic reform than its Russian neighbour also raised questions about the country’s prospects and indeed viability.

The government of President Kuchma, whatever its other shortcomings, in fact managed to resolve most of Ukraine’s outstanding problems with Russia. A Ukraine is emerging which recognises its historic ties with its eastern neighbour, but which also looks to the West. Ukraine is large enough – with fifty-one million people – and potentially wealthy enough – its soil is rich, though its economy is in terrible shape – to be a pivotal country in Eastern Europe. It is thus also important to us in the West. Ukraine is not to be treated as falling within a Russian ‘sphere of influence’. Rather, a strong Ukraine will act as a buffer between Russia and NATO. That would also probably be good for both parties.

In order to plot a path of independence, while seeking to resolve disputes as amicably as possible, Ukraine has vigorously resisted Russian attempts to turn the CIS into a pale imitation of the Soviet Union.* At the other extreme, Belarus’s President Lukashenko has consistently sought to reunite his autocratically ruled state with Russia in a new political, military and economic union.

Most of the other former Soviet republics have pursued a path somewhere between the two, often altering course according to the requirements of the moment. The five Central Asian Republics were all initially keen to join the CIS. None of them had been used to controlling their own affairs, which had been planned from Moscow, and their economies were still heavily dependent on links with Russia. But as the years have passed, other developments have affected their orientation – developments which are of some importance to the West.

First, the ethnic identity of the peoples of Central Asia has assumed greater significance. Four of the five states’ populations – the majorities in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan – share a common ethnic origin with the Turks. Although Turkey does not share a border with these states, it is active in the region and its influence as a prosperous, powerful, Westernised state is likely to grow.

Second, in the aftermath of the collapse of communism Islam has assumed much greater importance. It provides a rallying cry against corruption and abuses of power in Central Asia as elsewhere.

Third, partly in response to these perceived challenges – ethnic tension affecting local Russian populations, the influence of outside powers, above all the growth of Islamic militancy – Russia has reacted forcefully. There were thousands of Russian troops deployed in the Central Asian Republics long before the region became strategically crucial to America’s campaign against the Taliban. Moscow provided strong support to the Tajik government in its war with Islamic forces. It stations seventeen thousand Russian troops on the border. Russia also backed Kyrgyzstan with military aid in 1999, and has 2500 troops there. Fifteen thousand more are based in Turkmenistan.

In June 2001 the Moscow-led reaction to Islamic insurgency took what now appears a significant step further. Russia, China and the four Central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan agreed a security cooperation treaty in Shanghai. It was explicitly aimed at resisting Taliban-sponsored terrorism across frontiers.*

Three months later, in the wake of the attacks on New York and Washington, the Central Asia region acquired a sharply increased significance. In order to launch campaigns against al-Qaeda and the Taliban, while seeking to minimise potentially destabilising operations from Pakistan, the US sought the cooperation of the states bordering Afghanistan to the north. The governments of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan agreed, the former with particular enthusiasm, to welcome US bases. Kazakhstan also allowed the US to use its air space. The Uzbeks and Tajiks had their own special reasons to cooperate against the Taliban. But, as the dominant power in the region, it was Russia’s support for US aims that was crucial in overcoming local fears and hesitations. (I shall examine later the implications of this for US–Russian relations in the longer term.)

Central Asia is also of strategic importance for economic reasons. It possesses great reserves of oil, natural gas, gold, silver, uranium and other valuable natural resources. Oil and gas, though, are the most important. It has been estimated that Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan together with Azerbaijan have oil reserves larger than those of Iran and Iraq. The known gas reserves of Turkmenistan alone are twice as large as those of the North Sea. Kazakhstan’s Tengiz oilfield is one of the world’s biggest. And by some accounts its Kashagan field, discovered in early 2001, is bigger still.

Oil and gas are equally crucial to the affairs of that ethnic tinderbox, the Caucasus – not just because of Azerbaijan’s reserves but because of the need for pipelines to exploit the fabulous energy wealth of the whole Caspian region. Russia is determined to maintain control over this oil and has engaged in this new ‘Great Game’ as vigorously as it did the old. It has sought to ensure that Azerbaijan and the Central Asian Republics use Russian oil- and gas-pipelines from the Caspian to its Black Sea port of Novorossiysk.* Russia has shown in recent years that it can cause a great deal of trouble in pursuit of its perceived interests. In a region where convoluted conspiracies and counter-intuitive theories thrive one should be careful about ascribing particular actions to particular actors. But it seems clear that Russia backed the overthrow of the first post-Soviet President of Georgia, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, in January 1992; and that it then supported a separatist revolt in Abkhazia in order to drive Georgia into the CIS, where it could keep it under firmer control. Similarly, in Azerbaijan in 1993 the upright, pro-Western democrat President Abulfaz Elchibey, who wanted to agree with a Western consortium a contract for the exploitation of Azeri oil – thus excluding the Russians – was immediately put under huge Russian pressure. Russia cut off Azerbaijan’s oil exports and used Armenia to increase the long-standing difficulties over Nagorno-Karabakh. Finally, when all else failed, Mr Elchibey was dislodged in a coup and the former Soviet Politburo member Haidar Aliev was installed in his place. And when Mr Aliev proved more recalcitrant than the Russians expected they backed two attempted coups against him.

The past results of Russian policy are easy to see, and they have been wholly destructive. Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia remain in a state of disorder, corruption and political decay. And the vast wealth of the Caspian is still not being properly used. The West has to try to ensure that law-based, stable states are developed in the region; that customers for oil and gas are not deprived of a vital alternative source to those of the Middle East; and that there is a sensible accommodation with Russian interests. For its part, Russia will need to accept that although both Central Asia and the Caucasus fall within its traditional sphere of interest, that sphere cannot be exclusive if these regions are to prosper. And it is in Russia’s own interest that they should.

Coping with tensions in the Northern Caucasus is a still more difficult matter, for of course the region actually lies within the frontiers of the Russian Federation. The non-Russian peoples there have endured a miserable history, and they can hardly be expected to thank Russia for it. That is especially true of Chechnya.

In Stalin’s deportation of 1944 some two hundred thousand Chechens lost their lives. When the USSR collapsed and the ‘sovereign’ republics of the Southern Caucasus escaped, the Chechens like the other non-Russian peoples who found themselves in the new Russian Federation were denied their freedom. They rebelled and declared independence.

In 1994 the Russians moved to repress the revolt. The Kremlin and the Russian armed forces were determined to demonstrate to other ethnic groups tempted to break away that their action would not be tolerated. The Russian campaign was also motivated by the desire to keep control of the vital oil pipeline which ran through Chechnya. As is well-known, this first campaign led to disaster from which only the charisma and negotiating skills of General Alexandr Lebed extracted the humiliated Russian forces.

Russia’s second campaign against Chechnya in 1999 had similar motives. But it was far better prepared, the number of Russian troops involved was much larger, and – measured against the objective of crushing Chechnya – it was quickly successful. It was clearly intended as a showcase for Russia’s military might. Even the well-documented brutality against civilians was intended to teach Russia’s enemies a lesson. The message was that in spite of the West’s edging Russia aside in Eastern Europe, in the Middle East and in the Balkans, Moscow was in charge of its own backyard.

The second Chechen campaign was waged with the enthusiastic support of the Russian people – and this is highly significant.* Of course, it is possible to argue that Russians were given a one-sided view of the conflict by their media. And it is certainly true that the Chechens played into Russian hands when its Islamic fanatics broke into neighbouring Russian Dagestan. But what aroused Russian nationalism was desire for revenge after a series of bombs in the late summer of 1999 left over three hundred Muscovites dead.

To this day no convincing evidence of Chechen involvement has been produced. But the Chechen campaign turned an almost unknown Prime Minister Putin into an overwhelmingly popular President Putin in the space of eight months. It also left a city desolate, thousands of civilians dead and a tide of pitiful homeless, hopeless refugees.

Russia’s treatment of Chechnya has been inexcusable. But it is not inexplicable, especially given the fact that – whoever planted the bombs in 1999 – the Chechens have, over the last three years, become increasingly involved in terrorism. Ominous developments have been hijackings, suicide bombings, attacks on civilian installations and growing ties with Islamic terrorists, including Osama bin Laden. None of this, though, provides a justification for Russia’s refusal to respect the wishes and interests of the Chechen population. Most Chechens are far from being Islamic fanatics: it is national, not religious, grievances that matter most to them. Before 11 September the Russian people had started again to be weary of the brutal campaigns aimed at crushing Chechen resistance. Prosecution of the wider war against terrorism must not now become an excuse for the Russian authorities to renew their attempts to wipe out the Chechen nation. Otherwise Moscow will become the terrorists’ main recruiting sergeant in the Caucasus.

 We have to speak the truth clearly about Russia’s behaviour: in Chechnya it has been unacceptable

 We must make it clear that, while respecting the interests of a great power, we reject any right for Moscow to destabilise other countries of the former Soviet Union

 The Baltic states should be brought into NATO, as they desire, at the right time

 The West has important interests at stake in Ukraine (which borders NATO) and in the Central Asian and South Caucasian republics (which contain huge reserves of oil and gas which both we and Russia need to have developed); all these states should receive our attention and support – political, technical and economic

 We must continue to cooperate with Russia in resisting Islamist extremism in Central Asia.

DOING BUSINESS WITH MR PUTIN?

President Putin’s personality and background have been the subject of a large amount of speculation and debate ever since it appeared certain that he would be master of the Kremlin. We know the basic facts; the difficulty is to be sure of what to make of them. Vladimir Putin fulfilled his childhood dream of joining the KGB, the Soviet secret police, in 1975 at the age of twenty-two. He spent the late 1980s working alongside the East German secret police, the Stasi, among other things spying on NATO (as he disclosed in a book-length interview in March 2000). In the early 1990s he returned to his native St Petersburg, first to work at the university and then joining the administration of the late Anatoly Sobchak, the reformist but allegedly corrupt mayor of St Petersburg. In 1996 Mr Putin was brought to Moscow to be Deputy Chief Administrator in the Kremlin. In 1998 he was appointed head of the Federal Security Bureau (FSB), the KGB’s successor. He then moved from Secretary of the President’s Security Council to become Prime Minister in August 1999, succeeding Mr Yeltsin the following March.

All of which tells us practically nothing; indeed, given Mr Putin’s background in a profession where deceit and disinformation are all it may be less than nothing. It is always important in matters of high politics to know what you do not know. Those who think they know, but are mistaken, and act upon their mistakes, are the most dangerous people to have in charge.

Britain’s current Prime Minister certainly felt no inhibitions about pronouncing judgement on Mr Putin. He enthusiastically described the then Acting President as a ‘moderniser’ and offered to allow him to benefit from the expertise of the Downing Street Policy Unit. Mr Blair stated as well that Mr Putin ‘believes in a Russia which is ordered and strong but also democratic and liberal’.

A good deal of this was wishful thinking. Western leaders looked forward to dealing with a Russian leader who was healthy, sober, predictable and presentable. And they therefore hoped against hope that they were also dealing with a reforming democrat. It was, indeed, possible that such a person might have emerged from the stable of the KGB. But it was equally possible, and perhaps more probable, that Vladimir Putin was closer to the model of that other ex-KGB chief who became President, Yuri Andropov – hailed by the West at the time as a pro-Western liberal because he liked jazz and drank Scotch, ignoring the fact that he had also been a central figure in the brutal suppression of Hungarian freedom in 1956. Shortly before his election, Mr Putin solemnly unveiled a plaque to Andropov in the KGB’s old Lubyanka headquarters. That was not, all things considered, a reassuring sign.

Since then a clearer, though far from unambiguous, picture of Mr Putin’s presidency has been emerging. Its central approach is to create a strong state so as to restore order. For all its ominous overtones, that is what Mr Putin means by his oft-repeated phrase a ‘dictatorship of law’. His view, like that of probably most Russians, is that the Gorbachev and Yeltsin years saw authority drained away from central institutions to the benefit of different selfish interests, such as financial oligarchs, the mafia and regional bosses. In the chaos and corruption that have followed, the Russian people have lost out and Russia itself has been humiliated. Thus populism and patriotism have provided the main themes of Mr Putin’s campaigns. And he has been remarkably successful, winning a mandate of 53 per cent of the electorate and continuing – as of now – to enjoy widespread support.

In some respects, that is a programme with much to recommend it. Freedom without order is, indeed, mere anarchy. While Russia’s society, economy and politics are heavily criminalised there is no prospect for lasting recovery. Government everywhere does need to be strong in carrying out its essential tasks, and particularly so when the obstacles are as formidable as in Russia.

But government in a free society must also be limited in size and scope; it must not intrude into those aspects of life which are by rights private; and, above all, it must uphold and abide by, not undermine or override, the law. The call for ‘strong’ measures and ‘strong’ men is often an all too well-known preliminary to some kind of dictatorship.

How does Mr Putin’s programme measure up to this? Perhaps the most obvious feature of his analysis is its realism. He does seem to understand that Russia is in dire straits and that more of the same – whether the ‘same’ is communism or mafia-controlled quasi-capitalism – is not a viable option. In his State of the Nation Address to the Russian Federal Assembly in July 2000 he spoke in sombre tones about the country’s parlous state – its demographic decline which (he said) ‘threatened the nation’s survival’, the fact that the recent spurt of economic growth was unsustainable while structures were unreformed, and that ‘a considerable segment’ of that economy was in the hands of the criminal underworld. Mr Putin set out a programme of free-market reforms in language which sounds convincing – calling for lower taxes, less government interference and more competition. And some of this programme has since been implemented. The President has surrounded himself with at least some people who genuinely understand and believe in that programme.* Above all, he appears to have grasped that reform programmes are not simply a means of extorting fresh loans from gullible Westerners. He sees policies for economic revival as vital to prevent Russia being for ever under the thumb of non-Russians. This too makes sense. National pride has to be mobilised behind tough economic measures if they are to be given time to work – as we showed in Britain in the early eighties.

I sympathise too with the Russian President’s desire to create efficient administrative and security structures. Russia is a huge country which is not easy to rule. It is probably necessary to reinforce central control in some areas in order to stamp out corruption. My Russian friends talk of the need to ‘nationalise’ the Kremlin once more after years during which it was ‘privatised’ to the benefit of various powerful interests. And it is only natural that when embarking upon such a programme one should want to rely on ‘new men’ chosen from among one’s own friends and confidants. That is how politics works – particularly in the political jungle.

But, with all that said, I can also understand the worries of those – at present, it seems, a small minority – in Russia who are genuinely worried by some of Mr Putin’s decisions – such as, to clip the wings of elected regional governors, to appoint his own associates with FSB backgrounds to key positions, and to clamp down on critical independent media. Are we seeing the restoration of authority or the beginnings of authoritarianism? The jury is still out.

What matters most to non-Russians, however, is President Putin’s approach to foreign relations. And again the signs are mixed. In some respects, Russia’s attitudes have suggested continuity with those of the old Soviet Union.

Russia has shown itself determined to counter American global pre-eminence. To this end, it has sought to use the issue of ballistic missile defence and adherence to the ABM treaty to split Europe from America – with, it should be added, a good deal of help from the French and German governments. Russia has also been trying to build a broad ‘strategic partnership’ with China against the West.

In truth, these features of Russian foreign policy have never made any long-term sense, even for Russia. Mr Putin and his advisers must know that neither Moscow nor Beijing – nor even a combination of the two – can hope to compete in great-power politics with America. He must know that he will continue to need America’s help, or at least forbearance, as he tries to restore his country’s economy. He might also reflect that Russia could have to call upon the United States to use its planned ballistic missile defence system to bring down a missile aimed by an Islamic terrorist group or a rogue state at a Russian city.

Russia’s plans to create a strategic partnership with China to combat American influence are also flawed. Some 300,000 Chinese now live in the Russian Far East (if migration continues at the current rate, that population could reach ten million in fifty years’ time). Seven and a half million Russians face three hundred million Chinese across the border. Someone will eventually develop and exploit the natural riches of Russia’s Far East: but will it be the Russians, or the Chinese? It would be more sensible to settle, once and for all, Russia’s old territorial disputes with Japan, and then welcome in Japanese capital. That is certainly a more prudent course than accepting the region’s economic dependency on China.*

There is, however, another side to Mr Putin’s policies – one which has dominated Western perceptions of Russia in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 11 September. The Russian President’s reaction to these events was at once humane and shrewd. There is no reason to believe that his expressions of sympathy and his close rapport with President Bush in America’s time of trial were anything other than sincere. But it is equally important to note that Russia has its own strong reasons for wanting the United States to adopt as its dominant goal over the next few years prosecution of the war against terrorism. Russian influence in Central Asia and the Caucasus and its hold on Chechnya will all be boosted by what has occurred. To be able to portray its opponents as Islamist extremists and terrorists is a propaganda weapon which Russia will be keen to seize.

Russia will also hope to gain other advantages. It may hope to extract larger concessions for eventually acquiescing in US missile defence plans. It will almost certainly expect more economic aid. It may demand early entry into the WTO.

Yet perhaps the thorniest issue will turn out to be Russia’s relationship with NATO. As a clear-sighted pragmatist, Mr Putin will have noted that NATO is now as near a world policeman as exists, and that no other candidate can replace it. Hitherto, in large part as a result of lingering Cold War attitudes, Russia has sought whenever possible to prevent NATO’s expansion, particularly since that expansion brings it ever closer to Russia’s own borders. But from remarks he himself has made and from other signs emanating from Moscow, it seems increasingly likely that President Putin would like to see Russia itself as a NATO member.

It is easy to see why this might at first sight appear attractive to the West as well. What better way to seal the victory of freedom in the Cold War than to welcome our old adversary within our ranks? And in view of the dangers from Islamic extremism, and perhaps in the longer term from China, might it not make sense to turn Russia away from the East, bring it into Europe, and add to NATO another major power on whose resources we could draw?

The fact that such a prospect is even imaginable demonstrates how profoundly the world has changed since the Cold War. But what is imaginable is not necessarily desirable. It is, of course, true that Russia is not our enemy. It is not engaged in an ideological struggle with us. It is not in a position to embark upon a global struggle of any kind. So there is no reason in principle why Russia should not join. In practice, though, there are several reasons.

First, although Russia is not communist, nor likely to become so, it is certainly not yet a ‘normal country’. Its internal problems are unresolved, and it is possible to imagine any one of these leading to dangerous instability, possibly involving other neighbouring states. It is easy to see how this could present the rest of NATO with irresolvable dilemmas.

Second, although Russia may over a number of years eventually become a stable, prosperous, liberal democracy, it is not going to change its identity. And that identity will always be Asian as well as European, Eastern as well as Western. These are immutable facts of geography, ethnicity, culture, religion and ultimately national interest. If NATO is to have any underlying coherence it must, in at least its core, be ‘Western’. Russia can never be simply that.

Third, NATO today is already a sprawling alliance, comprising nineteen members. But it is effective because America leads. Anything which undermines that leadership weakens NATO. That is why, for example, the idea of a European army contains so many risks.* But bringing Russia within NATO would be even more dangerous. Russia will never willingly accept American dominance. Within NATO it would be in a position to obstruct, and it would quickly seek and doubtless find European collaborators in its objectives. Acknowledgement of these objections probably explains why President Putin has talked about NATO becoming a ‘political’ (as opposed to a primarily military) organisation. But NATO is first and last an alliance. And it must remain so if it is to be effective.

Yet, whatever one thinks of Russia’s longer-term aims and ambitions, it is hard not to be impressed with the qualities which Mr Putin has shown. He is providing his country with strong, vigorous leadership after years of disorder and disarray. He is also clearly able to assess international events and to respond to them boldly, shrewdly and effectively. It is not necessary to ascribe to him a tender conscience, nor the liberal instincts of a democrat, in order to appreciate his worth as a leader with whom the West can deal.

CHAPTER 4
Asian Values
PART I: WHY ASIA MATTERS

Asia is the largest continent, comprising a third of all dry land, and containing more than half the world’s population. Its importance is growing and will, I am sure, continue to grow. And that conviction has been reinforced by every one of the thirty-three visits I have made to thirteen Asian countries since leaving office.

Westerners have a habit of getting it wrong about Asia. Its distance, size and what I can only call ‘otherness’ intrigue, mystify and sometimes frighten us. We are inclined to exaggerate. Thus in the late 1980s and early 1990s there was much fevered talk about the twenty-first century being the ‘Asian’ or the ‘Asia Pacific’ century – an era in which the focus of world events and the centre of world power would radically shift from West to East. For example, the distinguished historian Paul Kennedy wrote in 1988 that ‘the task facing American statesmen over the next decade … is a need to manage affairs so that the relative erosion of the United States’ position takes place slowly and smoothly’.* At the same time, in response to Asian economic advance, Western protectionism found new and extremely sophisticated advocates – such as the late Sir James Goldsmith.† In the United States the call to resist the inroads of Asian economic power was taken up by former presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan and others. In Europe a new impulse was given to federalism by those who envisaged a world of competing trade- and power-blocs, one or perhaps two of which would be Asian.

The subsequent crisis which affected most of the Far East’s ‘tiger’ economies and the continuing problems affecting the mighty economy of Japan put paid to some of that hyperbole and hysteria. Indeed, alongside alarm at the global economic implication of this contagious bout of Asian economic ’flu there could be detected a certain Schadenfreude: many Westerners felt that Asia’s problems vindicated their own system and outlook.

But simply because the rhetoric about an Asian century was exaggerated does not mean that Asia’s advance has been halted. Indeed, the underlying realities all confirm that Asia matters – and it matters to the West. To see that this is so we need only consider the following.

First, Asia’s population (as a whole) is growing while the West’s (as a whole) is stagnating. By the year 2050, it is projected that Asia’s population will increase to 5.2 billion out of a total global population of 8.9 billion.* Asian countries have pursued policies to try to limit population growth with varying success and with varying degrees of coercion, and will doubtless continue to do so. But in a global economy with mobile capital and technology, and given the right framework of laws and regulation, large populations mean large workforces and growing markets. Expanding Asian nations will be increasingly important for us, both as customers and as competitors.

Second, Asia contains three – and possibly four – emerging powers on whose fortunes and intentions much depends. China, a major regional power with vast economic potential and uncertain ambitions, represents an increasingly important global player in the greatest game. Japan, still the world’s second largest economy, is deciding how in the long term it intends to protect and project its strategic interests. India, like China a vast country of more than a billion people, is the world’s largest democracy and now an established nuclear power. Indonesia, for all its continuing traumas, is the world’s largest Muslim state: its direction will have a significant impact on Islam as a political force.

Third, although generalisation inevitably means oversimplification, Asian – particularly East Asian – values, habits and attitudes will have a continuing and increasing impact on us in various ways. Asian immigration to the West is the most obvious of these. But, most important, Asian cultural distinctness will be crucial in shaping the economic and political development of the Asian states with which we have to deal.

‘Asian values’ are, needless to say, a thorny subject. Westerners have over the years created images and stereotypes that caricatured and offended Asians. One Asian commentator has, for example, recently argued that ‘the most painful thing that happened to Asia was not the physical but the mental colonisation’, adding that ‘this mental colonisation has not been completely eradicated in Asia, and many Asian societies are still struggling to break free of it’.*

But the recent proponents of the notion that Asians are different – and that this explains why their economies and societies are more successful – have themselves been Asians. For example, Lee Kuan Yew, the former Prime Minister of Singapore, has stated: ‘We [Asians] have different social values. These different values have made for fast growth.’† Again, according to Dr Mahathir Mohamad, Prime Minister of Malaysia, ‘Asian values are actually universal values and Western people used to practise the same values.’‡

We ought to ignore the element of special pleading in all this. ‘Asian values’ do not provide an excuse for abuses of human rights. One would hope that the unacceptable treatment of the Burmese opposition leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, has silenced all but the most shameless proponents of Asian autocracy as a legitimate alternative. But the importance of culture as a component of economic success and as an influence on social and political institutions is a reality nonetheless.

Well-known characteristic features of Asian – particularly East Asian – societies that are important here are the strength of family ties, a sense of responsibility and the disposition to save and to act with prudence. As Francis Fukuyama has pointed out:

Many modern Asian societies have followed a completely different evolutionary path from Europe and North America. Beginning approximately in the mid-1960s, virtually every country in the industrialised West experienced a rapid increase in crime rates and a breakdown in the nuclear family. The only two countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development not experiencing this disruption were the Asian ones, Japan and Korea … similarly with the countries of South-East Asia.*

A number of Asian countries have drawn on these social characteristics to create successful economies, keeping the size and cost of government down by limiting welfare spending and excessive regulation. These policies, which minimise welfare dependency, should in turn reinforce the social and cultural values which have helped Asian economies to flourish.

I believe that this will remain particularly true of countries that have a majority or a significant minority of Chinese. Wherever they go, even when they are living under the ramshackle quasisocialism of mainland China, they show the same qualities of enterprise and self-reliance.† And given the right economic framework, nothing is beyond them. Just consider Singapore.

PART II: THE TIGERS
SINGAPORE – A MAN-MADE MIRACLE

It is often the case that large truths are best elicited through miniatures. And in the case of South-East Asia that immediately leads us to focus on the remarkable reality of tiny Singapore.

Singapore is one of the world’s smallest states, less than 250 square miles, consisting of one island and fifty-nine islets. It has naturally poor soil, lacks significant mineral resources, and it even has to bring in its water. Yet today it is one of the most commercially vibrant places on earth. It is the world’s busiest port. Although it has to import all its raw materials, it is a major manufacturing centre – chemicals, pharmaceuticals, electronics, clothing, plastics, refined petroleum and petroleum products. Between 1966 and 1990 its economy grew by an average of 8.5 per cent. In short, Singapore is the hub of South-East Asia, itself one of the world’s most dynamic economic regions. And Singapore’s population of four million now enjoys an income per head higher than that of the United Kingdom, Germany or France.

Singapore, as we see it today, can be said to have had two founders. The first was the British colonial administrator Sir Thomas Raffles, who established the city in 1819 as a trading centre, uniquely placed at the passage between the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean. The British East India Company subsequently developed and exploited the port. Under British rule, the present population of immigrants of Chinese, Malay and Indian extraction grew up, with the Chinese in an increasing majority. The British did not exactly enhance their reputation in Singapore during the Second World War. But by the time we left, we had provided the inhabitants with the precious legacy of a rule of law, honest administration and a spirit of ethnic tolerance.

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