07/09/2014
In the
first of
two sections for his online column, Booker is up and running with a controversial article about Ukraine.
It is always revealing when politicians tell us that something is "unacceptable", Booker writes. What they mean is that, although people might expect them to do something about it, they haven't got a clue what it is they can do. That was why, as the Western leaders gathered for that NATO summit in Wales, several, including David Cameron, told us that President Putin's intervention in Ukraine was "unacceptable".
The real problem here is not just that our leaders don't know what they can do about Mr Putin and that horrible civil war in Ukraine, which has already killed nearly 3,000 people and which the Russians seem to be winning hands down. It is that they and many others in the West have been misreading this crisis ever since it began at the start of the year.
It cannot be said often enough that what triggered the crisis was not Mr Putin's desire to restore the boundaries of the Soviet Union, but the ludicrously misguided ambition of the West to see Ukraine absorbed into the EU and NATO.
There was never any way that either Mr Putin or all those Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine and Crimea were going to take kindly to seeing the country which was the cradle of Russian identity become part of a Western power bloc. Russia would be even less happy to see the only warm-water ports for its navy taken over by a military alliance that had been set up to counter Russia in the first place.
When 96 percent of Crimeans democratically voted in March to join Russia, this was not, as Western politicians now tell us, because Mr Putin wanted to "annexe" their country. It was because the 82 percent of them who speak Russian as their main language wanted to rejoin a country Crimea had been part of for two centuries.
Yet, at the very same time, the democratically elected government of Ukraine was being toppled by mobs of demonstrators in the streets of Kiev, many of whom were being paid from Brussels funds to shout "Europe, Europe" at Baroness Ashton, as she urged them to sign that âassociation agreementâ which was the last step but one to Ukraine becoming a full member state of the EU.
That is why the EU, with America's backing, has been led by its own vainglorious delusions into the mess we see today. The NATO leaders know there is little they can usefully do about it. For months they have been talking about those "sanctions", while being only too uncomfortably aware that the EU depends on Russia for 30 percent of the gas it needs to keep its cookers working and its lights on.
Even when President Hollande of France was urging David Cameron all those months ago to slam the doors of the City of London on the Russian bankers and oligarchs who have £27 billion invested in the UK, we knew that Britain had £46 billion invested in Russia.
So our leaders sat round the table in that ghastly concrete hotel in Wales, prattling about ever more sanctions. They send their little "battle groups" to march round in circles in Poland. They huff and they puff about what is "unacceptable". But they know they dare not risk trying to blow the house down.
Meanwhile, Mr Putin and the Russians of Ukraine's industrial heartland do exactly what could have been predicted, as they fight to establish a semi-autonomous "buffer state" between Russia and the West.
Our leaders, concludes Booker, have been caught out by a crisis that anyone of intelligence should have seen coming, from the moment they so recklessly and unnecessarily set it on its way.
