I practised law in Central and Eastern Europe. My old firm had offices in both Moscow and Kyiv. I lived in Warsaw (11 years) and Moscow (7 years). The region is where most of my friends are, including both Russians and Ukrainians.

I am pleased to see some of the former putting dove of peace emblems on their social media profiles. It says much about Russia that I worry it may have adverse consequences for them. One of my Ukrainian friends was interviewed on BBC radio recently. It was chilling to hear his usual calm, reasonable tone as he talked of joining a citizens militia and preparing to resist invasion. He and I were law partners. I fear for his safety and that of his family. He was born to a Ukrainian family in Canada and had the option to leave. I respect and admire his decision to stay and fight. I hope, in his position, I would have his courage. As his friend, I wish he was in Canada.

I hoped against hope that Putin was sabre-rattling. Part of the secret of his success has always been that, one way or another, he keeps Russia in the western news, which soothes his electorate. Why? Because it was a shock to their collective psyche to descend from being one of two super-powers to just a regular nation with an economy the size of Belgium's. Britain struggled psychologically in descending from being the greatest empire in history to just another G7 nation, but we had decades to adjust. We had time to build such institutions as the Commonwealth to soothe the jangled psyches of citizens used to red world maps in their classrooms. Russia had only days.

I am not excusing Putin's aggression by saying the West has made terrible mistakes in handling the demise of the USSR. They flowed not from malice but from a naive, innocent and as it turns out optimistic belief that Russia would rapidly become just like us. Fukuyama's book The End of History and the Last Man (published as I moved to Warsaw) pretty much summed up our leaders' attitude in that respect. The West simply did not feel the need to take the Russian elite's paranoid views on NATO seriously. It saw Russia just as a new, economically-insignificant, member of the Free World. 

NATO was an anti-Soviet defensive alliance. Its weaponry was trained on Russia and the Warsaw Pact. When the USSR ended, it should probably have been disbanded precisely because Russia's military and intelligence communities (who, unlike in other Warsaw Pact countries, were not purged after the fall of the USSR) had grown up thinking of it as "the enemy." They felt threatened by it. That feeling was unjustified. NATO was a defensive alliance with a "no first strike" doctrine. It poses no threat to Russia now and, in fact, never did. The feeling is real though. More accomplished diplomats than ours would have understood its significance.

If post-Soviet Russia's economy had been bigger, it might have been listened to. Ignoring the fears of its generals and spies because it was now a country that didn't matter very much seems in retrospect to have been an error. It won't help a paranoiac to laugh and say he doesn't matter enough for anyone to be out to get him.

This became a worse (but still unrecognised) problem when Putin and his chekisti (ex-KGB men) came to power. The military, intelligence and political communities were in practice just different arms of the Communist Party in Soviet times. Real democratic politics was in its infancy when Putin came to power. Once he was in the Kremlin, Russia's political elite was once more completely aligned with the attitudes of old KGB guys like him.

I suppose we in the West thought we could just rewrite NATO doctrine and retarget its weaponry to handle other threats. NATO worked, so why not repurpose it? The other Warsaw Pact countries, after all, cheerfully applied to join. I was in Poland when that happened and can assure you my friends there still saw it (having had the same education as their Russian contemporaries) as an anti-Russian alliance. That's exactly why (knowing Mother Russia rather better than we did) they wanted to join! I mentioned to a person I met from the Foreign Office at the time that I thought it was a mistake because Polish attitudes were (a) entirely contrary to NATO doctrine and (b) likely to fuel Russian paranoia. She said (I quote from memory, but I am confident it's pretty accurate);

The Foreign Secretary privately agrees with you but the Cabinet doesn't. Anyway the Americans wouldn't hear of excluding Poland.

So while we in the West sincerely saw NATO expansion as harmless (and would probably have accepted Russia as a member, with some conditions) the Russians didn't. Neither did some of their former allies who were joining it – and the Russians knew that. We are not responsible for their paranoia, but we did feed it. 

That said, Putin is lying comprehensively in his depiction of NATO. There's a useful (and very mild) web page of refutations from NATO itself, which is well worth a read. He is just spinning a yarn to justify doing what he wants to do. He's pretty clearly expressed his view that the Ukraine has no right to exist as an independent nation. My hopes have failed. He's about to fix that "error" and, in so doing, write himself into Russian history as (he thinks) a hero. 

The Putin of my days in Moscow was cleverer than this. He knew that rattling his sabre was enough. I fear that his isolated life for so long among people too scared of him to tell him he's wrong has caused him to lose his mind. I don't fear for the West, which could defeat his armies as readily as we could defeat those of Belgium, I do fear for my friends in the region.

I explained to a Ukrainian lady I met yesterday that – while I could understand if she had no time for that at the moment – I feel sorry for the Russian people. They are a wonderful, cultured people who have almost always been badly led because of endemic corruption. The end of the USSR didn't end that, as anyone who'd read Gogol could have predicted. Russia didn't stop being a problem to the West when the USSR fell. It may prove to become a worse problem now because the old Communist leaders always responded rationally to circumstances. I fear this madman won't. 

The West's leaders must perform better now than they have so far because how they respond could expose the world to much more than the loss of Ukraine's independence.

It was formed as a Three Musketeers style mutual defence alliance. An attack on one was to be treated as an attack on all. The anticipated attack was from the Soviet Union. NATO, with its US led military command based in Brussels, was the key international infrastructure on the Western side of the Cold War — mirrored orcishly by the Warsaw Pact. 

The Warsaw Pact is gone. So is the Soviet Union. The Cold War, pace the traitors of our academia — is won. The Berlin Wall fell and the question Sir Keith Joseph asked my student union long ago has been answered;

if the Berlin Wall were to be taken down, which way would the human tide flow?

The world changed — unexpectedly and very much for the better — and my delightful career helping clients to rebuild post-socialist Eastern Europe was made possible. To what would have been the amazement of my young self, most of my friends are citizens of Warsaw Pact countries. 

So why does NATO still exist?

The dismal science teaches us to distinguish between peoples’ stated preferences (often virtue-signalling lies) and their revealed preferences (how they spend their money). All NATO members say they believe in the alliance. Only four — the USA, the UK, Poland and Greece — meet their obligation to contribute more than 2% of their GDP. If you’re wondering, Greece has only accidentally met that target because of the catastrophic fall in its GDP. 

Opinion polls and my own experience of the bitter, sneering anti-Americanism of my otherwise delightful continental chums suggest that as usual the revealed preference is the truth. The Germans and French would not go to war in defence of America or Britain if we were attacked. Britain was attacked, when the Falklands were invaded, and our “allies” and “friends” sold arms to our enemies and gave them all kinds of moral support. Remember the Welsh Guards (my grandfather’s old regiment) massacred by Exocets fired from Mirages? The USA has often gone to war since the alliance was formed and mostly only British warriors fought, died or were injured alongside theirs.

Germany, France and their freeloading friends have quite simply been taking the piss from the outset. They take the Americans (and us Inselaffen and rosbifs) for mugs. They plot to form an EU Army and regret that Brexit means they won’t be able to continue to rely on English-speakers as their cannon-fodder.   

The continued existence of NATO has fuelled the epic paranoia of Russia’s military/intelligence apparatus. Desperate not to be decommissioned the generals and chekists have claimed that “the West” they grew up opposing is intrinsically hostile — rather than, in truth, insultingly indifferent — to Mother Russia. Their only “proof“ of this nonsense was NATO  

During my 7 years living and working in Moscow I heard well-educated, cultured, principled Russians ask again and again what the hell we were up to in keeping it. I answered airily that all bureaucracies were self-serving and that NATO’s staff (like the chekists) naturally preferred repurposing to redundancy. I was probably right but morally not nearly right enough. Our useless political class had a duty to look past such rent-seeking and — for once — to do the right thing.

They are Dr Frankenstein to Putin’s monster.

NATO is yet another of many examples of the truism that, once a bureaucracy acquires a competence, it will never disband. It continues because it can. The political and economic ills that drove the creation of what is now called the EU have long since faded into history. But the plump parasites of its apparatus have repeatedly repurposed it. Britain is a paradise of social, ethnic and sexual equality compared to the days when the precursors of the Equalities Commission were formed but its staff will find imaginary evils by the thousand before they’ll return to productive labour. Marx would gasp at the generosity of Britain’s welfare state and marvel at the lifestyle of even the poorest Brit and yet trivial micro aggressions are enough to sustain the revolutionary fervour of Marxist academics desperate to live as idly and unproductively as the man himself. 

NATO and these other examples remind me of the pre-reformation medieval church. Their stated objectives sound Godly and noble but their true purpose is to keep a bloated priesthood in luxury. Am I wrong? As always, please put me right, gentles all. 

How to deal with atrocities? « Samizdata.

Anthony Peto QC: A very un-British Bill – my response to Robert Buckland MP.

Conservatives are supposed to defend ancient rights. In their hands the great principles of English Law such as "innocent until proven guilty" and the rules of Natural Justice should be much safer than with progressives who openly seek to sweep away ancient rights to build a new order.

...was successfully suppressed by the government on the grounds that it would damage national security...

Mr Clarke’s comments look like a smokescreen for plans which are aimed not at keeping the British people safe, but at sparing the embarrassment of the security services when they get mixed up in wrongdoing. Instead of promoting this thoroughly un-British legislation, which is designed to make our courts secret as though we were living in Europe in the 1930s, Mr Clarke and his colleagues in government should concentrate on holding the security agencies to account when they break the law.

The justice and security bill has one principal aim and that is to cover up UK complicity in rendition and torture. The bill is an affront to the open justice on which this country rightly prides itself and, above all, it is an affront to human dignity.

 
The fact that some of those individuals who are complicit in rendition and torture can not only assist in the drafting of the bill but also vote to cover their tracks is a constitutional scandal.

These rights are so fundamental that for centuries they have been called the rules of “natural justice”.  This brand of justice has “Made in England” stamped all over it. It is our proudest and most enduring national product. This Bill would tarnish the brand for ever.

Argentina launches naval campaign to isolate Falkland Islands - Telegraph.

The three state services libertarians all support are defence of the realm, policing and provision of an independent judiciary. That's one of the things that differentiates us from anarchists. The irony is that modern governments have focussed so hard on redistributive policies designed to buy votes from the masses by providing non-jobs in non-services with stolen money, that they have become really bad at the basics.

How long do you give it before the Falkland Islands are lost? Even if the boy David was half the man that Margaret Thatcher was; even if President Obama was half the friend that Ronald Reagan was, we simply don't have the military assets to defend them. Perhaps that's why we are deploying the sainted Diana's look-alike boy? Surely no-one is so cruel as to attack the son of the Princess of Hearts?

It's a plan, though not one Nelson would have applauded. Some fully-equipped aircraft carriers might be a more reliable one. But, while we fund a bigger civil service than we had to run half the planet, we don't have the money for that, do we?

h/t The Englishman