Why is the UK so invested in the Russia-Ukraine war?

Donald Trump's victory in the US presidential election in November 2024 has destroyed the liberal scenario on the war in Ukraine. This scenario was to provide unconditional moral and material support for a Ukrainian victory, defined at a minimum as the recovery of the invaded territories of Crimea and Donbass. In Britain it was almost considered treason to suggest otherwise.

Even before Trump's election, the script had subtly changed: do what was necessary to put Ukraine in the best possible negotiating position in peace talks with Russia. This change recognized that unless the level of Western support was massively increased, Ukraine would face imminent military defeat. Faced with military setbacks and without expecting additional military aid from the Biden administration, President Volodymyr Zelensky has also abandoned his maximalist stance and is now pinning his hopes on diplomatic pressure to encourage Russia to negotiate.

Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine began on February 22, 2022, I have been one of the few supporters of a negotiated peace in the UK. On March 3, 2022, I co-signed a letter to Financial Times with former British Foreign Secretary David Owen urging NATO to present detailed proposals for a new security pact with Russia. On May 19, 2022, I called in the same newspaper for the resumption of the Ankara peace process. I did not know then that bilateral peace talks between Russia and Ukraine, organized by the Turkish government, had been aborted by the visit of the then British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, to kyiv on April 6, promising gave Ukraine all the help it needed to continue the fight. . I made several other appeals for peace, sometimes in polite company, over the next two and a half years, with increasing emphasis on the danger of escalation if peace was not quickly secured. But the only frontline British politician who agreed with this line was Nigel Farage, the leader of the Reform Party. From the non-NATO world came the peace initiatives of China and Brazil.

The second coming of Trump will result in a shift from a passive war policy to an active peace policy. This is sure to result in a ceasefire, perhaps by spring. The fact that the terms of peace remain vague is less important than the fact that the massacres stop. Once stopped, it will not be easily restarted. The question is why it took so many hundreds of thousands of lives, deaths and injuries on both sides to reach this moment. And what lessons can we learn from it?

The most obvious lesson is the importance of diplomacy. All nations have their own story to tell. The shock of their stories can provoke or fuel wars. The traditional task of diplomacy is to reconcile conflicting histories so that like can live peacefully with different. The war in Ukraine is the result of the catastrophic failure of diplomacy, in fact the disappearance of the world's diplomatic class, leaving the leaders of the belligerent countries free to pursue their ambitions without knowing precisely the reactions of others. As the 2022 invasion approaches, Putin's statements have sounded too much like saber rattling; the United States and its NATO allies have made little effort to try to resolve the security issue that was at the heart of the conflict with Russia. After Russia seized Crimea in 2014, trust completely collapsed. Chancellor Angela Merkel reportedly told Vladimir Putin: Can you guarantee that you will not attempt to change the borders further? To which the Russian president would have responded: Can you guarantee that NATO will not expand further?

It is generally accepted in the West that Putin said that fear of NATO's eastward expansion was just a pretext for Russia to try to regain land it had lost with the collapse of the Soviet Union. It's too simple. For centuries, Russia saw these lost lands – the Baltic states, Ukraine, Belarus and Georgia – as part of its empires to protect against foreign invaders. The Putin story is not just propaganda. Its roots lie in the mixture of 19th-century Russian nationalism and the geographic vulnerability of the Tsarist empire.

Most of us in the West simply cannot recognize the encircling clutches of the Borodins in NATO. Prince Igoror the insidious enemy of Prokofiev's opera War and Peace. NATO, we insist, is a purely defensive organization; countries are uniting to defend against Russia, not to attack it. This, however, is not the general view of NATO in the world outside the alliance, where its expansion is widely, although not universally, seen as an extension of Western imperialism. The Russian Federation's hostility to NATO's eastward expansion has been the most consistent thread of its foreign policy in the quarter century since the collapse of NATO. Soviet Union. How could we in the West, with the notable exception of diplomats like George Kennan and Henry Kissinger, not understand that when Russia regained its strength, this was a wrong that it would seek to right?

Here we have two opposing stories, each with some claim to truth, and no diplomatic mechanism to reconcile them.

Britain has been Biden's cheerleader in stoking the war between Russia and Ukraine. We must look to history to understand why. Modern Britain has never been truly isolationist because, until the early 20th century, it had a global empire that needed to be defended. Describing the principles of British foreign policy in 1852, Foreign Secretary Lord Granville wrote that it is the duty and interest of this country, possessing possessions scattered throughout the world and proud of its advanced state of civilization , to encourage moral, intellectual and physical progress among all other nations. This image of Britain as both policeman and mentor of the world engendered conflict between the muscular and pacifist wings of British liberalism, with non-interventionists like John Bright and Richard Cobden arguing that it was free trade which would civilize the world and the interventionists saying that free trade was only possible in a world civilized by British power and values. What is striking today is the collapse of this pacifist tradition.

So when Tony Blair, British Prime Minister, declared in Chicago in 1999 that spreading our values ​​makes us safer, he was proclaiming a continuing mission of British foreign policy. Claiming the higher moral foundation of democracy and human rights would justify attempts to spread Western values ​​to regions that remain mired in dictatorship and autocracy. Britain's most successful export was arguably its moral evangelism to the United States, as America emerged from its isolationism.

However, this historical story does not exhaust the causes of Great Britain's exceptional belligerence.

To this must be added the shame of the British establishment at the Munich Agreement of 1938, by which Britain ceded the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia to Hitler and thus contributed to the outbreak of the Second World War. The strength of the British reflex in Munich can hardly be overestimated. So when Egyptian leader Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956, Prime Minister Anthony Eden and Labor leader Hugh Gaitskell were quick to compare him to Hitler. And Conservative MP Sir Robert Boothby provided the rationale for a military response, reasoning which also underpins the current British response to Putin: if we would allow him [Nasser] to get away with it would be a damaging blow to the entire concept of international law. Where does the devil stop?

Putin's comparison with Hitler stems from a radical generalization that sees democracy as the peaceful form of the state and autocracy as its warlike form. To this must be contrasted the particularly realistic summary of the historian AJP Taylor: Bismarck fought the necessary wars and killed thousands of people; 20th century idealists fought just wars and killed millions. It's the idealists who are most likely to want to win at all costs, the autocrats who want to stop wars before their thrones collapse.

At some point, genuine Western admiration for Ukraine's struggle for independence turned into a proxy war against Russia, with only tacit reverence for Ukraine's best interests. The Western promise of unconditional support for a Ukrainian victory undoubtedly prolonged the war blinding Ukrainians to the realistic prospect of a limited victory that would nevertheless guarantee real independence. Unforgivable is the British and American promise to give Ukraine everything needed for victory, when they had no intention of doing so, Ukraine was sold a puppy by Boris Johnson in 2022 and has been bleeding ever since.

Which brings us back to Trump. Both those who applaud and those who attack his approach to international relations characterize it as transactional. Proponents argue that this will allow Trump to make deals with dictators in the interests of the Americas; opponents rightly deplore its lack of moral dimension. What both camps forget is that peace itself is a moral goal in Christian teaching, it is the highest good. Pope Francis has frequently called for negotiations to end the war in Ukraine, most recently in his Christmas message. It is the refusal of our hawks and their passive supporters to recognize the overarching demands for peace that constitutes the greatest danger facing the world today; Trump offers the most promising escape from an increasingly dangerous future.