Worse Than Hate.

Fear is the mind-killer.

I’ve been wondering whether there’s anything useful to say at the moment about the wider aspects of the Ukraine crisis. Iran has naturally taken the spotlight away from Ukraine for the moment, although there’s a broad consensus about the situation on the ground there: the Russians grinding their way through on the battlefield, and mounting heavier and heavier attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure. Meanwhile, European nations and the EU continue to act (and in some cases seem to believe) as though a Ukrainian victory remains a possibility. It’s that last point I want to focus on today, because I believe there is more to be said about the origins of European behaviour, and consequently why Europe is desperately trying to keep the wolf from the door, and how it will try to deal with the consequences of defeat. As long as Ukraine is still there, those problems can be avoided. I’ll also touch very briefly on some of the problems that Russia is going to have to confront after the end of the fighting. History can, as often, provide us with some guidance, if we ask it some intelligent questions.

Historians themselves will argue about what the Europeans thought they were doing both before and after February 2022; who thought what, who wrote what, who suggested what. That’s what historians are for. The conclusions will be messy, because Ukraine (and for that matter Russia) was only one among many priorities for western governments: for some, it was not a priority at all. But given the chaos that has obtained since 2022, the vast sums of money committed, the continued strength of the political system in Russia and the damage done to western economies, as well as a host of other, quite unrelated, contemporary problems facing western governments, the continued obsession of their leaders with Ukraine, and with bringing down the Russian government, seems inexplicable. And it is indeed inexplicable if we rely purely on traditional international relations and political science clichés about how governments make and implement policies. Which suggests that we need to look elsewhere. And unfortunately, better and more serious explanations suggest that European governments are behaving in increasingly irrational ways, and are likely to become even more irrational, which I find worrying: I don’t know about you.

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As I mentioned last week, a lot of thinking about and analysis of the international system is governed by prevailing orthodoxies of Realism/Neorealism on the one hand, and crude materialist explanations of international politics on the other. This is unfortunate, because both are ideological constructs that don’t explain the way in which nations actually behave very well. Unsurprisingly, the attempt to impose such rigid frameworks on complex and messy situations has consistently led the West to disappointment and defeat over the last generation or so. Now as I said last week, competition between states has always existed, and there have been occasions when it has resulted in proxy conflicts, or even outright war. But that is not the norm. To assume that all states rationally pursue power and influence all the time at each other’s expense leads to hopelessly and even dangerously mistaken conclusions: for example that Russia is trying to re-establish the old Soviet Union, because of course they would. Likewise, economic factors are frequently one of the causes of conflicts, but usually only one. It certainly wasn’t western armaments manufacturers who provoked war with Germany in 1939, any more than today’s armaments manufacturers have actually benefited much from Ukraine, in spite of budgets that Croesus might have envied theoretically allocated for rearmament if factories are ever built and raw materials and skilled workers can somehow be found. It turns out, in fact, that the nineteenth century Liberal opponents of Empires were right: what matters is good trading relations, not physical control of territory, which is never easy, always expensive, and always prone to disruption. After all, the main priority of the US at the moment is not to control anything, but just to get back to the previous situation where oil was flowing freely through the Straits of Hormuz.

There’s also a common tendency to confuse means with ends. International politics is not some abstract chess game where you try to wipe your opponent off the board to win. Attempted extension of power and influence, where it happens, usually serves an ulterior purpose. Countries with long frontiers, or countries that feel vulnerable, or countries with restless minorities, often try to extend their influence outside their frontiers to protect what they see as their security interests. Other countries (Nigeria is a good example) try to impose themselves as the regional superpower and reap political and economic benefits from doing so. Likewise, freedom of navigation is not an end in itself: it is the reason the international economy works at all, and national economies prosper, as we are now starting to understand again, once more because of Hormuz.

If we accept that today’s standard explanations of international behaviour are of very little value, and that they don’t help to explain the errors of western behaviour over Ukraine (which I think is unarguably the case) then what are we left with? In essence, the messy and sometimes irrational complex of mistakes, wishes, hopes, confusions, fantasies and fears that characterise a surprisingly large part of international relations. Yet even so, the behaviour of European leaders especially seems to have parted contact with reality some time ago: they must surely be under the grip of some quite special and powerful emotions. They are, but first let me sketch in the some of the generic psychological background to group behaviour in such crises, and a few of the reasons why international politics can sometimes resemble a group of Titanic passengers staring with mild interest and smug disbelief at an approaching iceberg.

The most important source of such apparently inexplicable behaviour is a variant of the sunk cost concept in economics. In this case, so enormous is the investment in Ukraine, so extensive the disinformation and fantasy, so strident the proclamations of imminent Russian defeat, that the task of somehow turning round and going back seems impossibly difficult. And even if you decided to do so, what could you possibly say? How could you explain where the money went? How would you deal with an angry and powerful Russia? How would you deal with a public and a media that had been revved up to hysterical levels? How could you ever admit that you had got it so wrong about everything for so long? In the end, it’s actually easier to continue marching blindly forward. After all, the worst hasn't actually happened yet, things may change, and you could be out of power or in a different job next year, and it will be somebody else’s problem.

Moreover, one person, one tendency, even one nation, cannot do very much to stop the process, even if for some Quixotic reason they decided to. The result would be savage internal and external arguments, quite probably the end of NATO and even a threat to the cohesion of the EU. No current western politician would lightly envisage that. And even then, the situation is so complex and interdependent that it’s like a hopeless knot, which the more you try to unravel, the tighter it becomes. So once again, the solution is to go with the flow, hope for a miracle (or at least the best) and avoid causing unnecessary trouble.

These are generic problems faced by any group of states that cannot get itself out of a position it should never have been in. But there are others which are more directly relevant to this case, (though they are not unique to it). The one I want to focus on, and which like most really important factors in international relations is seldom studied, is the influence of fear on the behaviour of states. Now in politics in general today, fear is a motivation that gets little sympathetic coverage. Fear is something we should be ashamed of, and we should try to overcome: it is typically “whipped up” by “extremists,” and of course is by definition irrational. Moreover, fear is not an emotion that is really communicable to others. I may be able to understand intellectually that you, your group or your nation are afraid that something bad will happen, or somebody will do something bad to you, but I cannot share that fear myself. So the habit is to downplay the fears of others, to regard them as signs of weakness, and then dismiss them as the inability to overcome the past or learn to live together with other people.

As a result, the discourse of Hate has been substituted for all considerations of fear, because it is much more aesthetically and politically satisfying. Hate, after all, does not have to be based on anything. It can be “stirred up” by “extremists,” from nothing, or from “instrumentalised” facts or just invention, and if those extremists can be silenced then crises and conflicts, artificial as they must necessarily be, can be resolved by more cultural exchanges and singing of Kumbaya. The problem is that this never works in practice. The dynamics of most real crises have little to do with the “hate” that our rational, managerial concept of politics sees everywhere. This concept understands political behaviour as like (idealised) economic behaviour: the rational search for power and influence, with a rational solution for every crisis. It’s only when “entrepreneurs of violence,” who stir up “ancient hatreds” arrive, that things go wrong; and obviously these dangerous figures, like people who break legal contracts in an economic system, have to be found and removed, so that political life can go on.

We look in vain, of course, for any major world crisis genuinely precipitated by hatred. Rather, it is fear that is probably the most dangerous of all emotions and the most likely to actually create an actual crisis. If we dig through the accreted layers of moralising commentary on the conflicts in such places as Bosnia and Rwanda, we find in the end that motivations for violence come down to essentially (1) We are afraid that they will do to us again what they did last time, or (2) We are afraid that they will want revenge for what we did to them last time. (“They” of course are often defined very vaguely.) In either case, the conclusion is the same: do it to them before they can do it to us. That is the only reliable way of ensuring Never Again. This is why fear often leads to extreme violence. It is also why countries and groups that see themselves as vulnerable and feel afraid are much more dangerous than countries that feel secure and powerful, although international relations theory has never really been able to understand this.

To understand this ourselves, we must do something radical, and pay attention to the actual words and behaviour of individuals, groups and states, rather than ignoring what they say and do, and attributing to them motivations we would be pleased if they had. Countries and groups do not in fact say to others “yes we recognise that we are a threat to you, and it’s quite reasonable that you should be afraid of us,” and few if any countries would actually accept, even privately, that they are a source of fear to others. True, there’s a small population of psychopaths in different countries making blood-curdling threats, but if you dig a little, you find that such people (in contemporary Israel for example) are generally driven by a variant of the exact same us-or-them fears that I described above.

The difficulty of course is the one I’ve mentioned; that it’s very hard to take other peoples’ fears seriously, and so, rather than trying to engage with these fears, we try to bury them, or just forbid people to express them, even when they involve personal unease and inherited memories. There are parts of Northern France, for example, where families have memories going back generations of illegal immigrants from Germany three times between 1870 and 1940, and the trail of destruction and atrocity they left in their wake. Now this isn’t all dreamt up by right-wing nationalists. It’s the grandmother’s memory of fleeing the advancing German troops in 1940 with her children clutched against her and the Stukas screaming overhead. Its her mother’s and grandmother’s memory of the exactions of the Germans against supposed “terrorists” in previous invasions. It’s the memorials everywhere to those executed by the Nazis or sent off to concentration camps. What people want, so far as I can tell, is not revenge, but neither is it compulsory happy-clappy let’s be friends and don’t mention the wars. They simply want it accepted that news of proposed German rearmament, for example, has an awkward resonance in certain parts of Europe that it lacks in others. Likewise, most Lebanese have rational fears about the threat from other communities, based on what actually happened in the past. People do not enjoy being patronised and told that this is “hatred” and a moral failing on their part.

When we move from the level of groups and communities to the level of countries, we find that fear has little to do with size, strength or even geographic situation. Nor by “fear” do I necessarily mean crude physical symptoms and a racing heartbeat. I mean that most if not all countries have worries, sometimes extreme worries, about what might happen to them, and what others may try to do to them. Moreover, fear is often fear of your own weakness, rather than of the strength of another country. This weakness may be military, but it may also be social and economic, and even quite a large state may be afraid that groups inside or outside the country can exploit this weakness for their own ends. And there is always the natural fear of the totally unexpected, the unforeseeable, the completely unpredictable: I was struck by the sense of fear and vulnerability expressed by US officials about the possibility of a missile attack from Iran or North Korea, even in the days before those nations had acquired missiles with sufficient range. (By contrast, the fear that Al Qaida might try to pull off another mass-casualty attack after 2001 was actually quite rational: it was known that they wanted to, but were unable to mount it. ) People are afraid of all sorts of things.

If, then, we accept that countries are often “irrationally” afraid that something bad will happen, afraid about the intentions of a neighbour or traditional enemy, about their own potential weaknesses and divisions, about the consequences of failing to act on time, about those they have wronged seeking revenge, about hidden conspiracies and future dangers, then we begin to understand much more about how the world functions in practice. In particular, we understand that countries very frequently act not out of rational self-interested attempts to better their situation, but out of frightened attempts to stop it getting worse. I’ve often said that if I ever write another history book, it will be called something like The Alternative Was Worse, discussing case-studies where nations chose the apparently least bad course of action, out of fear that any other would be even worse. For example, fear of wider negative political consequences and damage to their international political standing explains a lot about US reluctance to withdraw from Vietnam, and Soviet reluctance to leave Afghanistan.

Algeria is an interesting case study, because it is both very well documented and little known in the Anglo-Saxon world. At all stages, French policy in Algeria was driven primarily by fear, especially fear of the domestic consequences of withdrawal. Algeria, of course, had been part of France for longer than California had been part of the US. A million Europeans lived there, and it had been the power-base of De Gaulle’s Free French from 1942-44, enabling him among other things to frustrate US plans to install a military government in Paris and disarm the Resistance by force. Most importantly, and especially after the humiliation of Indo-China, the idea of having another part of France amputated twenty years after the defeat of 1940 was just unthinkable, across the political spectrum. The country, it was feared, simply would not survive another shock of that kind. And indeed, France came much closer than is often realised to civil war between 1958-62. De Gaulle was installed as a result of an effective military coup, because the Army thought he would guarantee Algérie française. When he realised this was impossible, and moved towards independence, they tried to kill him, and staged an abortive coup in 1961. Successive French governments had been less afraid of the cost, the casualties, the unpopularity, the controversy, the international criticism of the war, than of the potentially catastrophic political consequences of trying to stop it. They were probably right: it took someone with De Gaulle’s planet-sized arrogance and self-assurance to pull it off, and then only just.

In retrospect, it’s surprising how often decisions that were seen at the time as the product of strength and aggressivity are now understood to be based on much more complex motivations, often involving fear and vulnerability. I suppose the ultimate example would be Nazi Germany, where the received interpretation is of a ruthlessly determined leadership pursuing a carefully-thought-out policy for world domination from which they could have been deterred in the 1930s by something something. This requires popular historians and pundits to ignore or belittle everything the Nazis actually said about their objectives, about which they were extremely frank, especially in private, and attribute to them ideas that today we find it more comforting to think they might have had. The fact is that the Nazi world-view, if you can call it that, was one of nightmarish crudity. As modern science had shown, they thought, the world was divided into races, engaged in an endless, brutal competition for survival, in which the weakest would be exterminated. The Aryans, the summit of humanity and indeed the only “real” human beings, were surrounded by untold numbers of lesser races blindly bent on their destruction. War, total, exterminating, war without end, was the norm, and the only means by which the Aryans could survive. It was the ultimate example of the principle of doing it to them before could do it to you. It’s sobering to think that intelligent human beings could not just think this way (though to be fair milder versions of such views were found among many educated westerners at the time) but also put the ideas into practice. The idea that two million Polish Jews could be slaughtered in 1942 because there wasn’t enough food to go round in Europe, and that this literally didn’t matter, is more disturbing than any word-salad about “hatred.” Nazi Germany shows what happens when a movement, and finally a country, is marinated in fear, and loses its marbles completely.

Anyway, if you will accept, at least as a working hypothesis, that much of international politics is driven by fears great and small, then let us move to the Cold War, since much of the present chaos has its origins there, in the inherited attitudes of the Russians and the West. I sometimes think that we were lucky to survive the Cold War at all, so distant was the perception of each side from the reality of the other, and so consistently did each side completely misunderstand the other’s fears. This wasn’t entirely a secret at the time of course, but the difficulty, as with the Nazis and in many other cases, was the inability of each side to understand that the other was expressing genuine concerns in what it said, and not just propaganda. (I recall once looking through some East German Politburo papers from the 1980s, made available after Unification: it was like reading a bad science fiction novel set in an alternate universe.) Over the whole of the Cold War era hung the ghosts of the events of the 1930s and the War itself, and the obsessive desire of each side not to repeat the errors that were believed to have led to it. In effect, each side was symbolically refighting the 1930s, using the other as a surrogate Germany. For the Soviets, the lesson was that you could never have too many forces, too well equipped and too ready to move, so that the enemy would be deterred. For the West, it was that you needed a peacetime military structure ready and waiting to fight, so that the enemy would be deterred. To believe that the other side actually meant what they said, with the usual allowances for political exaggeration and grandstanding, was something that the two leaderships were incapable of. An important reason for this was that the generation that fought the war, and (as they saw it) had failed to prevent the most disastrous conflict in history, were determined to avoid anything that looked even faintly like a repetition, even if it meant badly distorting contemporary reality.

A sobering example of these fears, because it is well documented and it involves both personal and national fears, is the strange case of Operation RYAN. This was a KGB operation launched to discover the nature and timing of an anticipated US surprise nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. Now notice that RYAN (from a Russian acronym for “Nuclear Missile Attack”) was not intended to discover whether such an attack was being prepared, it took the assumed attack for granted, and KGB stations in the West were sent lists of Indicators to keep under review, to better anticipate the timing. RYAN therefore broke one of the cardinal rules of intelligence gathering, by indulging in Conformation Bias. And whilst the stations busily submitted their reports on largely meaningless indicators, obviously nothing was ever found because there was nothing to find.

Even in principle, the idea didn’t make sense. In the days of nuclear weapons carried on manned bombers, the concept of a paralysing surprise nuclear attack wiping out government and command structures and much of the enemy’s nuclear forces was just about conceivable, and no doubt there were nutcases on both sides who took it seriously. But with the development of ground-launched, and then submarine-launched missiles, and the dispersal and hardening of command systems, the idea retreated into fantasy land, and was no longer taken seriously except for a few ideological hawks on both sides.

One of those was Yuri Andropov, Head of the KGB in 1981. Andropov was pessimistic about the Soviet Union, and believed the country was becoming weaker and more vulnerable, and losing the strategic struggle to the US. He was alarmed by the Star Wars programme, which he thought would give the US an unassailable first-strike advantage, by Reagan and Thatcher’s bellicose rhetoric and by the decision to base intermediate range nuclear weapons in Europe, among other developments. Surely, he reasoned, this would be the moment for the US to strike, and, notwithstanding widespread scepticism from career professionals, he prevailed because it was, as usual, impossible to prove a negative. Every failure to find supporting evidence simply demonstrated how well that evidence must be hidden. (In this sense, RYAN was the mirror-image of the conspiracy theories peddled by Anatoly Golitsyn I discussed recently, except that there was no defector involved: the Soviets did it to themselves.) But Andropov, who went on to be General Secretary of the Communist Party until his death in 1984, had been Ambassador in Budapest in 1956 at the time of the Hungarian Uprising, and was haunted for the rest of his life by seeing members of the Secret Police strung up from lamp-posts. He took away an abiding fear that the apparently strong edifice of Communist power was not as solid as it looked and might crumble easily. This was why he supported the suppression of the Prague Spring of 1968, which anyway he believed had been engineered by the CIA. He was right about the weakness of course, but not in the way he expected. If there was a positive side to this near-disaster, it was that, when the KGB double-agent Oleg Gordievsky passed copies of RYAN documents to the British government, its leaders learned for the first time, and with great shock, just how fearful the Soviet Union was of the West and how vulnerable they felt.

Simply put, during the Cold War each side feared the other, whilst being unable to understand how the other side could fear them. NATO initiatives to generate new forces, spend more money on defence etc. were assumed by them to be stabilising, because they would discourage potential Soviet aggression. The western belief that it was a waste of time even to bother speculating what the Soviet reaction would be, was continued after the Cold War, with the poisonous addition that anyway what the Russians thought didn’t matter, because there was nothing they could do about it. And why should the Russians be afraid of the West anyway? Thus, the stumbling enlargement of NATO over the decades managed the difficult feat of getting the worst of all worlds: it worried and antagonised the Russians, whilst simultaneously weakening NATO overall, with the addition of mostly small and poor countries with little military capacity, and extending ever further from the relatively prosperous NATO heartland.

From the Russian point of view, of course, their fears seemed reasonable, because fears always do. Have you ever heard anyone, except when seeking treatment, say “I am unreasonably afraid?” Yes, NATO’s conventional forces might be puny today, but could you prove that they wouldn’t be massively larger in a decade’s time? OK, it was hard to imagine NATO agreeing to station nuclear weapons in Ukraine today, but could you be absolutely sure that they would not do so in ten years’ time? Or that NATO naval forces would not one day be based in Odessa? Or that commercial ships carrying disguised nuclear missiles couldn’t be surreptitiously moved into the Black Sea? You can’t disprove such things, or indeed disprove any other similar fears, because that’s the nature of fear.

For the West, the traditional fear of Russia—its size, its population its military potential, more recently its ideology—had been put on hold for perhaps two decades after the end of the Cold War. The generation in power in 2022 had grown up with a Russia considered a weak, declining power, held in the iron grip of a former secret policeman, with a population that would like nothing more than to imitate the West. To the extent they thought about Russia at all, which was not that much, they saw it as the “anti-Europe” I’ve described elsewhere, which should have followed Ukraine’s path towards the West, and one day probably would. As a result, military forces (including US ones) based in Europe were small, antiquated and reflected the idea that there would never again be a major European war. Even the outbreak of the fighting in 2022 was greeted more with incomprehension and condescension than concern: the Russian Army would fall apart and all would be over in a few days, after which Putin would be gone.

The nature of, and the reasons for, the palpable sense of fear that grips European decision-makers today, should not come as a surprise after the above discussion. But before I briefly go into specifics, it’s worth pointing out that, since a sense of weakness tends to be the origin of fear, the European political class was already in a bad way then. Economies coming apart as the contradictions of neoliberalism unwound, immigration out of control, public services in decline, the fumbling of the Covid crisis, the visible decay of institutions: they knew they were hated by their populations even if in their arrogance they couldn’t work out why. Indeed, so little confidence did they have in their hold on power that they panicked about alleged Russian disinformation influencing elections (we’ve just had another outbreak in France.) But swilling around in their confused and panicked minds, we can identify perhaps four more specific fears.

The most important is losing control of events to an angry and powerful Russia. Nobody seriously thinks the Russians will “invade” Europe: that’s effectively a metaphor for something much more subtle and dangerous: intimidation and economic pressure mixed with a little flexing of military muscles. It’s not simply that European leaders would have no idea how to react to such pressure, it’s also that after all the hysteria of the last few years, they would have no idea even how to explain the situation to their publics. This is not like the relationship with the US, where there is a large overlap of shared objectives, and which in any case Europe has long experience of gently manipulating. Such a relationship with Russia is not possible, even in principle.

The second, linked to that, is the loss of the US as a political counterweight to Russian power: the role it has fulfilled since the late 1940s. The US no longer has the political, economic or military strength to play this role, and its leaders now seem to understand the fact. Moreover, the Russians, whilst they seem to want a stable relationship with the US, no longer treat them as seriously as they did.

The third is the direct military threat from Russian technology—notably missiles—against which there is no effective defence. Again, I don’t think the Russians are going to attack Europe, but then they don’t have to. The mere knowledge that they could destroy any targets they like in Europe (and for that matter the US) and not have to fear any effective response, will have political ramifications that we cannot even begin to foresee at the moment.

And finally, Europe’s soft power status will be in ruins. It’s not that everyone will start learning Russian, but rather that the pose of moral superiority and political and economic strength accompanied by a huge budget, which has typified European dealings with much of the world, is no longer going to cut it. Influence in the United Nations, with organisations like the African Union and ASEAN, or with the states of the Middle East will decline rapidly, and these things are more visible, and matter more, to western leaders than oil pipelines.

So European leaders are panicking because they have lost control of the situation. Nothing works. Levers are pulled but nothing happens, and the outcome will be decided in Moscow, not Brussels. How will they react when things start to go really badly? I think you can forget the talk of “war.” As I always say, look at a map. What would be the objective? What would be the victory conditions? The very idea is ludicrous. More likely is years of bitter recriminations, of If Onlys, of political insecurity and conflict, and of the increasing nationalisation of defence and security. NATO, whatever its other virtues, was a mechanism for keeping disputes between nations under some kind of control. That could decay quite quickly, especially as the Russians will have a lot to gain from cultivating different relations with different countries and setting them against each other.

Finally, how is Russia itself going to respond, with its long history of fear of the West? I would like to think the Russians believe that NATO’s puny conventional forces are no threat to them, but who really knows? The difficulty with fear is that it’s impossible to calibrate. You can never really say “OK, now I’m not afraid any more,” and there will always be those who argue for more. Very well, Ukraine is neutralised and disarmed, but what about Rumania? What about Finland? We already know some of the original Russian objectives from the draft treaties tabled in December 2021, and Russian objectives now are unlikely to be less radical. But where do you stop? Controls on the Polish military? The German military? A disarmament treaty massively favouring Russia? This is where fear leads you, and fear here provokes the fear of others elsewhere, with consequences that could be politely described as uncertain.

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That’s all for this week. As always, thanks to others who tirelessly supply translation in their languages. Maria José Tormo is posting Spanish translations on her site here, and Marco Zeloni is also posting Italian translations on a site here, and Italia e il Mondo is posting them here. I’m pleased to add that versions of these essays in Czech will now be appearing regularly in translation on the site czstrat.cz. I am always grateful to those who post occasional translations and summaries into other languages just as long as you credit the original and let me know.