9

How to Win the New Cold War:

Why the West Must Believe in Itself
First a medieval fortress and then the citadel of Soviet totalitarianism,
the Kremlin's rose-red walls have rarely made lovers of liberty and
justice feel at home. It is as if Britain's government were based in the
Tower of London, or France's in the Bastille. Certainly the ideas
now bubbling under its onion domes would have been all too
familiar to its past occupants: put bleakly, Russia is reverting to
behaviour last seen during the Soviet era. So the first step towards
winning the New Cold War is to accept what is happening. History
is not delivering the inexorable victory that it seemed to promise in
the 1980s. The collapse of communism has spread freedom and
justice only to a minority of the ex-captive nations. In the rest,
authoritarian bureaucratic capitalism, bolstered by natural resources,
effective secret police and stifled media, has taken root. The
dominant value is not freedom but economic stability, protected
not by the rule of law, but by strong government. Consensus
replaces the electoral mandate. The powers that be are accountable
to history, not to the citizenry. Opposition is disloyalty at best, and
outright treason if it is supported from abroad. The individual is a
means to an end, not a bearer of inalienable rights; justice is a tool,
not an ideal. The mass media are an instrument of state, not a
constraint on its power. Civil society is an instrument for social
consolidation, not diversity. Property rights and contracts are con-
ditional; foreign policy is solely about the promotion of national
interest. Intervention to protect human rights is hypocrisy. The
raison d'etat rules. `Sovereign democracy' is just the latest label for
this; anyone who has studied Russian history will see that many of
these ideas go back centuries. Revisionist, nationalistic and jingoistic,
Russia has hauled its old ideas out of the dustbin of history,
burnished them and for now made them work.
Having accepted the magnitude of the problem, the next step is
to give up the naive idea that the West can influence Russia's
domestic politics. That was possible in the Yeltsin era, when the
people running Russia or at least some of them truly wanted to
join the West and were willing to take advice on how to achieve
this goal. That era may have been illusory. It may have been
wasted. It may not return for decades. At any rate, it is now futile to
seek friends among the feuding clans of the Kremlin. Their hatred
for each other may lead to change, but not necessarily change in the
West's interests. Instead, we are back in an era of great-power
politics. If we want to defend our interests, we will have to think
clearly and pay dearly. The difficulties facing us are not mere bumps
in the road. We are facing people who want to harm us, frustrate us
and weaken us. Their main weapon is our greatest weakness:
money. Just as we worried about the firepower of the Soviet war
machine, now we should fear the tens of billions of dollars in its
coffers, and the weakness of mind and morals on which they are
applied. The 1990s are over: it is high time now to treat Russia as
the authoritarian regime that it is: like China or Kazakhstan, rather
than a member of the European family experiencing an unfortu-
nate but temporary aberration.
A developed Western consensus on how to deal with Russia
took shape only slowly in the last Cold War, and a new one will
not be arrived at overnight now. But the elements are clear. First,
270 HOW TO WIN THE NEW COLD WAR:
Europe and America must realise that the Kremlin's aim is to split
them. America must not accept divisive deals from Russia on
security (trading help in Iran for the abandonment of Georgia, for
example). Similarly, the EU must drop its lingering disdain for
America. Certainly the Bush administration's foreign policy has
been open to criticism. But the common transatlantic interests are
far deeper and more important than the temporary disagreements
over Iraq, the Middle East or climate change. Europeans may
sometimes privately agree with Russian complaints about Amer-
ican arrogance or incompetence, but they should be careful about
echoing them publicly. Faced with the Kremlin, Europe needs
America more than America needs Europe. United, they are easily
capable of standing up to a resurgent Russia. Divided, each is
vulnerable, Europe most of all. The Atlantic alliance may never
regain the unity and importance of the last Cold War, but it is still
the basis for victory in this one.
Secondly, it would be neither possible nor desirable to block
trade with Russia or investment there outright. The lesson of
sanctions is that they create wonderful opportunities for corrup-
tion, stoke the paranoia and isolation of the targeted regime and do
little or nothing to dislodge it. But Russia cannot expect to take
advantage of the liberal and open economic system of Europe and
America if it does not play by the same rules at home. The EU is
already rightly alarmed by the investments made and planned by
state-run `wealth funds' from Russia and China. That alarm needs
urgently to turn into firmly enforced rules. Countries that do not
respect outsiders' property rights cannot expect to buy whatever
assets they like in countries that do: those who defraud shareholders
in Yukos should not then be able to use that loot to buy up more
companies abroad. It is time to stop the Kremlin having the best of
both worlds. Most of the time it claims its companies are normal
economic actors maximising profits like everyone else until
WHY THE WEST MUST BELIEVE IN ITSELF 271
suddenly it claims national interest and, for example, cuts off oil
deliveries to Lithuania and Latvia, or electricity to Georgia, because
of pressing political reasons. That is entirely rational in current
conditions from a Russian point of view, but intolerable from a
European one. In future, the Kremlin cannot have it both ways. If
it depoliticised and demonopolised its own energy industry
chiefly by allowing third-party access to its gas pipeline monopoly
it could defuse the controversy over energy security. Until that
happens, the outside world must regard every investment Russia
makes abroad as a politically loaded expression of foreign policy,
and not a neutral business transaction. In other words, energy
security is national security, and cheap energy from ill-wishers is a
bad bargain.
The EU must focus sharply on gas, which is now the continent's
greatest vulnerability. Securing supplies and breaking Russia's grow-
ing monopolymay be painful andcostly. The Kremlinhas already said
that if America or the EU start blocking its investments on national-
security grounds, it will retaliate against Westerncompanies inRussia.
That may be bluff: Russia needs Western technology and would be
foolish to scare such companies away. If it is not bluff: too bad. The
price is worth paying. It is better to shave pennies off these companies'
dividends than to let the Kremlin into the heart of our economic and
political system. Putting security of supply above cost means both
bargainingcollectivelywithRussia, andmakingEurope's ownenergy
infrastructure more robust and therefore less vulnerable to outside
pressure. That means, for example, enforcing competitionlaws sothat
South Stream is not built, while providing taxpayers' money and
political backing tomake sure that other pipelines are. Similarly, LNG
terminals are expensive and no cure-all, but still worth the money
because of the diversification that they allow. Europe needs better
strategic gas storage and to link its national `energy islands' with
interconnecting pipelines and electricity lines. The result will be a gas
272 HOW TO WIN THE NEW COLD WAR: