A long, cold winter?


At the Vienna summit, wracked with pain, John Kennedy was faced with a rampant Nikita Khruschev. The Soviet leader, far less psychotic than Stalin, was almost as bad a bully. He would shout, bang the table, and insist on his interests. He was also contemptuous of Kennedy's youth, and the fact that Kennedy was so ill he had to be taken away on a stretcher--hidden by the press but noted by the Soviets--was not lost on 'Mr K'.

However, perhaps because of Kennedy's condition, the Soviets realised how tough JFK was personally. Kennedy realised how determined the leaders of the USSR were to be tough themselves.

A year later, in the crucible of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which probably would have happened anyway, and which would have destroyed the world, these insights enabled both sides to climb down from the spiral of bluff and threat and to avoid thermonuclear destruction, Fidel Castro's best efforts to bring it about notwithstanding.

That suppressing the likes of Castro with assassination schemes was likely to end up leading to worse trouble was a lesson Kennedy seems to have learned from that later crisis. Unfortunately, we won't know, because he fell pray to the sort of opportunistic freelance assassination plotting Barack Obama has now twice avoided, as far as we know.

The summit was held in June; on seeing the Soviets' behaviour, Kennedy's final observation to Khruschev was that it was going to be 'a long cold winter', although reports sometimes differ.

I thought of that today when I read of Russia's 'threats' to undermine NATO supplies in Afghanistan. It is almost as though we have been living in a dream world.

President Bush has gone to summits with Vladimir Putin and, apparently, failed to work out what should have been obvious to the dogs in the street; Putin and the Russia he represents are clear-headed, very determined, tough as nails and cold eyed about their interests. Does no one ever keep a plan 'B' or allow for contingencies any more?

We got guff about Putin's 'soul'. What we did not get was any awareness that, at any time, Russia respects strength and this resurgent Russia especially so.

We have had NATO wandering around central Asia trying to destroy terror like Prince Alexius wandering around Crusader tents wondering at his new best friends and failing to see what was about to happen to Constantinople. Did anybody pause to think that winding Russia up systematically would just cause them to say 'OK, in the summer you can forget our airspace in the east and in the winter you can forget our gas?'.

Does anyone interested in the cold war posturing and provocation of (now probably inevitable) 'star wars' bases in eastern Europe realise what that will bring about, soon? I mean by that a full confrontation.

Does anyone indulging themselves with rubbish about global warming realise what opposing nuclear power and clean coal are going to do to us when the Russians turn off the gas and oil? It's one of the few things to his credit that Tony Blair used his last speech to the useless talking-shop European Parliament as Prime Minister to call for an energy policy in Europe--and he was ignored at the time.

Europe and the West are now left with a Russia with control of our dwindling modern stocks of oil for twenty years or so. We are in hock, in Britain, to large international energy companies with absolutely no national interest beyond their profits. Northern and Eastern Europe do not have domestic capacity that can bear the burden of winter.

France and Italy are going to be dependent on very shady deals with natural Gas outlets in North Africa that are unstable, and which require all sorts of badness to maintain them. NATO in Afghanistan is going to see what waging war with whoever the Taliban are this week means when Russia can't be a logistical facilitator.

We've been very very reluctant to take the long-term steps that could have protected us. Deepening trade, political links, and agreements between the Baltics, Poland, Ukraine, and Caucasus states, with western money, would have been easy to do a decade ago. Building up and expanding something analogous to the Visegrad group would have been preferable to a mad attempt to constitutionalise and federalise one monolithic EU approach.

Gambling everything on the Nabucco pipeline project was silly. Not embracing things like a Mediterranean Union to tie the near east and North Africa into European interests in an alliance for Progress because of anti-Turkish racism and fears of Islamism and dhimmitude is going to carry with it a price. And thinking that Russia would always be weak or compliant was pie-in the sky.

I like and admire Russia and the Russians, and always have. I do not want the policies of European states to be run by them. I don't want to depend upon Americans either. Nixon and Carter were bad enough, but if they had approached the level of criminal negligence and, frankly, crimes against the republic of the administrations since 1980, they would have been impeached and sent to Oklahoma or Alaska or some such place.

I believe in a principle of balance. Just as the United States with no balance in the late nineties and early twentieth century did crazy, hubristic things, so Russia in Europe needs some counterweight. Balance takes patience and long term planning.

Do you think that our ahistoric, student political, media class of leaders have the attention, the capacities, the patience, the memory, or the stamina to be trusted to bring balance about? Have any of them been tested outside of the soft and flabby politics of our age? Have any of them ever even had a proper job?

Its going to be a long hard winter, and they'll all be fiddling whilst others burn our patrimony to warm it up.