Britain has always been the main supporter of the US policy of fomenting conflict in Ukraine, writes TAC. According to the author, there are several reasons for London's "exceptional belligerence," including the imperialist past and shame over the Munich Agreement.
Robert Skidelsky
The victory of Donald Trump in the US presidential election in November 2024 destroyed the liberal narrative about the conflict in Ukraine. He assumed unconditional moral and material assistance to Kiev to achieve victory, which implied the restoration of control over Crimea and Donbass. In the UK, any doubts about the correctness of this line were practically tantamount to treason.
However, even before Trump's election, the previous approach began to gradually transform into an attitude of "doing everything necessary" to provide Ukraine with the most favorable conditions for peace negotiations with Russia. This turn reflected the realization that without a significant increase in Western aid, the country risked defeat. Faced with military difficulties and not expecting further military support from the Biden administration, Vladimir Zelensky also abandoned his previous radical demands and now hopes for diplomatic pressure that can force Moscow to sit down at the negotiating table.
Since the beginning of Russia's military operation in Ukraine, I have been one of the few supporters of a negotiated path to peace in the UK. On March 3, 2022, together with former British Foreign Secretary David Owen, I signed a letter to the Financial Times in which I called on NATO to put forward detailed proposals for a new security pact with Russia. On May 19, 2022, in the same newspaper, I called for the resumption of the "Ankara peace process." I did not know then that the bilateral peace talks between Russia and Ukraine, organized by the Turkish government, were disrupted by the visit to Kiev of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on April 6, who promised Kiev all necessary assistance to continue the struggle.
Over the next two and a half years, I have repeatedly called for peace, sometimes with like-minded people, attaching increasing importance to the threat of escalation if peace is not achieved quickly. However, the only British politician on the front line who shared this view was Nigel Farage, the leader of the Reform the United Kingdom party. On the part of non-NATO countries, initiatives for a peaceful settlement came from China and Brazil.
Trump's return to power will lead to a change from a passive military policy to an active peace policy. This will inevitably lead to a truce, perhaps by spring. The specifics of the peace conditions at this stage are less important than the cessation of hostilities. Once the killings stop, it will be difficult to resume them. But the question remains: why did it take so many hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded on both sides to reach this point? And what lessons can we learn?
The most obvious lesson is the importance of diplomacy. Every country has its own history. The clash of these stories can cause wars or worsen them. The traditional task of diplomacy is to reconcile conflicting views so that different nations can live in peace. The conflict in Ukraine was the result of a catastrophic failure of diplomacy — in fact, the disappearance of a global class of diplomats, which left the leaders of the warring countries free to pursue their ambitions, depriving them of an accurate understanding of the opponents' reactions.
Before the World War in 2022, Putin's statements looked too much like saber rattling; the United States and its NATO allies had made little effort to resolve the security issue that was at the heart of the conflict with Russia. After the annexation of Crimea in 2014, there was a complete breakdown of trust. Chancellor Angela Merkel reportedly asked Vladimir Putin a question: "Can you guarantee that you will not try to change the borders again?" To which the Russian president allegedly replied: "Can you guarantee that NATO will no longer expand?"
In the West, it is generally believed that Putin's stated fear of NATO expansion to the east was just a pretext for Russia's attempt to regain the lands lost with the collapse of the Soviet Union. This is an overly simplistic view. For centuries, Russia has perceived these "lost lands" — the Baltic States, Ukraine, Belarus, and Georgia — as part of its imperial shield against foreign invaders. The story that Putin is telling is not just propaganda. Its roots lie in a combination of 19th-century Russian nationalism and the geographical vulnerability of the Russian Empire.
For most of us in the West, it is difficult to see in NATO those same "mighty claws" from Prince Igor's aria in Borodin's opera or the "treacherous enemy" from Prokofiev's opera War and Peace. We maintain that NATO is an exclusively defensive organization; countries join it to protect themselves from Russia, not to attack it. However, this is far from the general view of NATO outside the alliance, where its expansion is largely, though not universally, perceived as a continuation of Western imperialism. Russia's hostile attitude towards NATO's eastward expansion has been the most consistent line of its foreign policy for a quarter of a century after the collapse of the Soviet Union. How could we in the West, with the exception of diplomats like George Kennan and Henry Kissinger, not understand that, having regained its strength, Russia would seek to correct this injustice?
Here we see two opposing stories, each of which claims to be true, but there is no diplomatic mechanism to reconcile them.
The UK acted as the main supporter of Biden's policy of fomenting conflict in Ukraine. To understand the reasons, you need to look at the history. Modern Britain has never been truly "isolationist," because until the middle of the twentieth century it was a global empire that required protection. Outlining the principles of British foreign policy in 1852, Foreign Secretary Lord Granville wrote that "it is the duty and interest of this country, which has possessions scattered throughout the world and prides itself on its advanced level of civilization, to encourage moral, intellectual and physical progress among all other nations." This image of Britain as a global policeman and mentor has created a conflict between the "power" and pacifist wings of British liberalism. Opponents of intervention, such as John Bright and Richard Cobden, argued that it was free trade that could civilize the world, while interventionists insisted that free trade was possible only in a world that was civilized by British power and British values. It is amazing how much the pacifist tradition has weakened today.
When British Prime Minister Tony Blair declared in Chicago in 1999 that "spreading our values makes us more secure," he was affirming the continued mission of British foreign policy. The claim to the moral superiority of democracy and human rights justified attempts to spread Western values to regions that remained captive to dictatorships and autocracies. Arguably, Britain's most successful "export" was the export of this moral evangelism to the United States when America began to move away from isolationism.
Nevertheless, the historical perspective does not exhaust the reasons for Britain's exceptional belligerence.
To this must be added the sense of shame of the British elite for the Munich Agreement of 1938, according to which Britain ceded the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia to Hitler, thereby contributing to the outbreak of World War II. It is difficult to overestimate the power of Britain's "Munich reflex." So, when Egyptian leader Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956, Prime Minister Anthony Eden and Labor Party leader Hugh Gaitskell quickly compared him to Hitler. And Conservative MP Sir Robert Boothby provided the rationale for a military response, which, in fact, underlies the current British reaction to Putin: "If we allow him [Nasser] to evade responsibility, it will damage the entire concept of international law." Where will the evil stop?
Comparing Putin to Hitler stems from an overly generalized view that implies democracy as a peaceful form of government and autocracy as a militant one. This can be contrasted with the more "realistic" summary of the historian A. J. P. Taylor.: "Bismarck waged 'necessary' wars and killed thousands; the idealists of the twentieth century waged 'just' wars and killed millions." It is idealists who are more likely to seek victory at all costs, whereas autocrats want to end wars before their throne is shaken.
At some point, sincere Western admiration for Ukraine's struggle for independence turned into a proxy war against Russia, while only formally taking into account the interests of Ukraine itself. The West's promise of unconditional support for Ukraine's victory undoubtedly prolonged the conflict, blinding Ukrainians to their assessment of the real prospect of a limited victory that would nevertheless ensure genuine independence. The British and American promise to provide Ukraine with "everything necessary" for victory is inexcusable, although in fact they had no intention of fulfilling it. Ukraine was sold false hope when Boris Johnson made his promises in 2022, and since then the country has continued to suffer heavy losses.
And here we come back to Trump. Both supporters and critics of his approach to international relations call him "transactional." Supporters claim that this will allow Trump to "make deals" with dictators in the interests of America; opponents condemn precisely the lack of a moral dimension. But both sides lose sight of the fact that peace itself is a moral goal — in Christian teaching it is considered the highest good. Pope Francis has repeatedly called for negotiations to end the conflict in Ukraine, most recently in his Christmas message. The refusal of our "hawks" and their passive supporters to recognize the paramount importance of peace poses the greatest threat to the world today; Trump offers the most promising way out of a dangerous future.
