Prepare For This Onslaught?

The invasion of Ukraine deserves the same condemnation as the invasion of Iraq did, and it can be taken seriously only when it comes from the same people. We have also been arguing forever, and in great detail, for energy independence and for diversification away from the sale of arms abroad, so we welcome latecomers, but again we insist that they have a lot to learn. Luckily, we have a lot to teach.

Most wars are between two or more lots of baddies, and here we have two equally unpleasant ultra-Nationalist ideologies that closely resemble each other due to having been formed by a long and ongoing common history. We cannot know which of them will win, but we do know that we are going to have to deal with whichever of them did.

That is why Boris Johnson has once again confirmed that we are not going to be doing anything very much at all. Although we are still doing about as much as we possibly could. We have no sabre to rattle, and we cynically station our personnel in the Baltic States as a tripwire because we know that there would be no popular support whatever for any war with Russia unless it had directly attacked our people.

We ought not to regret either the defeat of Vladimir Putin's kleptocracy or the defeat of the Azov Battalion, but we are likely to get only one of those. In any case, neither of them is a threat to Britain unless we chose to make it so, as we therefore must not do. British journalists who express incredulity at the suggestion that Ukraine might need to be denazified either do not know what the symbols behind them are, or they are pretending not to do so. Each of those is inexcusable.

As for the reassertion of Eurasian authoritarianism, when did it ever go away? Indeed, what does anyone imagine that the regime in Turkey embodies, right here in NATO, and already vocal in support of Ukraine despite its own regular invasions of Syria and despite its occupation of part of Cyprus since 1974? And what of the regime in Hungary, which is in both NATO and the EU?

A supposedly rival alliance of maritime outposts of freedom and democracy extends to the land of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and to the land of Nippon Kaigi. Some of us have actually read Halford Mackinder, whereas those who are advocating this have either not done so or not understood him. Moreover, they have been spear-carriers for Saudi Arabia and for the other Gulf tyrannies since time immemorial. We need that money out of our politics, not after, but alongside, Russian, and indeed Chinese, money. Close done Londongrad. At the same time, close down Londonistan.