The Reaction Is Never Equal

Paul Knaggs writes:

NEWTON’S THIRD LAW: THE REACTION IS NEVER EQUAL

Every schoolchild is taught Newton’s third law. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. What the schoolroom leaves out is the small print. In the affairs of nations, the reaction is rarely equal, and it is almost never opposite. It is larger, it is sideways, and it has a way of becoming something nobody chose and nobody can stop. History is a catalogue of small incidents that were meant to be contained and were not. A car turning down the wrong street in Sarajevo. A single Soviet officer in a sweating submarine in 1962, declining to fire the torpedo that would have ended the world. We remember the ones that were survived. The others we call wars.

This week, in the busiest shipping lane on earth, Britain took another step into that catalogue, and almost no one was asked.

On Tuesday morning the Russian frigate Admiral Grigorovich was passing through international waters between the Isle of Wight and Normandy. A British-registered yacht came within a few hundred metres of the warship. The frigate’s crew fired warning shots. The yacht turned away. No one was hit. No one was hurt. HMS Mersey, already shadowing the Russian vessel, sent a boat across to check the crew were safe.

Say it plainly: the yacht was not hit, and that is a mercy. Now say the rest. A foreign warship has discharged weapons near a British civilian boat twenty miles off the English coast, and the only thing standing between that sentence and a far worse one was a few hundred metres of water and a helmsman’s nerve.

The Ministry of Defence says it is investigating. It does not believe the shots were linked to events two days earlier. Hold that thought. It is the wrong reassurance to the wrong question.

THE SEIZURE BEHIND THE SHOTS

On Sunday, Royal Marines from 42 Commando and officers from the National Crime Agency boarded and seized the tanker MV Smyrtos, accused of belonging to Russia’s so-called shadow fleet. The suspected master has since appeared before magistrates in Southampton, charged under the sanctions regulations. He has entered no plea, and nothing here should be read as a verdict on a matter now before the courts.

Sir Keir Starmer presented the operation as a blow against Russia’s war machine. The staging was muscular by design. Britain, ran the message, will not let Putin’s tankers slip past in the dark.

Moscow reads the identical act through the opposite lens, and brands such boardings piracy. We should be precise, because precision is the one weapon a small publication can always afford. The lawful basis for the Smyrtos boarding was reportedly not the sanctions list at all. It was that Cameroon had struck the ship from its register weeks earlier, leaving it stateless, beyond the protection of any flag. On the letter of the law, Britain stood on firmer ground than Russia’s howl of piracy allows.

But lawful and wise are not the same word. The torpedo that nearly ended the world in 1962 would have been launched within the rules of engagement of a frightened crew who believed war had already begun. The rules are not the danger. The proximity is.

A METHOD, NOT A MOMENT

We are invited to treat each event as a thing unto itself. The seizure, isolated. The shots, isolated. The shadowing, routine. The sanctions, technical. Take any one alone and it can be defended. Lay them end to end and the shape is unmistakable.

What happened on Tuesday is not new. It is a method Russia has used before, and used on civilians. In 2023, after Moscow abandoned the Black Sea grain deal, a Russian patrol ship opened fire on a Palau-flagged cargo vessel that would not stop for inspection, then put men aboard by helicopter. In 2021, off Crimea, Russia said it fired shots and dropped bombs to drive away the destroyer HMS Defender, the first time since the Cold War it admitted using live rounds against a NATO warship. London denied a single shot was aimed at the ship. Notice what both governments did. Each reached at once for the loudest possible version, because the loud version flatters the teller and frightens the listener. That is the trade.

Escalation is not an accident of these encounters. It is the product they are designed to manufacture.

The shadow fleet itself is a monument to the same logic. It exists because the West withdrew Western insurance from Russian oil and pushed it into a fleet of ageing, uninsured hulks. The oil never stopped. It simply became more dangerous to everyone who shares the water with it. We did not choke the war. We armed the next collision and called it a sanction.

TOUGH AT SEA, HELPLESS AT HOME

And here is the part the establishment press will step around, because it embarrasses the men in charge. This is a government that postures as the guardian of the English Channel against the Russian navy, and cannot close that same stretch of water to a rubber dinghy. The boats keep coming. Everyone can see them. The critics who say Britain can no longer defend its own border are not cranks. They are describing Tuesday and they are describing yesterday, in the same sentence.

It runs deeper than dinghies. Our borders proved porous enough that a handler using Russian and Ukrainian could recruit foreign nationals already living in Britain, for sums running from a few hundred pounds to a few thousand in cryptocurrency, and direct them to set fires at addresses linked to the Prime Minister himself. A jury convicted the men of arson. No terrorism charge was laid, whatever the headlines insisted. Sit the two pictures side by side. A state that can fast-rope commandos onto a stateless tanker in the Channel, and a state that could not keep a cheap arson operation away from the Prime Minister’s own front door. The muscle is all for the cameras. The defence, where it actually matters, is hollow.

That is the government now trading warning shots, by proxy, with a Russian frigate. Not a strategy. A pose, worn over a vacuum.

DEEP WATER, NO CHART

There are questions ministers should answer, and answer in the House, not through unnamed sources briefing friendly correspondents. What were the rules of engagement for HMS Mersey as she shadowed the Grigorovich? Had the yacht’s crew any warning a Russian warship was transiting beside them? Above all, the question that should make every reader sit up: has Parliament authorised this widening confrontation in the world’s busiest sea lane, or is the country simply being steered into it, one routine incident at a time, and told after the fact to applaud?

Because the public are not children, and they have wearied of being addressed as though they were. “Standing up to Putin” is a slogan, not a plan. “Defending sanctions” is a headline, not an explanation. None of it covers a frigate firing near a British boat within sight of the Wight.

This particular incident may yet prove to be nothing worse than poor seamanship and a frightened crew. Even so, it tells us exactly where we stand. A government with no compass and no chart has sailed the country into deep water, and it does not appear to know the depth beneath it. The men who built this current will not be the ones caught in it. The working class will. First in the energy bill, first in the tax that funds the patrols, and first, should one misread radio message ever become one incident too many, in the only currency that escalation ever finally settles in.

We were told, more than a year ago, that the West could choose de-escalation and chose neither, and that the bill would arrive closer to home than the cheerleaders imagined. It has now arrived, twenty miles off the Isle of Wight. We are not in the business of pretending otherwise. We do not shove things down the memory hole.

Every action meets its equal and opposite reaction. Westminster has forgotten the second half of that law. The Channel has not.