Garvan
Walshe was National and International Security Adviser to the Conservative
Party until 2008. Follow Garvan on
Twitter.
“A
small country that nobody listens to.” The unnamed Russian official stung David Cameron where it hurts most: in
his national pride. This Prime Minister – often attacked for having only the
most superficial grasp of the very idea of a principle; a man for whom ideas
carry a nasty whiff of those twin Tory monsters, the Left and the Continent; a
gentleman whose favourite predecessor is reported to have been the decidedly
low key Lord Derby – has begun to develop a taste for foreign adventure that
owes more to Gladstone than Metternich.
His has grown out of a very different
sensibility than that which underlies globalist doctrines of humanitarian war
(it is indeed about as far from the formerly Marxist New York-Jewish
intellectuals of the New School for Social Research, who became famous as neo-conservatives,
as it is possible to imagine in a modern democracy). Indeed, he dismissed their
universal ideas as dropping democracy from a plane at “40,000 feet”. Rather, he
feels that Britain should stand up for the week against the strong, be on the
side of the good against the big battalions, and should still count for
something in this world. In this he owes more to Boy’s Own and the basic decency immortalised by Richmal Crompton
than the rarefied pages of Commentary.
Thus his engaging, if undignified, impersonation of Hugh Grant that’s now been
set to patriotic music by a thousand bloggers.
Yet
by responding to that Russian put down with his Richard Curtis skit ,Cameron gave
Putin exactly what he craves.
There
was once a time when Moscow's foreign policy was a riddle wrapped in a mystery
concealed inside an enigma, to which the key was supposed to be the Russian
national interest. Those days are long gone. Nor is it driven by Russia’s
insistence that it has not become, as I think a foreign minister recalling the
declining Soviet Union bitterly growled, “a piece of furniture”.
Now
it’s become the personal codpiece of its diminutive leader – he of the staged
archaeological driving expeditions (think of the ageing medieval king whose
servants would tie deer and boar to trees so they wouldn't escape the shaky
royal arrow); the grubby divorce from his long-invisible wife; and the repeated
release of ineffectually homoerotic topless pictures in the wilderness culled
from Brokeback Mountain 2: Riding in the
Urals.
Where
Putin had once been concerned with the exercise of raw power, as he – what
Machiavelli would call a “new prince” – took control of Russia's ramshackle
post-Yeltsin institutions, he now only craves their trappings. Gone is his
deftly ruthless timing: exploiting the horrific takeover at the school in
Beslan and the theatre siege in Moscow to cow opponents and replace elected
regional governors with Kremlin appointees; defanging Khodorkovsky before it
was too late, and putting other unfriendly oligarchs to flight.
Now
he’s saddled with expensive winter Olympics in the Caucasus and a football
World Cup. They will focus the world's attention on Russia and provide an
international audience for dissent instead of a circus to distract his people.
It’s perhaps still a means of disguising economic failure. The R in BRICS might
as well stand for resources rather than Russia – resources that have been
stolen, spent, exported and converted into overpriced stationary yachts, now
composing entire streets in Knightsbridge and South Kensington; and resources
that don't fetch as much on the market as they did before the crash.
Obstruction –
over missile defence, of Polish agricultural efforts and now in Syria – keeps him
on the map; to his mind makes him a contender, saving him from the fate of
Marlon Brando’s Terry in On the
Waterfront. Without Damascus he would be reduced to muttering to himself
about Russia’s destiny, boasting about the size of his country; stuck on the
fringes of the international playground – a man we would warn small countries
not to go near.