Digest 39: Europe’s bravest leader

Over the past ten days, upon taking the mantle of the European Union’s rotating Presidency, Viktor Orbán, Prime Minister of Hungary, set off to see Zelensky in Ukraine; Putin in Moscow; Xi in China; NATO leaders in Washington; and Trump (prior to yesterday’s attack) at Mar-a-Lago.

One could draw up no better itinerary of figures who need to be consulted to bring the conflict in Ukraine to a resolution.

Yet, what does our media report?

En route to Moscow, that Orbán is a “Putin sympathiser”, and that the EU/NATO member is “paying homage” to Putin.

British media has for a good while chosen to ignore diplomatic efforts. I tried for three months last year to get a chronology of March/April 2022 diplomatic talks in Istanbul published in any mainstream outlet. I had official written endorsement from two of the key senior negotiators in the room. Every single outlet I wrote to rejected it.

Initialled agreements from these talks have in the past six weeks been published by The New York Times. Still, the British press at large refuses to mention the agreements. (Did you read anything about this commensurate for how big a story it is?)

Now that diplomacy can no longer be ignored, the media turns to denouncing attempts.

Think about it. Was Eisenhower “paying homage” to Kim Il-Sung by having his closest advisors negotiate with North Korea in 1953? Was General George C. Marshall a “sympathiser of Mao” in attempting to bring an end to the Chinese Civil War in 1947?

Such character attacks have become embarrassing.

Now, I realise that Orbán is portrayed as a villainous authoritarian. But I hope your mind has in recent weeks been opened to the fact that our media is not always entirely faithful in its coverage. Also, that you might concede to not having ever actually listened to a minute’s interview with Orbán to make your own assessment.

I encourage you to watch the following, with your own eyes. What do you see?

Is Orbán an authoritarian villain? Or, someone actually quite reasonable, acting from a strong place of morality, who wants the best outcome for Europe?

This is all in English. It couldn’t be easier to see:

The interviewer is skeptical towards Orbán – a fair representation of Western media generally.

Isn’t it peculiar that Orbán is portrayed as a traitor to Europe while Kyiv (Zelensky himself) now wants to hold a second peace summit and to invite Russian representatives? But such doublethink has become routine.

I encourage everyone to adhere to a new life principle: In order to have an opinion about someone, you must have listened to at least one long-form interview with them. If you have, and you don’t like them, that’s fine. But you are not entitled to an opinion purely from media spin.

Orbán’s mission is commendable. Kudos to the whole Hungarian leadership team.

And the fact Zelensky has since spoken out against their attempts puts them in the company of (in 1953) newly elected President Eisenhower. Professor Carter Malkasian: “Rhee [President of South Korea] vociferously opposed the armistice. He wanted Korea unified and all Chinese forces withdrawn from Korea. Koreans filled the streets of Seoul and other cities throughout South Korea to demonstrate. Most South Koreans supported President Rhee’s stance that an armistice should not be concluded until North Korea was liberated. Rhee was intransigent.” This mere weeks before the Armistice signing – now considered Eisenhower’s second greatest achievement.

The UK Prime Minister could easily have done this, at any point, the past 2.5 years. Brexit afforded Britain the flexibility to play such a role.

As the WSJ editorial board wrote in 2019: “The world also needs the Tories’ pro-American streak – as ballast between the US and Europe.”

It was a wide open goal, squandered by successive leaders in favour of accomplishing ~nothing at G7 photo-ops.

Hungary is a country of not even 10 million people. But it has shown itself to have greater significance on the world stage than 21^st century Britain, France, and Germany.

Instead of challenging or skeptically questioning our government’s approach (which the UK’s for 2.5 years has been in grave need of), our media has been a fawning and flag-waving supporter of the West’s skinny-fat foreign policy – steering Ukraine away from diplomacy (which right up until the morning of 9th April, 2022 Zelensky is on video with the Associated Press as having been in favour of), without doing much at all seriously to build its industrial base.

Calling earnest and doubtless exhausting attempts at diplomacy “appeasement”, the media has further debased its vocabulary – becoming yet hollower in perspective.

Every so often an interview catches a spark and shifts public perception, causing people to “update” on the artifice they have been fed. The above with Orbán ought to become the next such example.

We are making our adversaries better

The WSJ four days ago:

Moscow is learning how to defeat Western precision munitions in Ukraine.

The war continuing is not to our advantage – in any theatre.

Russia’s success in electronic countermeasures – closely watched by China, with whom Moscow is believed to share some of its battlefield lessons in dealing with Western weaponry.

William LaPlante, the U.S. under secretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, acknowledged in recent remarks Russia’s successes in disrupting precision munitions. “The Russians have gotten really, really good,” he said.

Kissinger saw it perfectly

In May 2022:

“Negotiations need to begin in the next two months before it creates upheavals and tensions that will not be easily overcome. “Ideally, the dividing line should be a return to the status quo ante,” he added, apparently referring to a restoration of Ukraine’s borders as they were before the war began in February 2022. “Pursuing the war beyond that point would not be about the freedom of Ukraine, but a new war against Russia itself.”

Also Kissinger:

The quest for peace and order has two components that are sometimes treated as contradictory: the pursuit of elements of security and the requirement for acts of reconciliation. If we cannot achieve both, we will not be able to reach either.

The then greatest living statesman was denounced for what he’d dared said.

In July 2022:

Interviewer: But none of those three outcomes, Henry, really punishes Putin for his aggression, do they?

Dr Kissinger: Quite the contrary. If the war ends as I sketched at Davos, I think it will be a substantial achievement for the allies. NATO will have been strengthened by the addition of Finland and Sweden, creating the possibility of defence of the Baltic countries. Ukraine will have the largest conventional ground force in Europe linked to NATO or a member of it. Russia will have been shown that the fear that has hung over Europe since World War II, of a Russian army descending – the conventional army descending into Europe across established borders – can be prevented by NATO conventional action. For the first time in recent history, Russia would have to face a need for coexistence with Europe as an entity, rather than America being the chief element in defending Europe with its nuclear forces.

The same was said in fall 2022 by General Mark Milley (then US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff).

What could have been – had we had more enlightened figures at the apex of government.

What has been achieved in the past year of fighting?

• A now reported ~1,500 Ukrainian military deaths per day, with conditions set for long-term demographic collapse

• More loss of territory

• Massive destruction of infrastructure, including power grids

• A normalisation of sending young women to the front line (which Ukrainian media is now celebrating: https://kyivindependent.com/ukraine-sees-surge-in-female-soldiers-with-over-10-000-women-serving-on-front-lines-deputy-pm-says/)

• ~$100bn more in Western military spending (while US interest payments overtake its defence budget – which should worry us all)

• The Pope publicly said “negotiate is a courageous word. If you go on, how many dead will there be? And it will end worse. Find a country that can be a mediator.”

• Anti-establishment political forces unleashed across Europe, in part due to the backward effect of Western sanctions

• A taboo broken by the West in green-lighting gifted missiles being launched into Russian territory (something which never happened during the Cold War)

• Media standards deteriorated to the point where a decision so big is not debated

• Western stockpiles further depleted, increasing vulnerability for other conflicts

• Russia has been sent yet deeper into the arms of China/North Korea.

North Korea, believe it or not, has an army numbering 1,320,000 active troops with a reserve of 560,000. And speaking with a serving diplomat: North Korea apparently has defence manufacturing capability roughly equivalent to the whole of the EU.

Putin is now mulling sending supersonic missiles to the Houthis – cautioned from doing so only by MBS of Saudi Arabia.

*

In the past nine months, Ukraine – and the West generally – has put itself in a notably worse position. Prime Minister Orbán, having visited all the key players in this conflict, warns: “In the next two months we will see more dramatic losses and military developments on the frontlines than ever before.” But Putin apologist that he is in view of our media, the warning doesn’t cut through.

We in the West still seem unable to recognise that this conflict is going to end at some point. It would have worse territorial lines today than it would have had in October last year. Those are worse than would have been the case in April 2022. But it will be yet worse for Ukraine if delayed all the way to 20th January, 2025.

One can reasonably argue that any type of armistice would allow Putin to re-arm and re-attack. This is a legitimate fear. But has anybody making this argument asked how the likelihood of this could be reduced? The US has ensured stability in South Korea for 71 years and counting. Has any editor/commentator seeking “vengeance” for Ukraine bothered to read the Korean Armistice Agreement? It does not appear they have.

Yes, hospitals getting hit is horrific. Ukraine/the US (not reported) also accidentally cluster-bombed an entire civilian beach in Crimea two weeks ago.

Both of these should be expected amidst the horrors of war. They are all the more reason this conflict should have been brought to a close when it could have been.

The UK did well this week to row back the perception that Starmer was going further in missile freedoms than previous administration policy:

But we are incredibly far from a sensible policy that would have any shot at producing a better outcome.

And the likes of Sir Niall Ferguson are now making morally dubious arguments that it’s a “bargain” to keep Ukraine fighting (on behalf of the West).

Anyone who calculates the financial cost of this war purely in terms of military aid is being myopic. To say nothing of the generation being put to the slaughter: what about the hundreds of billions in reconstruction that will ultimately be needed? What about the increase in energy prices all across Europe? The 2024 “cost” of the conflict is considerably more than $60bn.

“This will be the last war”

Those who cling to the status quo (though, this in their minds does seem to permit NATO expansion on autopilot) are happy to go along with magical thinking of military arithmetic; stick their head in the sand on industrial capacity; ignore (or disparage – if a political figure they don’t like mentions) prior official history; and use morally dubious arguments to justify their position.

This is well explained in a talk given 21 years ago by Professor H. W. Brands, that contains some of the most incisive analysis I’ve seen summing up the state of the world today:

From the standpoint of the United States there’s this tendency of Americans, from the American Revolution to the present, to think whatever war they’re involved in is the last war…

There is this abiding optimism in Americans that if we can fight this war, and win this war, then we can establish the conditions of peace that will prevent our having to fight other wars.

Americans, by and large, would like to think that war is not the normal situation for international affairs. That wars are aberrations, and wars can be explained by a failure of diplomacy, by extraordinarily bad people in other countries… But war is not something that the human race is condemned to live with forever.

But despite this optimism, the United States has never gone more than ten years or so without a war – wars of one sort of another.

As much as we hope to win whatever war we’re involved in, and to make lasting peace out of that war; odds are pretty good there will be another war before too long.

There have been times when the world has gone for a fairly long time without really big wars. In fact, from the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 until the outbreak of the First World War, there wasn’t really a major war in Europe – for 99 years. And so it was pretty easy for people – Europeans and Americans – to think that maybe the problem of war had been solved.

There was a vogue during the early part of the twentieth century to think that another major war was impossible. The economies of the Western powers had become so intertwined. The interests of the intelligentsia were all so interconnected that war would simply be impossible.

There was also a belief that modern war had become so expensive that governments fighting wars would soon run out of money – and the wars would have to stop. That was the belief of many Americans at the beginning of WWI. They just calculated how fast the European powers were going through materiels required to make war and realised that those governments were going to run out of money. What they didn’t reckon on was how imaginative the governments of the belligerent powers would be in funding wars…

H. W. Brands goes on…

The United States is the pre-eminent status quo power. The status quo, by definition, favors those who are on top. So it’s quite natural for Americans to think that war – or anything that challenges international order – is a bad thing.

If you look at the statements of American Presidential administrations from 1945 until the present, one of the primary goals in dealing with most parts of the world is the “maintenance of stability” or the “maintenance of order”. Well, stability or order don’t tell you anything about the nature of that order. It simply presumes that what is in existence there is worth preserving, and change is probably going to be for the worse. That’s true enough, if you happen to be the country that benefits from the status quo.

But if you don’t, you’re inclined to challenge the status quo. You may be a revolutionary power. In which case, the world is going to look a lot different. And war may actually seem to be an appealing alternative to the maintenance of this order that’s tilted towards somebody else.

Those who can see reality of the present military picture are trying to stem the tide to propose solutions that make the new environment the best it can be.

Wars are horrific

By clinging to sunlit uplands that are no longer there, the British media has contributed to making things worse – offering no credible alternative other than a slow descent into military collapse, further loss of Western deterrence, and further destruction of infrastructure that will take decades to rebuild.

There have been numerous opportunities to wrap up this conflict: prior to it starting, in Istanbul in 2022, in fall 2022 when Kissinger and General Milley were advising such, and fall 2023 when the scales should have fallen from everybody’s eyes.

There is a straightforward way out of this now. Any student of history should be able to discern that there was no popular support for bringing about an armistice in Korea – but one was imposed, to South Korea’s enduring benefit. It is not a binary choice today between capitulation and escalation. There is a sensible middle path, with historical precedent, that is in dire need of champions.

The West needs much better diplomacy and much better deterrent credibility. Attempts at either should be celebrated – not demonised.

A foundational step towards wiser policy would be for people in and around Western National Security circles to stop taking our media at face value. It is withholding information about past diplomatic attempts, and distorting intentions of those endeavouring to bring about a better outcome now. Go direct and listen to figures such as Orbán yourself.

The West today is in a considerably weaker position than it needed to be. Attacks of the past several weeks would not have happened had an off-ramp been taken sooner. Other policy options can still be pursued – if only our leaders were as brave as Hungary’s.

NB: The above was drafted prior to the Pennsylvania shooting. I wish President Trump a speedy recovery on his path to victory.