Three news items which you may have missed last week, what with everything going on in Ukraine and Syria. First, Greece ostentatiously disavowed an EU communiqué that criticized Russian President Vladimir Putin’s support for the Donetsk rebels. Second, Cyprus offered military and naval facilities to Russia. Third, Egypt applied to join the Eurasian Economic Union.
These three snippets are worth pondering, not least because they help explain what’s going on in Ukraine and Syria — or help explain, at any rate, why bands of militiamen from Donetsk to Damascus feel they can breezily take on the United States. Let’s consider them in turn.
The new Syriza government in Athens needs money and, since it doesn’t like the conditions that Brussels and the IMF attach, it’s looking to Moscow instead. But there’s more to it than that. Anti-Americanism is stronger in Greece than anywhere else in Europe. Syriza has pledged to take Greece out of NATO — an alliance that was an accidental consequence of the Roosevelt-Churchill-Stalin carve-up at the end of World War II, which anomalously condemned conservative Poland to Soviet rule while leaving Greece, where there was a genuinely popular Communist movement, in the West. Large elements of the Greek Left looked to Moscow throughout the Cold War — as, indeed, does a chunk of the Greek Right which defines itself with reference to Eastern Orthodoxy.
Much the same can be said of Greek Cyprus, which also has a strong indigenous Communist tradition, and which is now awash with Russian money. Its military rapprochement with Moscow shows that even tiny and insolvent states don’t much care what America thinks these days.
There was a demonstration of this disdain in Cairo last week, when Putin presented a Kalashnikov rifle to Egypt’s strongman, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. Their rapprochement surprised some American conservatives, who thought of Sisi as their son-of-a-bitch. It’s true that, for reasons of his own, Sisi has been brutal with the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas — more brutal, indeed, than Hosni Mubarak ever was. But he evidently hasn’t forgotten the friendship which secular despots in his part of the world traditionally enjoyed with the Kremlin. Egypt’s state-owned newspaper al-Ahram drooled over Putin on its front page, calling him “the hero of our time”.
Egypt will now join Russia, Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan in the Eurasian Union — which will presumably have to change its name, possibly to Club for Anti-Western Autocrats.
Nor does Russian revanchism stop there. In recent months, Serbia and the Serbian part of Bosnia have more or less overtly joined the Russian camp, and there have been orchestrated anti-NATO demonstrations in Bulgaria. At the same time, several populist parties in Europe — the French National Front, Hungary’s Jobbik, even UKIP — are cozying up to Putin. This is not, exactly, as the headline writers claim, a new Cold War. But it is arguably an East-West civilizational confrontation of the kind foreseen by Samuel Huntington.
Putin presents himself as the champion of all those who dislike Western liberalism. Anglo-American society is dismissed as debased and degenerate, money-grubbing and meretricious, rotted by feminism and homosexuality, dominated by financiers and Jews.
There is nothing new here. Authoritarian regimes generally excoriate capitalism in such terms. The Nazis and the Communists used remarkably similar language to assail the Anglo-American way of life. How, they asked, could bourgeois societies based on freedom and free trade possibly succeed against ideologies that elevated collective endeavor, martial sacrifice and state power? There was a reason that they called our system “decadent:” They genuinely thought it was in decay. As Reinhard Spitzy, Ribbentrop’s private secretary, later lamented:
“We National Socialists never said we were nice democrats. The problem is that the British seem like sheep or bishops, but when the moment comes they are shown to be hypocrites, and they become a terribly tough people.”
Not just the Brits: all English-speaking peoples. There have been three global confrontations over the past hundred years between systems that elevate the state over the individual and systems that do the reverse. The list of countries that were on the right side in all three — the two World Wars and the Cold War — is short, but it includes the Anglosphere democracies. We won, not because we had more territory or population or natural resources, but because the capitalism that our enemies loathed gave us a technical edge.
Which brings us back to the readiness of bankrupt Levantine states to line up with Putin. It’s not that they see Russia as a rising power — the collapse in oil prices has made the Eurasian Union something of a joke. It’s that, in a part of the world where prestige matters, they see power sliding away from America. In 1945, the world’s center of economic gravity hovered over the North Atlantic off Iceland. Today, it just north of Kazakhstan, running East at a rate of knots.
I’m not going to try to blame President Obama, though his readiness to tour the world apologizing hasn’t helped. Nor am I going to moan about the difficulty, after the Iraq debacle, of getting support for even the most contingent and localized military interventions.
No, the real problem here is economic. Greeks and Cypriots know a thing or two about owing money. They can see that a country with an $18 trillion debt can’t afford an active foreign policy.
The Anglosphere imperium rested on the innovation that comes from free enterprise. Financial resources saw the English-speaking peoples through every major conflict from the French and Indian War to the Cold War. If the money runs out, the world will be an altogether colder and darker place. Some of those now denouncing Yankee imperialism will one day be wishing it could come back.
Dan Hannan is a British Conservative member of the European Parliament.
