16 hours Ago By Patrick Cockburn
This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.Nato leaders in Europe are reacting to President Donald Trump’s rapprochement with president Vladimir Putin with a mix of panic and bewilderment brought on by an exaggerated idea of the Russian threat.
The Nato powers are behaving as if they were the West European equivalent of the East European communist bosses in the 80s, who suddenly heard to their horror that the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, had decided that the USSR would no longer serve as their military protector and political supremo. In reality, the US continues to guarantee Nato states within the organisation’s current boundaries.What Trump has actually done, through a baffling blend of open craziness, hidden guile and egocentric realpolitik, is to blow away many European illusions and propaganda tropes about the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
He has exposed the extraordinary and embarrassing fact that three years into the war, the UK, France and Germany, along with other Nato powers, do not yet have an achievable plan either to fight the war successfully or to bring it to an end.if(window.adverts) { window.
adverts.addToArray({"pos": "inread-hb-ros-inews"}); }Outrage over Trump’s “betrayal of Ukraine” serves to obscure this policy vacuum. But, if European governments do not want to self-marginalise themselves, they must finally answer crucial questions about how they see the conflict.
PariahThis is especially true of the UK where there has been little real debate about the Ukraine war other than to give, at least verbally, maximum support for Ukraine. Such debate that does take place is at an infantile level, denouncing any peace deal with Russia over Ukraine as appeasement. The demonic Putin, now in cahoots with the almost equally evil Trump, must continue to be treated as a pariah and the war allowed to go on ad infinitum.
But the crucial question that the war hawks, which in the UK includes the whole political class, fail to answer is how far backing for Ukraine means full support for a Ukraine war. Those opposing a ceasefire must keep in mind that Moscow also opposes it until a deal is done. It does so because it sees the present attritional warfare against a numerically inferior Ukraine as progressively tipping the military balance in its favour.
This is confirmed by the highly respected head of Ukrainian military intelligence, Lt-Gen Kyrylo Budanov, who is reported to have told a confidential meeting of the Ukrainian parliament in late January that “if nothing changes, the front line may begin to collapse and there will be problems”.if(window.adverts) { window.
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adverts.addToArray({"pos": "mpu_tablet_l1"}); }Wishful thinkingThe second question the European powers, which now criticise Trump, need to answer concerns their future relations with Russia. Russia is the largest single state in Europe by population and occupies 40 per cent of the European land mass.
An Italian author published a book just after the Second World War with the title The Volga Rises in Europe. His point was that Europe is indivisible and, if no agreement is reached with whoever rules in Russia – and the Russian attitude to the centrality of Ukraine would be much the same from Catherine the Great to Putin – then the continent will be destabilised.President Joe Biden and Nato evaded having achievable war aims over the last three years by vaguely supposing in 2022-23 that Russia might be defeated on the battlefield, or regime change in Moscow would solve their problems, or sanctions would lead to the collapse of the Russian economy.
All these things turned out to be wishful thinking.Nato policies since 2022 have been contradictory. At one moment, the Russian army is to be feared, as if it were as powerful as the Red Army under Stalin in 1945.
This juggernaut supposedly threatens to subjugate Ukraine and sweep on into the Baltic states and central Europe. Yet, at the same time, the Russian military machine is deemed to be so puny that Ukraine might evict its forces from Crimea and Donbas, occupied in 2014, making a compromise peace unnecessary.Heavy Russian casualtiesThis might just have been a feasible strategy in 2022 in the months after the debacle of Putin’s invasion on 24 February, but the Ukrainian counter-offensive in 2023 failed to make headway.
General Valerii Zaluzhni, the Ukrainian commander-in-chief who led the counter-offensive, said in an interview published on 1 November, 2023: “Just like in the First World War most likely we have reached the level of technology that puts us into a stalemate. There will most likely be no deep and beautiful breakthrough.”Since then, Russia has fought an attritional war, seeking to use its advantage in military manpower to grind down the enemy.
As government-controlled Ukraine has a population of only about 27-29 million and the Russian has some 144 million, this strategy has had a fair measure of success, though at the cost of heavy Russian casualties.So far there has not been a decisive Russian breakthrough, though this cannot be ruled out. The mass use of drones makes it difficult for either army to feed enough troops into the front line in order to achieve an overwhelming local superiority at any particular point.
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addToArray({"pos": "mpu_tablet_l2"}); }PledgesA peace deal – and it is by no means certain there will be one – is likely to reflect this overall military balance which is tipping towards Russia, but by no means decisively. Putin lost his one chance of a complete victory in the first days of his failed invasion three years ago and he is not going to regain what he lost then at the negotiating table.#color-context-related-article-3547168 {--inews-color-primary: #3759B7;--inews-color-secondary: #EFF2FA;--inews-color-tertiary: #3759B7;} Read Next square SARAH BAXTER Trump's popularity is already cratering - biglyRead MoreEuropean leaders show no signs of having learned any military or political lessons from the war.
Suddenly, the air is full of pledges from Nato states to raise their defence spending by a percentage point or so, as if this would make well-equipped and trained army brigades spring magically out of the ground. In practice, this all takes time. Note also that it was not vastly expensive new generation aircraft, tanks and missiles which have transformed warfare in Ukraine, but the massive use of relatively cheap and not very sophisticated drones.
Trump may be a very bad man and a dictator in the making, but he does have a crude sense of political reality which European leaders, individually or collectively, show no signs of possessing. His aggrieved Nato allies complain of being exiled “to the kids’ table” during talks, while American and Russian grown-ups get on with the serious business of trying to make peace. Yet, supposing the humiliated Europeans had been included in these early negotiations with the Russians, what would they have said except that they did not want to talk to the Russians or would only discuss terms they knew the Russians would reject.
The devil incarnateTrump may be the devil incarnate but, when it comes to peace-making it is a mistake, as the old saying has it, “to give the devil all the best tunes”.As it is, there are few more disgusting sights than watching warmongering European politicians and jingoistic pundits campaign against a possible peace that might save a second million young Ukrainians and Russians from being killed or wounded.It is an impossible dream, but it would be only fitting to send those fulminating European war hawks into the front line in eastern Ukraine and see how long they maintain their opposition to a ceasefire.
Further ThoughtsA problem in improving treatment of the mentally ill is that 80 per cent of the public is profoundly ignorant of mental illness and 20 per cent know all too much about it. The latter category has usually gained its hard-won knowledge through coping with their own or a relative’s mental illness.if(window.
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adverts) { window.adverts.addToArray({"pos": "mpu_tablet_l3"}); }A misunderstanding among the 80 per cent of people ignorant of mental illness is that they believe that it is roughly the same as physical illness, but in crucial ways it is entirely different.
Diagnosis is the first stage in treating a physically ill person, but is far more difficult with the mentally ill because the nature and severity of their illness is uncertain. Saying a patient has paranoid schizophrenia or is bi-polar sounds definitive, like a diagnosis of TB or appendicitis, but in reality it is simply the name given to a collection of shifting symptoms. Drugs can control and mitigate these, but the medication does not cure the underlying illness.
“You may be surprised to learn that we have drugs that work quite well, but we do not know why they work,” a psychiatrist once told a friend of mine whose son was suffering from a breakdown.A further problem is that people do not understand that a psychosis, which means the defeat or retreat of the rational mind, is very different from mental ill health like most types of anxiety and depression. Talking therapies like cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) only work – and success is uncertain – if a mentally ill person is already stable on medication.
There is never any magic bullet.The greatest self-inflicted mental health disaster of the last half century was the closure of most of the old mental asylum system all over the world. This stemmed from not understanding or not caring that people with severe psychosis still need to be cared for by others.
The development of anti-psychotic drugs in the 1950s reduced, but did not end this need.Yet governments were attracted by the idea that they could close all those big expensive Victorian asylums, often sitting on valuable property, under the progressive sounding slogan of “de-institutionalisation” in the US and “care in the community” in the UK. Liberals bought into this programme because they persuaded themselves that people were being unnecessarily confined for unconventional behaviour, as shown in the influential film One Flew Over the Coocoo’s Nest (1975).
As a result of the closure of the old mental hospitals – no Garden of Eden but at least they provided a place of refuge for the most vulnerable – families were left to look after desperately ill relatives on their own. In the US, the number of beds available to psychiatric patients fell 90 per cent from 558,000 in 1955 to 53,000 in 2005. In the UK the fall has been from about 150,000 beds to 24,000 in 2022.
Many of those denied a bed now end up in a prison cell. Nobody appears to know precisely what proportion of the UK prison population are mentally ill, but in the US an expert report on beds for the mentally ill notes sardonically that the biggest de facto mental institutions in the US these days are Los Angeles County jail, Chicago’s Cook County jail and New York’s Rykers Island jail. if(window.
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adverts) { window.adverts.addToArray({"pos": "mpu_tablet_l4"}); }Beneath the RadarThe part of President Trump’s tirade against president Volodymyr Zelensky which got most media attention was his accusation that the Ukrainian leader was an unelected and unpopular “dictator”.
But much of Trump’s verbal assault on Zelensky was about US aid money, accusing him of wanting to “keep the ‘gravy train’ going”. He said that Ukraine had received “350 billion dollars” from the US, while Ukraine said the true figure was just under $100bn.Zelensky can rebut the allegation that he is an unpopular autocrat, but on corruption Ukraine is vulnerable.
Much of American assistance comes through USAid, some 40 per cent of the agency’s total dispersals. But now USAid has been largely dissolved and is being denounced as a sink of corruption by Trump and Elon Musk.Ukraine is probably vulnerable to any Trump-inspired investigation into how US aid money was spent in the three years since the Russian invasion on 24 February, 2022.
Last year, I was told by a source well-connected in Ukraine that one senior Ukrainian official had attempted to deposit $350m in cash in an Italian bank. The bank refused to accept the deposit, but the Italian authorities asked them to keep quiet about this.Officials in the Biden administration despaired of stopping Ukrainian government corruption – and did not want to denounce it publicly for fear of undermining public support for Ukraine – but they hoped to get the amount of money being stolen down from 40 per cent to 20 per cent of the total.
All this matters politically because one reason that US voters grudge aid to Ukraine and everywhere else is that they are convinced – not entirely wrongly – that their tax dollars, much needed at home, are being thrown away on corrupt regimes abroad. Trump may focus on this issue if his feud with Zelensky escalates.Cockburn’s PicksStriking to see the Financial Times calling for Thames Water, which has just been given permission by the courts to borrow another £3bn at high interest on top of its existing £17bn debt, to be effectively renationalised.
An editorial says that “Thames Water, which supplies a quarter of the UK population, is the poster-child for the failures of England’s experiment with privatising formerly public regional water companies, which were floated with zero debt in 1989.”if(window.adverts) { window.
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adverts.addToArray({"pos": "mpu_tablet_l5"}); }Curious to see privatisation, a centrepiece of Margaret Thatcher’s economic policy, laid to rest with so little ceremony.This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper.
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