The Times - UK (2022-05-26)

Our cult of perfection

has devalued beauty

James Marriott

Page 30

on friendly terms with Vladimir

Putin, wrote that “it is incompatible

with the rules of the existing world

order for Russia to annex Crimea”. A

few weeks later Russia annexed

Crimea. Three years later Kissinger

discovered it was after all compatible

and advised president-elect Donald

Trump to recognise the annexation.

Five years on and the lesson Putin

drew from all this was to try to get

the whole thing. Why on earth

would you believe that, “off-ramped”

with a large chunk of war-ravaged

Ukraine, rested and resupplied, he or

his successors would not be back for

the rest? Why would Ukrainians

believe this? Or “strategically

marginal” places such as Finland,

Estonia, Moldova?

It isn’t (as Barack Obama

discovered in Syria after 2013)

western red lines that create disasters

but the failure to act when they are

crossed. The Syrian failure established

a vacuum that Russia stepped into. A

year later Russia stepped into Crimea.

If Kissinger was offering honest

advice, why didn’t he deliver it to

Zelensky in private? Where Putin

and his advisers could not hear it

and take strength from it? Perhaps

because you can still, even at 98, be

horribly vain as well as terribly

wrong.

Kissinger’s cynicism is music to Putin’s ears

Telling Ukraine it must surrender land to Russia reflects an outdated realpolitik that will only fuel future conflict

ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES

opponents. What the people of Chile

wanted was of no account.

Or, as his authorised biographer

Niall Ferguson put it, “arguments that

focus on loss of life in strategically

marginal countries — and there is no

other way of describing Argentina,

Bangladesh, Cambodia, Chile, Cyprus,

and East Timor — must be tested

against this question: how, in each

case, would an alternative decision

have affected US relations with

strategically important countries?”.

It’s not just that this attitude is

immoral — why do we go on so

much about liberty and democracy?

— or that it is outdated and has been

since 1989, but it doesn’t even work.

American action in Chile, for

example, helped poison US relations

with Latin America for half a century.

In 2014 as the Russians seemed to

threaten Crimea, Kissinger, always

Henry Kissinger appears to give no

weight to what the Ukrainians want

Volodymyr Zelensky and his people

that there is a limit to how far the

United States and Nato will go to

confront Russia”. The editorial board

can conceive of no argument about

this from other Nato countries. I

would be ashamed to have written

such an editorial.

There are a series of expressions

that leach out of the expert world

and come to infect the pundit world.

“Mission creep” and “exit strategy”

were two from the 1990s. Today we

have “off-ramping”. Vladimir Putin,

having invaded his unthreatening

neighbour, causing thousands of

civilian and military deaths and

billions of pounds worth of damage,

must now be offered something to

get him to go away. Something small

to celebrate, like a piece of Ukraine.

He should be given territorial

Danegeld so he can exit the Total

War Highway.

As for the bloodied but “wise”

Ukrainians, they will be persuaded

that although they have fought the

school bully to a standstill, refusing

to hand over their pocket money,

they need now to help him save face

by just giving him half of it. That’ll

learn him.

This, apparently, is “realism”. So to

counter Russian hyper-cynicism, we

are invited to adopt Kissingerian big

power cynicism. We’ll talk the talk of

freedom and territorial sovereignty,

and do the deed of rewarding the

nuclear-armed aggressor with a bit

of someone else’s land.

That this would be Kissinger’s view

is no revelation. When the socialist

Allende government was elected in

Chile in 1970 Kissinger led those

advocating a policy of non-tolerance

on the basis that the US could not

afford an apparently successful leftist

government in its backyard. What he

could tolerate was a far-right

dictatorship that murdered its

I

think they call it “skin in the
game”. In Davos on Monday the
98-year-old Henry Kissinger was
speaking on the subject of
Ukraine. He advocated that
Ukraine should cede territory to
Russia and end the war by returning
to the “status quo ante”. This would
involve Ukraine accepting the Russian
occupation of Crimea and agreeing
to Russian de facto annexation of
two provinces (provinces which are
still fiercely contested).
I didn’t hear him. Somehow my
Davos invitation, like my
knighthood, fails to arrive year after
year. But the next day I was at the
Education World Forum in London
to hear the Ukrainian education
minister, Serhiy Shkarlet, talk about
how his country has tried to keep
children’s learning going under
Russian bombardment. He spoke, he
said, “as a teacher, a father and a
Ukrainian” and repeated his
president’s determination not to give
up Ukrainian territory in the face of
Russia’s criminal aggression. He
received a standing ovation.
As far as we can tell, a significant
majority of Ukrainians agree with
their education minister and not
with a foreign nonagenarian who
was never elected by anyone and
who departed his last administration
when James Callaghan was prime
minister.
However, Kissinger’s great-
grandfatherly advice, in which he
exhorted Ukrainians to “show
wisdom”, coincides with the ending

of the mild triumphalism that

followed Russia’s withdrawal from

around Kyiv. Now in the east it’s a

war of terrible attrition and the

Russians have the brute advantage.

They are laying waste to the region

in order to occupy it and we have

entered a new phase. Meanwhile,

though the Ukrainians do the dying,

the rest of us feel a growing

discomfort. No one is bombing us,

but prices are going up. So perhaps

Kissinger was just spelling out in

clear terms what others are thinking

but are too mealy-mouthed to

express?

Take this example. Last week The

New York Times carried an editorial

of Janus-like opacity on the subject

of the war. Yes, the authors said, back

in March they had been right to

argue that “Ukraine deserves

support against Russia’s unprovoked

aggression” and that resistance to

Putin’s violence had to be led by the

US. “That goal cannot shift”, they

wrote. Then added, “but”. “But

popular support for a war far from

US shores will not continue

indefinitely. Inflation is a much

bigger issue for American voters

than Ukraine.”

But does anything flow from this

“but”, which suddenly qualifies what

was supposedly an unshakeable

determination? Well, apparently Kyiv

must make some war-ending

decisions which, the newspaper

asserts, are “painful territorial” ones.

Such as what? Alas, unlike

Kissinger, the authors do not care to

say but rather advise President Biden

to “make clear to President

In the 1990s we had

‘exit strategy’. Today

we have ‘off-ramping’

If he was offering

honest advice, why not

deliver it in private?

Comment

David

Aaronovitch

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the times | Thursday May 26 2022 29