Ukraine

Vladimir Putin has invaded Ukraine, a chilling moment that cries out for a tough response. Thankfully, the president of the United States has deployed his usual silver tongue. "The world will hold Russia accountable," Joe Biden said last night. "I will be monitoring the situation from the White House this evening and will continue to get regular updates from my national security team." Cue Cockburn nearly collapsing from the sheer rhetorical power of that statement. It's a wonder the Russian tanks didn't screech into reverse and roll back over the border. Cockburn understands this is a dangerous situation that calls for delicacy and forethought. But were such bland bromides really the best the leader of the free world could do?

As the Ukraine situation heats up, you can already picture the insider account Vice President Kamala Harris will publish one day in her 2025 bestseller Thirty-One Days in February. But then, as any survivor of the Cuban Missile Crisis is bound to tell President Joe Biden, “I knew Jack Kennedy, Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine, and you, Joe Biden, are no Jack Kennedy.” One of the clichés if not the myths about the Cuban Missile Crisis was that President Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev were playing chicken and Khrushchev “blinked." Under threat of potential nuclear war, he then decided to withdraw the Soviet nuclear missiles from Cuba. We now know that what really happened was more complicated than the initial reports made it appear.

Whatever the West’s response to Russia’s attack on Ukraine’s sovereignty, the crisis demonstrates the limitations of western politics and policy across the board. If Vladimir Putin understands any demographic better than the Russian people, it is the governing class of the West: that Harvard-Oxbridge-Sciences Po axis of toweringly smug and practically interchangeable global-liberals who weep for international norms they weren’t prepared to defend. Their ideas and their sanctions are tired because they are civilisationally tired. Putin knows this, but none of the rival ideologies aiming to replace liberalism have anything better to offer.

The White House told us with absolute certainty that there would be an invasion of Ukraine this week — instead Vladimir Putin bit off a chunk of Ukraine without firing a shot. Perhaps it seemed to him that recognising the two breakaway territories of Luhansk and Donetsk was a clever move: he had not, after all, ignored the warning that — in Boris Johnson’s phrase — one Russian soldier putting a toe-cap over the border would make sanctions inevitable. But sanctions will come anyway — the issue is only about how severe they will be — imposed because, as Johnson says, there has been a clear breach of international law.