NOT long ago I chanced upon a book whose provocative title demanded that it be investigated. Its red cover, with a fireball from a tank and freshly launched missile as the backdrop, proclaims: 2017 War with Russia. The subtitle declares: An urgent warning from senior military command.
I did not expect to find a novel between the covers, but that’s what it turned out to be: a lurid militaristic fantasy framed in cringingly clunky prose and peppered with Orwellian acronyms. Towards the end of his extended preface, the author, Gen Sir Richard Shirreff, announces: “This is not fiction as such. This is fact-based prediction…”
Until a couple of years ago, this British general was the deputy supreme allied commander Europe, or DSACEUR as he prefers to put it. One of Shirreff’s former bosses, retired US Navy admiral James Stavridis — lately mentioned as a possible running mate for the hawkish Hillary Clinton — contributes a suitably Russophobic foreword to the book.
The book comes across as an inveterate warmonger’s fantasy.
Another was US Air Force general Philip Breedlove, who surrendered his Nato post in May. Recently hacked emails from his Gmail account suggest he was determined back in 2014 to undermine what he saw as the White House’s contemptuous restraint in the face of Russian manoeuvres in Ukraine and its annexation of Crimea. He sought advice from potential allies such as retired generals Colin Powell and Wesley Clark on “how to frame this as an opportunity where all eyes are on [the militant Islamic State group] all the time”.
Breedlove, Stavridis and Shirreff come across, in real life, as potential characters from a 21st-century version of Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant Cold War satire, Dr Strangelove. And perhaps the only value of Shirreff’s derisory debut novel lies in its depiction of the dangerously belligerent mindset at the helm of Nato’s US-led military command structure.
In fact, it wouldn’t be particularly surprising to find Shirreff taking credit for Nato’s ongoing show of strength in the Baltics, reaffirmed at this month’s Warsaw summit, with thousands of American, Canadian, British and other Western troops deployed on Russia’s borders, ostensibly to thwart Vladimir Putin’s ambitions. Just last month, Germany’s foreign minister was sufficiently alarmed by what he saw to warn against “[inflaming] the situation further through sabre-rattling and warmongering”, adding: “We are well-advised to not create pretexts to renew an old confrontation.”
Nato took shape in 1949, six years before the rival Warsaw Pact was launched, with the intention, as its first chief, Lord Ismay, put it, of keeping “the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down”. When the Warsaw Pact crumbled some 40 years later, Nato refused to accept its raison d’être had ceased to exist. Its quest for new enemies led it into uncharted territory. Its military role in the former Yugoslavia could at least be justified on the basis that it was still operating in Europe. Extending its reach to Afghanistan and Libya was always a bit of a stretch, independent of the dubious consequences of these interventions.
The disintegration of the Soviet bloc and the Soviet Union’s demise were accompanied by US assurances that Nato would maintain its distance, but soon all bets were off. Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic were welcomed as Nato members in 1999. Many other Eastern European states followed five years later, alongside the former Soviet Baltic republics.
In Shirreff’s book, which comes across as an inveterate warmonger’s wet dream, Russia first carves a land corridor to Crimea in Ukraine, then embarks on an enterprise to recolonise the Baltics. An intrepid bunch of Brits offer invaluable assistance to US forces in reversing the occupation by infiltrating the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave between Lithuania and Poland, and retargeting the nuclear weapons there towards Russia. The nuclear blackmail inevitably pays off, Russia withdraws from the Baltics, and a humiliated Putin — never actually mentioned by name — struggles to stay afloat politically in a nation that no longer respects or fears him.
Putin is a deeply troubling character at many levels, and Russia could indeed be a far better place minus its Putinism and oligarchism that accompanied the restoration of capitalism. He feels obliged, perhaps, to make occasional noises about the Russian-speaking minorities in Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania. He’s not stupid enough, though, to consider any of these countries just another Chechnya.
He is, however, inclined to react precipitously to provocations. Already hemmed in by the EU’s economic sanctions, which generally operates in close coordination with Nato, Russia could indeed lash out at the perception of a self-declared enemy at its doorstep, turning Shirreff’s disingenuous nightmare into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
At which point Nato’s warlords would presumably proclaim ‘we told you so!’, although it would actually be a case of ‘we made it so’.
Published in Dawn, July 20th, 2016
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