2024-01-31
The penny is dropping, so to speak.
We can fight the climate (and lose!) or fight Mr Putin (and lose). Or of course we can pretend to fight both, but everybody would see through that ... wouldn't they?
War requires energy and in quantity, but "green" doesn't deliver.
And it isn't merely about steel, although that comes into it depending upon whether Mr Putin would allow us time to prepare.
But why would he? He wouldn't. He strikes me as being very rational, particularly about defending Russia and the Russian Federation. So unless we believe that he is only bluffing about defence (which flies in the face of his track record so far) we would be well advised to negotiate a proper defence understanding with him - you stay out of our back yard (which doesn't include the Ukraine) and we will (for a change) stay out of yours. And allow "mutual" inspection ...
We negotiated appropriate treaties with the USSR in times past, so why not with the Russian Federation?
Neville Chamberlain famously returned from Germany with a bit of paper proclaiming "Peace in Our Time" at a time when Britain had plenty of home-produced coal and steel and an extensive Navy - but we still needed to deploy "diplomacy" to secure a temporary peace.
Such a negotiation might be done in bad faith, to buy time to prepare for a real war, as were the Minsk Agreements. But Mr Putin certainly well remembers the old adage "fool me once, shame on you - fool me twice, shame on me", so it does seem that the time for negotiation may have expired.
Still, the only alternative to "war war" remains "jaw jaw".
"China’s coal-fired economy is why it can readily build its new navy, just as we once did"
Prof Gwythian Prins explains for the hard of comprehension.
