Lord Hannan of Kingsclere was a Conservative MEP from 1999 to 2020, and is now President of the Institute for Free Trade.
This is not the first time a conflict in Gaza has distracted us from Russian revanchism.
“The bitter division in public opinion provoked by the British intervention in the Middle East has already had one disastrous consequence,” wrote Malcom Muggeridge in 1956 after the start of the Suez war – a war fought as much in Gaza as Sinai. “It has deflected popular attention from the far more important struggle in Hungary.”
Ukrainians fear that the horrors in Gaza and Israel are hogging the attention their Western backers. Some suspect that Vladimir Putin and his Iranian allies encouraged the Hamas atrocities precisely to open a second front against the democracies.
I fret that defeat in Ukraine – and anything that allows Putin to keep his gains is a defeat, not just for Ukraine but for the post-1945 world order – would be a Suez moment for the West.
We made the decision to arm Ukraine; if it loses, we lose. As our global reputation gives ground, so will the ideas associated with our civilization: personal autonomy, private property, impartial courts, regular elections, limited government, human rights.
Suez, remember, was a military victory. British, French, and Israeli troops were making huge gains when they were ordered to stop. Our Paras had seized the airfield at El Gamil, while their French counterparts had taken Port Fuad. The Royal Marines had carried out a successful amphibious landing, and allied tanks were streaming south, mopping up what little Egyptian opposition they encountered.
We were defeated by international pressure, not local resistance. In a decision that he came to regret more than any other, Dwight Eisenhower demanded a ceasefire. With British commentators fulminating against the invasion, the Labour Party in uproar, and the rest of the world cheering Nasser as an anti-colonialist hero, Anthony Eden backed down.
“I cannot understand why our troops were halted”, declared an incredulous Winston Churchill. “To go so far and not go on was madness”.
Britain’s prestige never recovered. The country that had very recently dominated a unipolar world, and that was still seen, in 1956, as a great power, ranking alongside the United States and the Soviet Union, became a busted flush. Pro-British regimes, especially in friendly Arab nations such as Iraq, were toppled. Nasserism and related viral strains, including Ba’athism, spread across the region.
Many of our allies had been in the British camp, not because they cared about Magna Carta, nor yet because they were sending their sons to Harrow and Sandhurst, but because, as Osama bin Laden was later to put it, they preferred a strong horse to a weak horse.
How spavined the Western horse will look if the lines in Ukraine freeze close to their present positions. Hedging neutrals will conclude that Nato, with all its allies and auxiliaries, all its technological and economic advantages, cannot achieve the minimal aim of restoring recognised international borders.
I was optimistic when the counter-offensive began. I expected Ukrainian troops to reach the Sea of Azov, cut Putin’s land bridge to Crimea, and kettle the Russian garrison there. That would have prompted talks on restoring Ukrainian sovereignty. Sure, there would be give and take, greater autonomy for the eastern oblasts, perhaps a referendum in Crimea under international supervision; but the basic principle would have been upheld that aggression is not rewarded.
But the Ukrainian counteroffensive has failed – or, as Volodomyr Zelensky puts it, “has not achieved its desired results”. Ukraine made minor gains in the south, but the initiative has now swung back to Russia, which is again striking at Ukraine’s energy infrastructure and has loosed an unprecedented number of drones.
It is still possible that Ukraine will break through. But Putin’s strategy of holding out until Donald Trump or another anti-war Republican is elected, and then imposing a peace based on what the negotiators will call “facts on the ground”, is looking a lot more plausible now than three months ago.
Let’s not pretend that such an outcome would simply amount to an local failure on distant steppes. It would be Suez times ten, a moment when the West collectively was too weak to save an ally.
We can already see what happens when rogue states sense that the policeman is no longer on his beat. But never mind hostile countries like Iran and North Korea. Consider the behaviour of states which we thought were on our side.
India and Israel are democracies that might have been expected to denounce Putin’s unprovoked war. Both instead chose to break with the West and remain neutral. Both have since shown that they don’t care what the White House thinks. Israel has brushed off pleas to alter its campaign methods in Gaza, while India seems to have gone as far as to order the assassination of a Canadian citizen.
Would a Ukrainian breakthrough shore up our authority? Yes, a bit, at least for a while. It would make Taiwan safer, draw Delhi back into the fold and concentrate minds in those autocracies that see the eclipse of the West as an opportunity to settle local scores (Venezuela’s claim on Guyana being the latest example).
More than this, victory in Ukraine would open the door to a post-Putin Russia, and an end to the disruption that has been pouring out of the Kremlin for years, whether in the form of online propaganda designed to undermine the legitimacy of Western institutions or in the form of raw Wagner power.
Is the problem, as Ukrainians sometimes complain, that Western leaders don’t really want Putin to lose – or, more precisely, that they prefer an orderly transfer of power in Russia to the chaos of a total defeat? Or are they being lackadaisical, sending too little too late?
Or are we in some sort of ghastly 1915 situation, where military technology is so tilted in favour of the defender that the only way to win us to grind the enemy down through years of attrition?
Because we probably don’t have years. In less than 12 months, Trump, with his weird adulation for Putin, could be back in the White House. The West would be seen, like Britain at Suez, to have given up for want of resolve. Other countries would draw their own conclusions. The world would become altogether darker and colder.