Relationship with Russia and China

Chris Bryant Excerpts

Thursday 24th February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Bob Seely (Isle of Wight) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House calls on the Government to develop separate but aligned cross-Government strategies for both Russia and China; and further calls on the Government to support the international order, working with allies across the globe to develop an approach to Russia and China that, whilst recognising their separate legitimate interests, ensures a robust defence of both UK interests and democratic values.

I will speak for 15 minutes, if I get that far, as I am mindful of others.

As of this morning, offensive war has once again broken out in eastern Europe, as Russian artillery and armour rain down on a peaceful neighbour. We have all seen the reports of columns moving from Crimea, of Kharkiv and Kyiv potentially being under threat and of bridges being blown up in Chernobyl as Ukrainians defend hearth and home.

This is arguably the first conventional war in Europe since 1945. The intentions of Vladimir Putin have long been clear: to control or destroy Ukraine, to shatter western unity, to build a new sphere of influence on the foundations of the USSR and to present the west as a decadent, mortal enemy of the Russian people and Russian identity. It is an agenda that is both febrile and dangerous, but sadly it is also very real. We have needed to understand it for some time, and we urgently need to get our heads around what is happening.

According to polling, the majority of Russians see war—and nuclear war—with the west as now more likely than not, which should be a sobering realisation for all of us. Russian state propaganda has prepared the population for conflict for years. The immediate news is clearly shocking, but I will still try to look more broadly, to talk about tactics rather than strategy and, where possible, to bring in China as much as Russia. People will forgive me if I do not always succeed.

Russia in the west and China in the east present differing but overlapping and increasingly significant threats. However imperfect our current global system, we have avoided major conflict, but that order is now under threat: in Ukraine today; potentially in Taiwan and the South China sea; and potentially in the Baltic and the Black sea in the weeks, months and years to come.

I lived and worked in Ukraine and the former USSR from 1990 to 1994, and I was fortunate enough to travel through the country for much of that time. I lived in Kyiv, but I well remember many of the places we are talking about now. I went down coal mines in Donbas, I visited Soviet dachas in Sevastopol, and in Moldova and Georgia I witnessed the first of the proxy wars engineered, probably, by the KGB. Many of my formative experiences as a young man were spent there, and I am deeply fond of the place and its people. What is happening pains me, because a KGB placeman will now pit Slavs against other Slavs to fulfil a fantasy about the Soviet Union and the world. The cold war was not a good world. It died 30 years ago and should remain dead. Tens of thousands are likely to die.

I would like to argue the following: the risk of direct conflict with Russia and China is growing and, in some senses, we are already in indirect conflict with both, in different ways—importantly, I am not directly comparing Russia and China. We are midway through a 20-year crisis with Russia that we are woefully ill-prepared for and have done our best to ignore. Frankly, this is now returning with a vengeance. We are at the beginning of a significant and potentially damaging change in our relationship with China—there may be greater opportunity there, but there may also be greater threat. Therefore, for the next 20 years the primary foreign policy goal for this country must be in old-school state relationships and the avoidance of direct conflict, and the establishment of working relationships with both, where we can, that are as productive as possible, while resolutely defending our values and our allies. I do not believe we are there yet by any means; and the coherence and integration of our foreign policy, and our policy in both cases, is not there.

Secondly, we need to understand the new world and the new styles of conflict being practised against us, and the new forms of covert and overt influence. Thirdly, as a result, we need to move to an era of “smart” containment, which is not only geographically based, but is a protection of our values, and of our IT property, our universities and law firms, and our City institutions and others. That includes things such as a national strategy council to complement the National Security Council, because frankly—the more I speak to people, the more I feel this—we need to relearn the arts of strategy and deterrence. We need to relearn how to use power properly—I believe we have forgotten that.

We also need to make provision for laws that we should have put in place years ago: a foreign lobbying Bill—my God, how many more scandals do we have to put up with before we realise we need one?; an updated espionage Bill; an economic crimes Bill; and changes to the libel and data protection rules to protect freedom of speech and to protect journalists from becoming peripheral victims of Russian oligarch intimidation to our freedom of speech.

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

I wish to add to this list, although I share in everything that the hon. Gentleman is saying. He is very intelligent and foresighted on these issues. Should we not also be looking at those who have dual nationality—Russian and UK, or Chinese and UK—reassessing and making them choose a nationality? Secondly, should we not be looking at everyone from China or from Russia who has a tier 1 visa and reassessing whether those should not be withdrawn?

[Bob Seely]

The hon. Gentleman make sensible points. I look forward to working with him on them and I thank him for his intervention.

Both the Russia and China leaderships see themselves as being in conflict or intense competition with the west. That may sound “hawkish”, but it is not designed to be so. It is designed to avoid conflict in the future by being clear about the times we live in. Let us face it: who of us today will claim that deterrence has worked in Europe? Let me remind the House that the best wars are not those that are won, but those that are unfought. Our greatest victory in world war three was that it did not take place, not that we destroyed our civilisation in order to destroy another.

In Russia, the security elites have believed for the past 20 years that they are in conflict with us—in a conflict of values and of information, with spheres of interest. President Putin alludes to a “western plot” that destroyed the Soviet Union and he sees “colour revolutions” in the same light. Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev regularly warns that the west wants to destroy Russia because we fear it and are jealous of it. The Kremlin’s confrontational strategy to change the post-cold war order began with a reassessment of military art in the early 2000s, which was played out somewhat in national publications such as Voennaya Mysl, or Military Thought, and Voenno-promyshlennyi kur’er—or Military-Industrial Courier. The result of that debate was a strategy that has, in effect, aligned Russia’s two ways of war, the conventional and the non-conventional, and seen the west as a psychological, spiritual and physical threat. It is not fundamentally a military doctrine—the Gerasimov doctrine—as some people falsely claim; it is actually a strategic art, not simply a military one. These ideas have formed in Russia’s military and national security doctrines, written by those around Putin, where the west is the existential threat, spiritual and physical. Swedish academic Maria Engström has discovered that at its worst there is a disturbing narrative among Russian ideologues that links Russia’s nuclear arsenal and Russian Orthodoxy, known as “Atomic Orthodoxy”, as the “sword and shield” against the Antichrist—the US and NATO. We are the Antichrist. The sword and the shield are also the symbols of Putin’s old KGB and now the FSB. We made the mistake of dismissing fringe Russian philosophers as neo-fascist nutjobs in the 1990s. Given what has happened since, it is unwise that we do the same again. In China, party document No. 9 lays out quite clearly that the Communist party seeks a dominant position of its socialism over western capitalism. The language of win-win is for an external audience, for us. The language domestically is to win and to dominate, and again we should be under no illusion about that.

Whereas Russia is a declining power, China is rising one. They present different but related threats, and both, to a greater or lesser extent, use the tools of hybrid conflict. The principle behind this is not just war plus information ops; it is much more. It is to see state competition as Darwinian, with war as an extension of politics—as set out by von Clausewitz—and politics as an extension of conflict. The latter idea was peddled by German world war General Erich Ludendorff in his book, “The Total War”. China believes in something similar, as readers of “Unrestricted Warfare”, published in the late 1990s, will know. Our opponents are harsh, harsh realists. Their secret police disappear people. They are not liberal internationalists. Although they share legitimate interests, and we need to work on those legitimate interests, their mindset is different from ours.

Putin is a product of the KGB; an organisation involved in some of the greatest crimes in human history, but one that, unlike the SS, has never had to collectively accept responsibility. He is both deeply rational and highly irrational. Russian integrated strategic decision making is years ahead of the west. Its general staff is probably the last Prussian organisation on earth. This war has been planned for years. He knows that EU dependency on energy is worsening and he has built up tens of billions in reserves. I suspect he laughs at the ad hoc tactics of the west, where we ask, “Do we do a no-fly zone? Do we do this? Do we do that?” From him, this is, as Sun Tzu would say, “tactics before strategy”—it is “noise before defeat”.

Putin is also fuelled by a bitter and cold anger at the loss of the USSR—at the loss of Ukraine—which he cannot abide and refuses to accept. This is the third stage of the Ukrainian conflict. The first, between 2004 and 2014, involved economic and political tools. The second stage, between 2014 and 2022, involved those as well as paramilitary violence. In their hybrid tools, both Russia and China seek elite capture in this country. We know about Huawei and about the academics and the universities. Twice in this House I have heard the claim that Huawei is a private company. Anyone who knows anything about one-party states and about communism knows that that is an incredible and bad claim for a Minister, or for an official putting words into a Minister’s mouth, to be saying. Both countries use covert military force. Both use an intimidating conventional military presence. Both use culture. Both use covert control of the media.

So what is our response? First, it is to understand our adversaries and potential enemies, because they spent a great deal of time understanding us. We need to keep reaching out to their leaders, however futile that now is in the case of Russia, and to their people. We also need to have a conversation in our own house about how we clean up our own house—about the Bills we need to bring in, which I have mentioned: the foreign lobbying law; the data protection law; and the laws on economic crimes.

That is just a start. If Confucius Institutes wish to remain in this country, they must stop spying on Chinese students, and be willing to discuss Hong Kong and Tiananmen Square. If not, they should be shut down. Military dual-use work should be banned. Work for Chinese military universities should be banned. Recruiters for the Chinese secret agencies need to be exposed and prosecuted. Front organisations such as the Chinese Students and Scholars Association should be banned. [Interruption.] I am aware of the time, Mr Deputy Speaker. We need to become significantly less strategically dependent on industry and manufacturing from China, not least because of the environmental damage they do to our state. Globalisation has in many ways been a force for good, but we need to have a conversation with ourselves about whether offshoring so much of our industry is a good thing.

The military dividend—the peace dividend—is over. Spending 2% on defence is not acceptable. To put it crudely, we need a bigger Navy and a bigger Air Force. We need to rebuild our alliances throughout the world. If there is one thing unique about British strategic culture—one of the greatest things this country has done in 200 years, arguably more than any other—it is our ability to build alliances throughout the world. We need to be at the heart of the building of new alliances. Potentially, our second carrier should be part of the CANZUK—Canada, Australia, New Zealand and UK—fleet. Potentially, we should put a physical NATO base in the Suwalki gap between Kaliningrad on one side and Belarus on the other.

I could go on but I am mindful of the time, so let me sum up. There are two courses for humanity in the 21st century. The first is the western model of a law-governed society with politicians under the control of the people. It is incredibly imperfect, as we all know, but it is the best hope for mankind. The second is the new militarism of high-tech authoritarianism that is championed by Russia, and a little bit by China. It promises the data-inspired, artificial-intelligence control of populations. We need foresight, strategy and resolve to fight to defend our values and the future of humanity. We should not underestimate the scale of the task nor shy away from it. The defence of human freedom, wherever it is in the world—in Taiwan, Ukraine, the Baltic or the Black sea—is the struggle for our age.