Russia’s Grand Strategy

Daniel Kawczynski Excerpts

Thursday 6th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Sir Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered Russia’s grand strategy.

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for safeguarding a touch more than the three hours that we were promised for this most important debate. I am very grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for providing time for it at this most crucial moment, with developments in Ukraine and elsewhere.

The term “grand strategy” may seem something of a relic from previous centuries, and one that became irrelevant with the end of the cold war, but to think so would be to ignore what is happening in today’s world. There are many Governments around the world today who practise grand strategy, but sadly very few are allies of the west. Most are despotic regimes that are constantly challenging the rules-based international order on which western security and the global trading system depend. The most immediately threatening of such powers is, undoubtedly, Russia.

Today’s Russia has inherited an admirably precise and uniformly understood meaning of the term “strategy”. “Politika”, meaning policy, stands at the top of a hierarchy of terms and describes the goal to be achieved; “strategiya” describes how the goal is to be achieved. Military strategy is merely a subset of global, national or grand strategy.

So what is the goal behind Russia’s grand strategy? Putin’s goal is nothing less than to demonstrate the end of US global hegemony and establish Russia on an equal footing with the US; to change Russia’s status within Europe and become the pre-eminent power; to put Russia in a position to permanently influence Europe and drive a wedge between Europe and the USA; and to re-establish Russia’s de facto control over as much of the former Soviet Union and its sphere of influence as possible. As the strategy succeeds, Putin also intends to leverage China’s power and influence in Russia’s own interests. China, incidentally, will be watching how we defend Ukraine as it considers its options for Taiwan.

On 17 December, the Russian Foreign Ministry unveiled the texts of two proposed new treaties: a US-Russia treaty and a NATO-Russia treaty. Moscow’s purported objective is to obtain

“legal security guarantees from the United States and NATO”.

Moscow has requested that the United States and its NATO allies meet the Russian demands without delay.

This is, in fact, a Russian ultimatum. Putin is demanding that the US and NATO should agree that NATO will never again admit new members, even such neutral countries as Sweden, Finland and Austria, which have always been in the western zone of influence; that NATO should be forbidden from having any military presence in the former Warsaw pact countries that have already joined NATO; and that the US should withdraw all its nuclear forces from Europe, meaning that the only missiles threatening European cities would be Russian ones. The ultimatum is premised on a fundamental lie, which Putin has promulgated since he attended the Bucharest NATO summit in 2008 as an invited guest. That lie is that NATO represents a threat to Russian national security.

As Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov explained:

“The two texts are not written according to the principle of a menu, where you can choose one or the other, they complement each other and should be considered as a whole.”

He described the NATO-Russia text as a kind of parallel guarantee, because

“the Russian Foreign Ministry is fully aware that the White House may not meet its obligations, and therefore there is a separate draft treaty for NATO countries.”

Putin’s intention is to bind NATO through the United States, and bind the United States through NATO. There is nothing to negotiate; they just have to accept everything as a whole.

Russian media are already triumphant, proclaiming:

“The world before, and the world after, December 17, 2021 are completely different worlds… If until now the United States held the whole world at gunpoint, now it finds itself under the threat of Russian military forces. A new era is opening”.

[Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)]

My hon. Friend talks about Russian grand strategy and Russian grand design. I am sure that he will come on to talk about the way in which the Russians are using gas and energy to manipulate and coerce our key NATO partners in central and eastern Europe, such as Poland, with the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Does he agree that it is a disappointment that our own Government have not imposed sanctions on the companies involved in the construction of that pipeline?

[Sir Bernard Jenkin]

I will not comment on that particular suggestion, but I will be coming to the question of gas.

This ultimatum is, in fact, Russian blackmail, directed at both the Americans and the Europeans. If the west does to accept the Russian ultimatum, they will have to face what Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko calls

“a military and technical alternative”.

What does he mean by that? Let me quote him further:

“The Europeans must also think about whether they want to avoid making their continent the scene of a military confrontation. They have a choice. Either they take seriously what is put on the table, or they face a military-technical alternative.”

After the publication of the draft treaty, the possibility of a pre-emptive strike against NATO targets—similar to those that Israel inflicted on Iran—was confirmed by the Deputy Minister of Defence, Andrei Kartapolov. He said:

“Our partners must understand that the longer they drag out the examination of our proposals and the adoption of real measures to create these guarantees, the greater the likelihood that they will suffer a pre-emptive strike.”

Apparently to make things clear, Russia fired a “salvo” of Zircon hypersonic missiles on 24 December, after which Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, commented:

“Well, I hope that the notes”—

of 17 December—

“will be more convincing”.

We should be clear that Russia’s development of hypersonic weapons is already a unilateral escalation in a new arms race which is outside any existing arms limitation agreements. The Russian editorialist Vladimir Mozhegov commented:

“The Zircon simply does its job: it methodically shoots huge, clumsy aircraft carriers like a gun at cans.”

An article in the digital newspaper Svpressa was eloquently titled “Putin’s ultimatum: Russia, if you will, will bury all of Europe and two-thirds of the United States in 30 minutes”.

How have we reached this crisis, with the west in general, and NATO in particular, so ill prepared to face down such provocation, when Putin’s malign intent has been evident in his actions for a decade and a half? Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the west has too easily dismissed today’s Russia as a mere shadow of the former Soviet Union. Yes, it has an economy no greater than Italy’s; it has no ideological equivalent of communism, which so dominated left-wing thinking throughout most of the 20th century; it has very few if any real allies; and much of the rhetoric that emerges is bluster, reflecting weakness rather than strength. Nevertheless, we should not dismiss what Russia has done since 2008 and what Russia is capable of doing with its vast arsenal of new weaponry, and nor should we take a complacent view of Russia’s future intentions. After all, just months after the Bucharest summit in 2008, where he was welcomed as a guest, Putin seized Georgian sovereign territory in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. In 2014 he illegally annexed the Crimea. His aggression was rewarded, because we have tolerated these illegal invasions.

Many western leaders, and the bulk of the western public, have failed to understand that Ukraine is merely a component of a long-running hybrid warfare campaign against the west. They fail to appreciate the extent and nature of Russia’s campaign or the range of weapons used.

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[Sir Bernard Jenkin]

All I can say is, do not start me on the lamentable incoherence of 20 years of UK energy policy, because it is a disgrace, and something that we could have done so much better and that this Government are starting to repair, but it will take some time.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Sir Bernard Jenkin]

I have already given way to my hon. Friend, so I hope he will forgive me if I do not take up more time.

The constantly high level of Russian military activity in and around Ukraine and the attention being drawn to it have enabled the Kremlin to mount a huge disinformation campaign, designed to persuade the Russian people and the west that NATO is Russia’s major concern, that somehow NATO is a needless provocation—I am looking at my right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh), because I cannot believe how wrong he is on this—and that Russian activity is just a response to a supposed threat from NATO. That is complete rubbish.

The only reason the west is a threat to the regime in Russia is who we are and what we represent. We are free peoples, who are vastly more prosperous than most Russians, liberal in outlook, relatively uncorrupted and democratic. The Russian narrative is nothing but a mixture of regime insecurity and self-induced paranoia. Putin feels that Ukraine becoming visibly and irrevocably part of the western liberal democratic family would show the Russian population that that path was also open to Russia as an alternative to Putinism. Let us remind ourselves that Russia’s war against Ukraine in 2014 was provoked not by Ukraine attempting to join NATO, but by its proposed association agreement with the EU.

It is crucial to understand that Russia’s hybrid campaign is conducted like a war, with a warlike strategic headquarters at the National Defence Management Centre at the old army staff HQ, where all the elements of the Russian state are represented in a permanent warlike council, re-analysing, reassessing and revising plans and tactics. The whole concept of strategy, as understood and practised by Putin and his colleagues, is as something completely interactive with what their opponents are doing. It is not a detailed blueprint to be followed. It is primarily a measure-countermeasure activity; a research-based operation, based on real empiricism; an organically evolving struggle; a continual experiment, where the weapons are refined and even created during the battle; and where stratagems and tactics must be constantly adapted; and plans constantly rewritten to take account of our actions and reactions, ideally pre-empting or manipulating them. It is also highly opportunistic, which means that they are thinking constantly about creating and exploiting new opportunities.

To guide such constant and rapid adaptation, the strategy process must include feedback loops and learning processes. To enable that, what the Russians call the hybrid warfare battlefield is, as they describe it, “instrumented.” It is monitored constantly by military and civilian analysts in Russia and abroad, by embassy staff, journalists, intelligence officers and other collaborators, all of whom feed their observations and contributions to those implementing the hybrid warfare operations.

Meanwhile, western Governments such as ours still operate on the basis that we face no warlike challenges or campaigns. We entirely lack the capacity or even the will to carry out strategic analysis, assessment and adequate foresight on the necessary scale. We lack the strategic imagination that would offer us opportunities to pre-empt or disrupt the Russian strategy. We have no coherent body of skills and knowledge to give us analogous capacity to compete with Russian grand strategy. Our heads are in the sand. So much of domestic politics is about distracting trivia, while Russia and others, such as China, are crumbling the foundations of our global security.

Why does this matter? It matters because our interests, the global trading system on which our prosperity depends and the rules-based international order which underpins our peace and security are at stake. We are outside the EU. We can dispense with the illusion that an EU common defence and security policy could ever have substituted for our own vigilance and commitment. We must acknowledge that while the United States of America is still the greatest superpower, it has become something of an absentee landlord in NATO, tending to regard European security issues as regional, rather than a direct threat to US interests. Part of UK national strategy must be to re-engage the US fully, but that will be hard post-Trump. He has left terrible scars on US politics, and the Biden Administration are frozen by a hostile Congress, leading to bitter political paralysis. Nevertheless, the priority must be to reunite NATO.

Having initially refused to have a summit, President Biden has now provisionally agreed to a meeting with Putin on 9 and 10 January—this weekend—to negotiate what? We all want dialogue, and the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) speaking from the Opposition Front Bench earlier said we want dialogue, but it should not be to discuss the Russian agenda. Being forced to the table to negotiate that way would be appeasement. It would be rewarding threats of aggression, which is no different from giving way to aggression itself. What further concessions can the west offer without looking like appeasers? The Geneva meetings have to signal a dramatic shift in the west’s attitude and resolve, or they will be hailed as a Russian victory.

Some are now comparing the present decade to the 1930s prelude to world war two, where we eventually found we were very alone. If we want to avoid that, the UK needs to rediscover what in the past it has done so well, but it means an end to muddling through and hoping for the best. We cannot abdicate our own national strategy to NATO or the US. It means creating our own machinery of government and a culture in our Government that can match the capability and determination of our adversaries in every field of activity.

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[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

I warmly congratulate the be-knighted Member, the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin), on securing this very important debate.

I suspect I am going to agree with everybody and that everybody is going to agree wholeheartedly with one another today, but I think that that is important because it is important that Russia understands that the UK has a single voice on this matter. I am absolutely delighted that my political party has now returned to common sense on these issues. I welcome the new shadow Foreign Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy), and I am delighted that he is here for the whole debate. If I am honest, I wish that the Foreign Secretary were here, because this is the kind of debate that the Foreign Secretary should listen to. Let me start with some things I have said before. I have been saying some of them for a very long time, and when they were not very popular things to say in this Chamber.

In essence, there is a great lie at the heart of Putin’s strategy. His lie, first of all, is that the west is threatening Russia. In fact, the first clause of Russian military doctrine states that the existence of NATO is the greatest threat to the Russian Federation. That is a lie. Everybody in this Chamber would agree that NATO is a defensive alliance. There is no aggressive intention whatever behind our alliance. The second part of the lie is that Ukraine is oppressing Russians. That is remarkably similar to what Hitler said about the Sudeten Germans in the 1930s. It is also a blatant lie. Thirdly, he says that Russia is interested only in self-defence and auto-determination, and that that is the policy it tries to advance all around the world. That is a blatant lie. As we can see in all its activities, whether in Syria or the Balkans, it is very clear that Russia is always pursuing its own self-interest.

The last bit of the lie, repeated regularly in particular by Russian ambassadors to the Court of St James’s, is that everybody who disagrees with Russia’s attitude on any individual case is a Russophobe. It is almost an equivalent to antisemitism as far as they are concerned. That is a lie. Every single person in this House who takes an interest in Russia does so because we have a phenomenal respect for the Russian people, their history, their traditions, their arts and their culture. We only have to go to Russia for a day to understand what a phenomenal history they have. Whether we are talking about art, music, poetry or novelists, they have made such a phenomenal contribution to the world. None of us in this debate today is a Russophobe. We are all lovers of the Russian people.

What is actually happening in Russia, rather than Putin’s big lie, is an aggressive campaign of destabilisation. It takes two forms. The first is a destabilisation of the democratic west. This is a repeated theme. It is quite cheap. It is much cheaper to try to destabilise us rather than to go to war with us. I will say a little bit more about that later in relation to some of the secret documents I have obtained from the Kremlin.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

The hon. Gentleman is a strong proponent of the European Union and campaigned for our membership of it; how does he react to Germany and France bypassing sanctions on Russia and supporting things such as the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that clearly undermine our NATO partners in central and eastern Europe?

[Chris Bryant]

I completely agree with the hon. Gentleman about Nord Stream—indeed, I regularly try to berate British Government Ministers for not being robust enough and decisive enough on that issue. My anxiety about our having left the European Union is that there is a danger, in respect of the Europeans’ common security and defence policy, that they will renege on the kind of policies that we would like to see. I would like us to find a way of still sitting at the table so that we can influence such decisions. The Spanish Prime Minister once said to me that one problem with the EU maintaining its sanctions regime was that once Britain—frankly, the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May)—was no longer in the room, everybody started to fracture apart. I come to the same conclusion as the hon. Gentleman but from a different perspective.

Others have talked about the pattern of behaviour, about South Ossetia and Abkhazia, about the problems in North Macedonia and Catalunya, about the destabilisation in the United States of America and, of course, about the invasion of Crimea, as well as about the recent problems in Montenegro. All that is, of course, a deliberate distraction from the real problems of the Russian economy. I say that because I have a copy of a document—as does the hon. Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely); he may refer to it later—signed by President Putin himself on 22 January 2016. It clearly outlines Russia’s strategic aims. First, it notes the falling incomes of Russian people which, it says, could lead to significant social tension. It also notes the positive effect of the invasion of Crimea and the policy in the Donbass region on public opinion in Russia, but points out that that positive effect has been only temporary and may not last.

The document suggests that, consequently, Russia has to engage in a process of influencing other states in the world, particularly the United States of America and western democracies. It says it should do this, first, by the provocation of the emergence of a sociopolitical crisis in the United States of America; secondly, by the delegitimisation in the public consciousness of the state system in western democracies; thirdly, by instilling an internal social split in order to facilitate a general increase in the radicalisation of society in western democracies; and fourthly, by provoking the emergence of and strengthening non-traditional communities in the United States, with ideological focuses ranging from extremely right to extreme left but always with one message: they do not hear us. That is precisely what the Russian state has been doing for the past few years in the United States of America and in every western democracy, including the United Kingdom.

I know that the Intelligence and Security Committee looked at this issue, although I do not think it had that document. I do not understand why, when our own Intelligence and Security Committee has recommended changes in this policy area and the proper investigation of attempts to try to destabilise the British political system, the Government have simply refused to do so.

Frankly, we have been getting our policy on Russia wrong for two decades now. We vacillate and send off mixed messages all the time. We look weak and indecisive. We look as if we need Russia, rather than the other way round. We constantly make ourselves the supplicants—the demandeurs: “Please, don’t do that, Mr Putin. Please don’t do that!”

We tempt Russian oligarchs to the United Kingdom with easy visas: we had these golden visas that largely went to extremely wealthy oligarchs who had made their money corruptly in Russia, with no questions asked other than, “Do you have enough money?” We did not even ask, “Are you going to invest it in the United Kingdom?” We boast about our clever lawyers and accountants who can tidy things up so that assets are protected, however they have been obtained. We open up our high-end housing market to Russian billionaires even though we know that the best way to squirrel away a dirty fortune or, indeed, to launder £20 million is to buy a property that is worth £10 million for £20 million. Yes, £10 million is lost, but we have managed to clean up £10 million. That is precisely what has affected the London housing market so deleteriously. We even grant—Government Ministers do this—some Russian individuals anonymity in what is meant to be the public register in Companies House of beneficial ownership of companies.

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[Mr Ellwood]

I will explore that in more detail. Certainly, our gathering of the intelligence picture is second to none—we do that extremely well indeed—but today I will make an argument about our appetite to step forward and fill the vacuum that, I am afraid, has been temporarily left by the United States.

To go back to the three key themes, first, we have the state of the west. I believe that in the last decade we witnessed the high tide mark of post-cold war western liberalism. That is quite a statement to make in this Chamber. Since 9/11, a new form of asymmetric warfare has dominated western attention, but it has distracted us from the international rules-based order and recognising and supporting the importance of bolstering and updating the rules that we want to follow, which we earned after the second world war. We have not kept up with shifting power bases, new technologies and emerging threats.

As I alluded to, the United States—the one country that we look to for leadership—is missing in action, distracted and polarised by what is happening in its domestic scene. That is likely to get worse with the coming mid-terms.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

rose—

[Mr Ellwood]

I will not give way, as I have already done so once and I am conscious of the time.

The United States has temporarily retreated from the global stage, and there is a gap on the world stage for leadership that Britain should and—I hope—could fill.

Secondly, we have the rising influence of authoritarian states. Our adversaries are taking advantage of our weakness and becoming bolder, more confident and more assertive. They sense the west’s weakness. That is why we saw Putin not hesitate to invade Georgia and the Crimea as he sought to strike back in concern about NATO’s growing membership of former Warsaw pact countries. Such countries have joined both NATO and the EU. Retaliatory sanctions were of course imposed, but, given our reliance on Russia’s oil and gas, their impact was limited.

Finally, as other hon. Members have touched on, we have the fast-changing character of conflict, which Russia is excelling at. The strategic context that we face today is increasingly complex, dynamic and competitive. We face constant political warfare designed to erode our economic, political and social cohesion. Russia’s goal is to win without war fighting: to break our willpower and harness attacks below the threshold that would normally warrant a war fighting response. Russia excels at constant political conflict, deception, economic coercion, cyber-interference, large-scale disinformation and manipulation of elections, all underpinned by strong-arm tactics and military intimidation. That is what hybrid war looks like.

I argue that any threat can be measured by a simple formula: the product of the ability and intention to engage minus our ability and commitment to defend ourselves and our interests. During the cold war, Russia backed down over Cuba knowing that the United States would not turn a blind eye. But Russia’s ability to engage in conflict has dramatically improved in the last decade. It has made significant investments in all three of its military services—its army, air force and navy—as well as spilling out into the weaponisation of space, hypersonic missiles, as have been mentioned, and cyber capabilities. It is also developing a worrying alliance with China, sharing protocols and doctrines.

We need to understand Russia’s desire to engage and cause conflict. That requires an appreciation of its leader. Putin has long held the view that the west is to blame for the demise of the Soviet Union, not least because the privatisation of Russia’s nationalised industries saw so much Russian money leaving the country for the west. He believes that the west deliberately seeks to keep Russia weak; his goal since coming to power has therefore been to revive Russia as a global power that will again command respect from the west. Putin has long held the view that the west is to blame for the demise of the Soviet Union, not least because the privatisation of Russia’s nationalised industries saw so much Russian money leaving the country for the west. He believes that the west deliberately seeks to keep Russia weak; his goal since coming to power has therefore been to revive Russia as a global power that will again command respect from the west.

Putin’s strategy is very clear indeed. First, he needed to secure his own domestic power base by silencing his critics, controlling the message and providing an enemy for the nation to rally against. That is straight from the authoritarianism playbook: procure an external enemy on which domestic shortfalls can be blamed, and against which the population can rally when fed propaganda via state-controlled media. With that largely achieved, his second mission is to return Russia to superpower status, using its well-harnessed grey zone skillsets to expand Russia’s influence to counter the expansion of NATO and the European Union, specifically focusing on the Russian-speaking diasporas in neighbouring states.

Last month, an ever-confident Putin went further, effectively declaring that he wanted a new Warsaw pact to turn back history—back to the USSR. His ultimatum to the west starts with the obvious—the renunciation of any further enlargement of NATO to the east—but then demands that the US withdraw its protection from the 14 eastern European and Balkan states that have become members of NATO in the last 24 years.

All this, of course, is unacceptable to the west and to NATO members, which makes the prospect of an invasion ever more likely. That is the immediate threat to Ukraine. After the loss of the former Ukrainian President, Putin’s ally, it was clear that Ukraine would eventually join both NATO and the EU, which would see the western organisations rubbing up against the Russian border. That, for Putin, was unacceptable.

Let us put ourselves in Putin’s shoes. Would there be a better time to invade eastern Ukraine than right now? Over time, Ukraine will rearm and move closer to the west, making any invasion more of a challenge. That is why there are not just 100,000 infantry on the border, but special forces, field hospitals and missile systems—way beyond what would be needed just as a leveraging chip in discussions with the United States.

Russia is aware of the financial sanctions, but they will be limited because any impact on Russia will also affect its trading partners. Russia will, of course, retaliate with its energy provision to Europe, and in the long term it will simply expedite a closer relationship with China.

This is about more than just Ukraine. Russia is restoring its authoritarian clout in the international arena to the point that it is able to dictate its own terms in shaping the international community. It would not have taken NATO much hardware to deter Russia and make Putin think twice. I hear the argument that NATO is a defensive organisation and Ukraine is not a member, but that is a simplistic view of the threat picture, with potentially grave consequences for eastern European security, and it will embolden other authoritarian regimes to pursue their agendas to expand their own influence.

Where does that leave the west and the UK? We need to wake up and recognise just how fragile and dangerous our world has become. A question that I pose regularly to this House is whether we think the world will be more or less stable in the next five years; we know the answer. We have so many fires that have been left unextinguished—for example in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen and even Bosnia and Kashmir, where governance and security are starting to erode and fail. The bigger geopolitical threats, of course, are Russia and China. With two Presidents for life sitting in Moscow and Beijing with more power and time than they know what to do with, it is obvious that we must wake up to this crunch point in our history.

How we in the west conduct ourselves over the next five years could determine how the next five decades play out. If America chooses to step back, it does not mean that Britain should do the same. We are a nation that steps forward when others hesitate, as our history illustrates. If we do not, who will? That does not mean that we do all the heavy lifting, but our hard and soft power assets remain strong. What we are missing is the appetite once again to play a more influential role and offer the statecraft and thought leadership that the west is currently missing.

I make it very clear: we need a reality check. We need to stop kidding ourselves that we garner so much influence as senior members of the United Nations Security Council, NATO, the G7 and the Commonwealth, when those very organisations no longer harbour the clout or the vision to handle our modern and complex world. Power bases and alliances are shifting fast, but we seem to be in denial. The west needs to quickly remind itself what it stands for, what it believes in and what it is willing to defend.

To conclude, we need a Russia strategy. Our current trajectory on Russia is to see it slide progressively ever closer to China. I make the bigger point that this will be China’s century. How the world adapts to that is a whole other debate, but as we debate today what Russia is doing, would it not be easier to contest and challenge where China is going if we turned Russia 180° over the next decade, so that it is closer to the west than it is to the east? That would be a strategy that I think we could all agree with.

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[Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)]

As the sole Conservative Member of Parliament to have been born in a communist country, I know what the Russians are capable of on our continent. I remember returning to Poland to see my beloved grandfather in 1983, when martial law was finally lifted, and saw at first hand what the Russians did to the country of my birth in the coercion, manipulation and control of this country of central and eastern Europe.

Yet today we see a different form of manipulation on our continent by the Russians. There is no greater manifestation of that than the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. I have tried to raise this issue on a number of occasions. I had a debate on it last year. However, there seems to be little appetite from our own Government to take a lead on our continent in stopping this project, and I feel that it is now a missed opportunity. We have heard many times about the current poor American leadership and the flip-flopping that has occurred on the part of President Biden on the issue of Nord Stream 2, and indeed his pandering to Germany and others in allowing this pipeline to materialise. It gives the Russians unprecedented access to the very heart of our continent, not only in terms of their ability to control and manipulate gas prices, their main export commodity, but the blackmail and coercion they seek to put countries such as Ukraine under, as well as our NATO partners, the Baltic states, Poland and others. When he was President of the United States, President Trump, at a breakfast meeting with Jens Stoltenberg, made a very interesting comment that I strongly support. He asked what is the purpose of Americans sending troops and equipment to central and eastern Europe when one NATO country, namely Germany, completely ignores and bypasses the spirit and the letter of the law of NATO membership in terms of common energy security and common strategy, thereby giving hard currency to our main opponent in Moscow, which uses that money to put rockets, tanks and other aggressive equipment on the borders with Poland and other countries.

That is in stark contrast with Poland and Croatia. I want hon. Members to know that Poland has invested billions of dollars in a liquefied gas terminal in Świnoujście on the Baltic coast, and so has Croatia. These very sensible NATO partners are taking a lead in demonstrating that if you have the privilege of NATO membership—a situation peculiar to only 30 nations in the world—with that also comes responsibility. We need to start thinking, as NATO partners, about how we ensure that we follow the Polish and Croatian policy, which is to build liquefied gas capacity and to be less dependent on Russian gas. Where do you think the Poles are buying their liquefied gas from? From fellow NATO partners. They are building a pipeline directly to Norway, a fellow NATO partner, to buy their gas from there. They are buying liquefied gas from America, a fellow NATO partner. These are the sorts of examples that other countries such as Germany ought to follow.

Sweden, Finland, Ukraine and Georgia are the last major countries in Europe that do not have the benefits of NATO membership. I am very fond of my right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh), but I disagree with him fundamentally on this issue. We need to look as to how to incorporate and support these last four countries in joining the NATO partnership. This week—for the first time ever, to my knowledge—Finland started to talk about potentially joining NATO, because of Russia’s nefarious conduct in Ukraine.

Lastly, when Poland and the Czech Republic joined NATO in ’99, we heard the siren calls: that it was a step too far; that it would cause world war three. When Romania and Bulgaria joined in 2004, we heard those same calls. That did not lead to war, and we now need to support Ukraine and others in joining our organisation.