Russia’s Grand Strategy

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Thursday 6th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[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.

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making a brilliant speech, and thereby shortening the one that I will make very considerably. He has made the comparison with the run-up to the second world war. One of the key final shocks in that catalogue of disaster was the unexpected Nazi-Soviet pact. Would the equivalent to that be some form of Chinese move against Taiwan, which would so distract the United States as to be the last piece of the jigsaw in the picture that he is painting of a Russian plan to dominate the European continent?

[Sir Bernard Jenkin]

I have no doubt that Russia and China are not allies, but they know how to help each other, and I think my right hon. Friend’s warning is very timely. As I said earlier, how we deal with Ukraine will reflect how Russia regards Taiwan and, I suppose, vice versa.

I was talking about the need to create our machinery of government and our culture in Government that can match the kind of strategic decision making that takes place in Moscow. I can assure the House that there are people inside and outside Whitehall who are seized of this challenge, and Members will be hearing more from us in the months ahead.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

At the beginning of March 1946, less than a week before Churchill delivered his iron curtain speech in Fulton, Missouri, the joint intelligence sub-committee of the chiefs of staff concluded:

“The long-term aim of the Russian leaders is to build up the Soviet Union into a position of strength and greatness fully commensurate with her vast size and resources.”

The JIC admitted that firm intelligence was difficult to obtain, as

“Decisions are taken by a small group of men, the strictest security precautions are observed, and far less than in the case in the Western Democracies are the opinions of the masses taken into account.”

Whilst

“likely to be deterred by the existence of the atomic bomb”,

of which the Americans then had a temporary monopoly,

“in seeking a maximum degree of security, Russian policy will be aggressive by all means short of war.”

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? “In brief,” the JIC warned

“although the intention may be defensive, the tactics will be offensive, and the danger always exists that Russian leaders may misjudge how far they can go without provoking war with America or ourselves.”

That was in 1946. Here we are, many decades later, but one can see resonances and the relevance of that analysis to the situation that we face today.

We have had two excellent speeches from Labour Back Benchers—I am only sorry that there are not more Opposition Members here, although I am hopeful that, if there were, they would have been largely singing from the same song sheet. However, it is one thing for us all to agree on a bipartisan basis on the analysis of what is wrong and quite another for us to be able to take steps to ensure the safety of the west, which seems to be imperilled rather more than at any time I can think of since at least the 1980s, when there was a huge movement to try and disarm the west of nuclear weapons unilaterally. What are we going to do, what steps are we going to take, and have we got confidence in the leadership of the western world to stand up for the values that seem to be common to all participants so far in this debate?

We have heard a masterly summary of the way in which Russia has been issuing ultimata to the west that are truly extraordinary. I must make a slight disclaimer at this point and say that I am speaking entirely in my capacity as a former Chairman of the Defence Committee, and certainly not as the current Chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee. Nothing that I say in this debate is predicated on anything that I have read, heard or discussed in that more recent capacity.

What I am about to say is the same message that so many of us have been trying to put forward for many years, which is that there is no real defence for Europe without the involvement of the United States. I was very interested to hear the remarks of my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin) about the fact that people should not denigrate the cold war. The cold war was a strategic success for democracy. There were two alternatives to the cold war: one was surrender and the other was nuclear war, so of those three, I think I know which was the preferential outcome. I also agree with the earlier observation that all the talk about grey zone warfare, and all the rest of it, is a sign that we are already involved in a cold war. It is a good thing, if we are faced by adversaries, to confront them, to stand up to them, and hopefully to prevent that from escalating into an open war: a hot war; all-out conflict.

How best can we do that? Well, it worked rather well from the mid-1940s until the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union in 1991. It was a mixture of two concepts: deterrence and containment. Deterrence involved two main elements: the involvement of the US, as I said, in European security, and the fact that there was a nuclear umbrella that might not deter all forms of aggression but could certainly protect us from nuclear blackmail. The point about containment is that, if you are not going to go to war with your adversary but you want to stop him taking you over and destroying your way of life, then you have to be prepared to hold him in check for decades on end. What a pity that somebody did not explain this recently to President Biden, who kept talking about “forever wars”. Are the Americans involved in a forever war in South Korea? Should they withdraw their limited military presence from South Korea? What do we think would happen then?

[John Spellar]

Surely that is exactly the wrong analogy. In Korea there is a stalemate and there are two societies. That is very different from fighting a forever guerrilla war in unfavourable territory. It is more about President Biden’s predecessor, who gave everything away to the Taliban in the same way that he encouraged Putin.

[Dr Lewis]

All analogies are risky and no analogies are perfect, but in one sense my analogy stands up: if North Korea now knew that America would not be prepared to go on indefinitely defending South Korea, does one honestly think that South Korea would have much of a future in the face of the regime that it faces across that parallel? Of course it would not.

I am not being partisan about this, because I believe that we are speaking on the very anniversary of ex-President Trump’s disgraceful behaviour in relation to the riots and the invasion of the Capitol, but I am very concerned that we are now faced with the prospect of someone who is manifestly not up to the job of taking on a ruthless, villainous gangster like Vladimir Putin and is going in to negotiate with him on the basis of an ultimatum put forward by Putin that effectively states that the NATO alliance has a take-it-or-leave-it offer: either it withdraws all its troops from the territory of any country that has joined NATO since the end of the cold war or it faces the prospect of military action in Europe. I believe that the great American people and the great American political system depend on more than any individual in the top job, but all I can say is that, if there are wise strategists around President Biden, they had better brief him a lot better, a lot more quickly and in a lot more depth than they did in the run-up to the disastrous unilateral withdrawal from Afghanistan.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

I will arrange a meeting for my right hon. Friend with the Chancellor so he can press that point.

I am also grateful to my predecessor, my hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Wendy Morton), who visited the region and built strong relationships. She was instrumental in demonstrating our commitment in this area.

I am wary of the time, so I will move on to a major concern that most Members articulated. The Government, like most hon. Members, are deeply concerned about the forced closure of human rights groups such as Memorial, which was closed down in the past few days. The work of this particular internationally respected group of historians and human rights experts is vital to defending human rights and preserving the memories of victims of political repression in Russia. The group has worked tirelessly for decades to ensure that the abuses of the Soviet era are never forgotten, and its closure is yet another chilling blow to freedom of expression in Russia. That demonstrates what my right hon. Friend the Member for Maldon (Mr Whittingdale) said about the gradual and ruthless suppression of dissent, human rights and media freedoms in the country.

The UK has been at the forefront of calling out Russia’s malicious cyber activity, in solidarity with our international partners. In 2020, in tandem with the European Union, we announced sanctions against the Russian intelligence services for cyber-attacks against the UK and our allies. Last month, we set out our new national cyber strategy, backed by £2.6 billion of funding, to help to protect the United Kingdom and our international partners. We are developing an autonomous UK cyber sanctions regime. Our sanctions are carefully targeted to respond to hostile acts, and to defend freedom and democracy. That includes sanctions on 180 individuals and 48 entities for the destabilisation of Crimea, Sevastopol and eastern Ukraine. We also announced asset freezes and travel bans against 13 individuals and an entity involved in the attempted murder of Alexei Navalny, the Russian Opposition politician.

We have taken multiple other actions to address the Russian threat in recent years. As we set out in our response to the Intelligence and Security Committee’s Russia report in July 2020, this includes new legislation to stop individuals at the UK border to determine whether they are, or have been, involved in hostile state activity. We have provided the security services and law enforcement with additional tools to tackle evolving state threats.

We take the threat from Russia extremely seriously. We are working closely with our allies and partners to set a strong, united, consistent signal that Russian aggression will have severe consequences. We will continue to engage with the Russian Government on matters of international peace and security, to address global challenges facing the world, including climate change and the coronavirus pandemic. We will also use these channels to raise any wider issues of concern to us.

[Dr Julian Lewis]

Will my hon. Friend allow me to intervene?

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

Forgive me, but I must allow my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex some time to conclude.

For us to work together, Russia must de-escalate its activities and engage seriously with the international community. Ultimately, we are all better in co-operation than in opposition, but I must underline what the Foreign Secretary said to this House earlier today. Our commitment to Ukraine is unwavering. Any Russian military incursion into Ukraine would be a massive strategic mistake and come at a severe cost, including co-ordinated sanctions.