Ukraine

Lord Dykes Excerpts

Thursday 3rd April 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Dykes (LD)]

My Lords, I very rarely disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Judd. I agree very much with his exhortation that we should not carry on preaching. Time is very short, so all I have time for is to refer to some aspects of the historical past and the United States’ policy on this matter because there were faults everywhere in the long lead up to what has happened.

I congratulate my noble friend Lady Falkner on launching this debate. I would embarrass her by commending the thoughtfulness and restraint she has shown on this matter in recent weeks. John McCain and other people would probably like a third world war—perhaps that is an unfair comment on John McCain, but there are some people who would relish the idea. They are a tiny minority, thank goodness, and most people are being very sensible and empirically restrained on this matter.

If you go back to the end of the Cold War, there is a link with the United States and the inconsistency of American leadership in these matters. It is no good us being slavish supporters of everything the United States does. That has been a great mistake for Britain. I hope we will get away from it if we become once again a self-confident member of the European Union. At the moment, we are in transition from nervousness to panic about UKIP and all that, but we need to get our self-confidence back and be a strong, active member of the European Union.

NATO is taking the lead. I think what has been done so far has been correct. Russia has quite rightly been condemned, but the inconsistency in America has been there. When the Cold War ended, we saw the reaction to the end of the Soviet Union. The humiliation that Russians experienced at that stage was enormous, but instead of us being sympathetic to that psychologically and supporting Russia as a great world country, even if not a leading world power, we were very aggressive and critical about Russia and all its aspects, particularly Russian civil society, and said that there was nothing good about Russia. Everything was wrong there and suspect, although there are things to worry about, as my noble friend Lord Chidgey said. I think the Russians probably expected us to do the same as them. They folded up the Warsaw Pact. We carried on with NATO. I think Putin also expected that NATO would finish, but we found artificial out-of-theatre excuses to carry on with NATO. These things have to be accepted empirically and objectively. I am not talking down our Western cause because that is the priority for all of us.

When the promise was made to Gorbachev, and I think repeated to Putin and to Yeltsin as well, that there would not be a NATO country next to Russia, that solemn promise was breached by the West and NATO. These things are facts. You can imagine that someone with the personality of Putin would react in the wrong way, aggressively, to those things, but I hasten to add that that does not condone what has happened in Crimea. The referendum is a reality. We have to accept it. If Russia were foolishly to go further than that into new territories or attack Ukraine, it knows that that would be madness. We hope and pray that this is the end of this affair, so far. It is not easy to see how it will work out in the longer term. There may be a reconciliation between the more democratic Ukraine and Russia as the end result. That would be a very good result.

The inconsistency of American policy in the Middle East peace process has allowed 35 vetoes since 1967 and has allowed Israel, a wonderful country with wonderful people but a lousy Government, to disobey international law all the way through and get away with it. Quite rightly, Saddam Hussein was expelled from Kuwait after one year by the international community. However, Israel has been in the Occupied Territories for nearly 50 years and nothing has been done about it. People notice these things. There is an idea that John Kerry will suddenly come along and say, “Well, I hope you didn’t notice what happened before but we’re now going to solve it”, but there is now a complete vacuum. Netanyahu will not co-operate. You have to have a sensible Government. It is no wonder that young Israelis have gone to live in Berlin: they are fed up with the situation in Israel with its extreme policy. Therefore, the United States’ leadership has been weak and inconsistent. It needs to be better in the future and then it can claim to be perhaps not the exclusive leading world power but a very important country.