Paul Lay 

Until recently, I had assumed that democracy in the UK was safe and assured. That now feels like a misperception and, for obvious reasons, a perilous one. Ultimately, democracy depends on those on both sides of the political divide – and in the UK, historically, we tend to view politics though a binary lens – being ready to lose. Yet, for the first time in my lifetime, intelligent, decent democrats, such as Lord (Andrew) Adonis and Professor A.C. Grayling, among others, are calling this consensus into question.

This is particularly ironic given the celebrations in the UK of the centenary of suffrage for (some) women and all men. The suggestion that a Brahmin class knows best argues against the general belief in the stress-tested wisdom of a British electorate, which rarely gets things wrong and remains supremely un-ideological.

It is worth recalling, though, some of the reasons women got the vote in the first place. Certain politicians argued that women, particularly those from the upper and middle classes who got the vote in 1918, would act as a counterweight to the socialist demands expected from the newly enfranchised male working classes. And they were right, so much so that all women were given the vote by a Conservative government a decade later. 

Cynicism is one thing, however. Nihilism, quite another.

Victoria Schofield

The idea that the United Nations ever had any mandatory authority to resolve the conflict between India and Pakistan over the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir is a dangerous one. For 70 years, the bogey of potential UN involvement has hung over the conflict between those two nuclear neighbours, India and Pakistan.

There are those (mainly in Pakistan) who support the UN’s involvement, believing that it has the authority to hold a plebiscite in Jammu and Kashmir, there are those (mainly in India) who reject the UN’s involvement because they think it would force a referendum or plebiscite on the state, whose outcome might prove unacceptable to India’s national interest.

But both viewpoints are incorrect. The belief that the UN resolutions (passed in 1948 and 1949) which urged the holding of a plebiscite in order to confirm or negate the state’s temporary accession to India, had any mandatory authority, is misplaced. The resolutions were only ever recommendations which outlined certain measures that both countries should undertake before a plebiscite could be held. Once one or other government reneged on its commitments, the UN had no authority to force that country either to hold a plebiscite.

By misunderstanding the UN’s role, alternative avenues for resolution have been not been sufficiently explored. People in both countries have become frustrated and  attitudes have hardened; in such a volatile situation, the potential for another military confrontation remains – most probably  instigated by an act of terrorism using the unresolved dispute over Jammu and Kashmir as the pretext.

Allan Mallinson

The most troubling misperception for me is that the EU has been the both the builder and the guarantor of peace in Europe. 

In 2012, the EU was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for its contribution over six decades to “the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe”, and being instrumental in “transforming most of Europe from a continent of war to a continent of peace”. The problem with the award’s parameters – the prize is meant for those who have “done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses” – suggests that the EU’s contribution to peace has been greater than Nato’s. Indeed, that by not reducing its standing armies, Nato is itself endangering peace.

I have no difficulty with acknowledging the EU’s role in peacebuilding (a United Nations term), but the absolute guarantor has always been Nato. Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty stipulates that “an armed attack against one or more of [the members] in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all…”, promising dire consequences for the perpetrator. To misunderstand this, wilfully or otherwise, is to exalt the EU to the point of hubris, and to denigrate Nato to the point of undermining Article 5 – which is precisely President Putin’s aim.

Eliot Cohen

So many misperceptions! The largest and most consequential though is the failure to accept contingency. It is difficult to study political or military history without concluding that things did not have to be the way they were. Commanders, diplomats, activists – all have their role to play, as does sheer accident. Abraham Lincoln stops a bullet in 1862 (and there were those trying to kill him) and the Civil War probably ends with two countries (at least) in what is now the United States. Halifax becomes Prime Minister in 1940, as he wished and Neville Chamberlain, not to mention the largest bloc in the Conservative Party, would have preferred, and it is difficult to believe that Britain would have avoided a peace treaty, or at least a substantial truce, with Nazi Germany.

There is a tendency in our age to think in structural terms about trends and underlying facts, and there is something to that. Particularly in democracies, crowds matter. All of us witness large phenomena – the spread of personal digital assistants, for example – that no one really can control. Big data is the absorbing interest of the moment. But it is still the case that particular people make a difference. A Kagame or an Erdogan are consequential people – a Trump, Putin, or Xi Jinping even more so.

And sometimes things blow up. There may have been structural preconditions for the so-called Arab Spring, but surely it mattered that a fruit seller in Tunis was so maddened by desperation and rage that he set himself on fire. There is a danger that we will forget just how contingent events can be. In this centennial of World War I, after all, it bears remembering that had Archduke Franz Ferdinand decided that one brush with an assassin was enough, and returned to his hotel in Sarajevo, the slaughter of millions might not have followed.

Tomorrow our History Jury will select the lessons of history that are being ignored to greatest cost.

The Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Nick Carter, started it off by highlighting the Russian threat in a speech at Rusi on 22 January. Echoing the US’s new National Defence Strategy policy document to the letter, Carter identified Russia as “the most complex and capable state-based threat to our country since the end of the Cold War”. The British land army, habituated to fighting counter-insurgency wars in dusty places, needs to be “recapitalised”, he said, to repulse a modern nation state, which by blurring the boundaries of war and peace, has substantially redefined warfare in an era of inter-state competition.

Gen Carter was more convincing on Russian capabilities than on Russian intentions, for which one requires a less technocratic mindset and a greater sense of how the Russians regard themselves and us. The newspapers, too, concentrated on the “threat” Carter outlined and all the technical stuff about hardware, rather than coolly assessing how Russia views the world, its resources, and how their strategy relates to the domestic regime Putin has constructed.

A few days after Carter’s speech, our newish Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson then upped the ante when he warned that the Russians could “cause thousands and thousands and thousands of deaths” if they cut the seven electricity and gas interconnectors linking the UK to the Continent.

The General’s speech could of course be viewed in the context of special pleading by the Army in the run up to tough choices about defence budgets –  or even his bid to be the next chief of defence staff. And Williamson’s alarmist remarks coincided with his decision to go public about an office tryst in 2004 when he was a lowly manager at a Scarborough fireplace surround manufacturer. But Russia, is not a useful bogeyman for no reason.

And then, at the weekend, the Russians were back in the news again. Ben Wallace, the security minister, announced the introduction of Unexplained Wealth Orders (UWOs) which would force corrupt foreign oligarchs to reveal the source of the luxury lifestyles they enjoy in Britain. It is a rather embarrassing coincidence that they’ve been a problem since the 1990s, but only in the wake of a BBC1 drama, McMafia, about Russian bankers, organised crime, and money-laundering, has anything actually been done. So much for cool assessments.

So although there does seem to be a sort of unanimity across the UK security Establishment that the Russians are a threat, that message seems to be taking its time to work its way into popular consciousness. Indeed, across broad swathes of the populist Right – Ukip, Lega Nord, Front National – there is admiration for the decisive way in which President Putin asserts Russia’s national interests abroad.

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By Michael Burleigh

At home, the Putin regime rules with a combination of authoritarianism, plebiscitary democracy, predatory capitalism, Orthodoxy, social conservatism, and elements culled from Russia’s past, all combined in a thoroughly post-modern way which makes it harder to combat ideologically. Its main appeal is to the elderly, the military and police, and the unsophisticated in deep provincial Russia.

But the regime’s swagger masks the reality of a society suffering from post-imperial phantom limb syndrome after the sudden amputation of 14 former Soviet republics in 1990-91 and its failure to diversify its economy away from chronic dependence on hydrocarbons. Arguably, though, its greatest problem lies in the absence of the rule of law, the means by which so many corruptly acquired gains have been effortlessly recycled into London.

Theoretically, it should be possible for Nato communications specialists, intelligence agencies and our media, to take advantage of this and make much more of the consequences of lawlessness for ordinary Russians who are defenceless in the face of power and money combined with state power. But big money talks, and British journalists are so tantalised by it they ignore those many instances where ordinary Muscovites are persecuted or protests quashed.

Instead, acres of sympathetic coverage are devoted to the plight of extremely rich men, such as the Anglo-American financier William Browder and the exiled oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Both of whom have run sophisticated campaigns, one publicising the 2009 murder of Browder’s Moscow lawyer, the latter concerning the 2003 pillage of Khodorkovsky’s oil company, Yukos.  In both cases, the small matter of how their huge fortunes were made in the era of crash privatisation in the early 1990s is passed over in something approaching embarrassed silence.

So why isn’t more attention paid by journalists to the living hell that unscrupulous people can inflict on ordinary Russians who stand in their way.

One particularly nasty growth industry in Russia is in boutique advisory services which don’t specialise in helping businesses insulate themselves against cyber or terrorist attacks, but against something ominously called ‘nightmaring’.

This term, which was given dramatic form in the 2014 movie Leviathan,  applies to the way in which unscrupulous characters co-opt the police, prosecutors and judiciary in order to loot private capital from random individuals. One real-life victim was Ruslan Telkov who owned a small business manufacturing synthetic furniture upholstery. In 2012, he was arrested and detained in an overcrowded remand prison after being charged with violating the ‘author’s rights of leopards and nature’ when he printed a faux leopard skin pattern on some material.

Russia is becoming increasingly lawless and unstable. Surely, if we had any half-decent communications strategy, we would be making more of this. Instead, our defence chiefs are concentrating on the equipment our forces need to deal with any Russian surprises. While this isn’t a bad thing of itself, it does have to be calibrated with an objective reading of Russia’s intentions – which General Carter so studiously ignored – during the long winding down of the Putin regime which will start once he has won re-election in March.

This will be as much about the  wielding of news and information as  the military hardware we do or don’t have. And the UWOs are an encouraging, though belated, first attempt to bring order to the unpredicatable oligarchs.

It remains to be seen, though, whether the Russians’ army of eager British helpers will find a way to frustrate the UWOs, leaving us five years hence, with McMafia a distant memory, thinking: perhaps we need a more sophisticated understanding of national security strategy than that which these defence ministers, generals and journalists have provided?