Can you have a Moral Foreign Policy?

In answer to various comments, I am quite aware that Russia has been a predatory power in the past - and indeed fear that if we are stupid enough in our approach to it, it will become one again.

 

But then so were we, and so was France, and so was Germany, and so was the USA, and so is China. This is the nature of real life. The intelligent thing to do is not to moralise about it, but to reach intelligent, cynical compromises about it that will not lead to war. Hence Versailles was very moral, and killed millions, whereas the treaties that ended the Napoleonic wars were not moral, and endured peacefully for a century . The Cold War settlement , under which we left the Warsaw Pact countries in Russian chains, was also not moral, but it was realistic.  

 

The 1992 borders imposed on Russia may be moral (I’m not qualified to judge) but even without the Baltics joining NATO (let alone Ukraine and Georgia) they were unrealistic and will not last. You might as well claim to have invented an anti-gravity machine, or to have cured death, as to imagine that such things can be achieved.  Do we want to rearrange them in a wise manner, or do we actually want to make them even more unrealistic, so ensuring future conflict? What we can really learn from the inter-war treatment of Germany is that if you don’t make concessions to reasonably civilised governments, you aid their downfall, and so end up making much bigger concessions to uncivilised governments which have replaced them.

 

In my view, Germany, like Russia, simply exists and its existence (and therefore its basic needs) must be acknowledged. The comment from ‘Jack’ that ‘The root of the problem is that Germany was insufficiently weakened by WWI’ is a great illustration of this absurd view, that you can wish countries out of existence. From 1870 onwards, the rest of Europe should have realised that a united Germany must be accommodated. Silly efforts to resist this inevitability destroyed European civilisation and Christendom in 1914,  created the catastrophe of the Russian Revolution, and led directly to the horrors of 1939-45. A similar unwillingness to accept that Russia exists and reasonably desires a cordon sanitaire of non-threatening nations on its borders is equally unrealistic. As I’ve said before, you might as well try to move the Himalayas with a teaspoon as try to create a Europe without German and Russian power.

 

Mr ‘P’ says that Czechoslovakia wasn’t the point, nor was Poland. This at least removes the sentimentality from the case for war. But what precisely was the ‘principle’ which we would have defended by making Prague a cause of war, and so woefully failed to defend by making Poland a cause of war?   

 

I cannot see it. Imagining that the frontiers of Eastern Europe are a major interest of Britain’s is grossly to exaggerate our importance in Europe (as we tend to do). To the extent that we had any interest at all, I should have thought it lay in hoping Germany would turn East rather than West, which was in any case likely.