Jacob Rees-Mogg Debates Tucker Carlson About Russia

The high-profile British traditionalist and conservative possesses a lamentably poor understanding of what Lord Salisbury regarded as common sense.

As I have noted in this newsletter before, the die was cast for the Russo-Ukrainian War at the NATO summit in 2008. Russian President Putin, who attended the summit, stated in his address that NATO’s expansion into Ukraine and Georgia was “direct threat to Russian security.” Even at the time, it occurred to me that US policy wonks welcomed this unequivocal statement by Putin—on the record at a NATO summit—because with this statement, Putin publicly declared his red line, the crossing of which would force his hand to take military action.

I have long been morally certain that the horrible people who run US foreign policy wanted Putin to take military action in Ukraine because they believed it would lead to an Afghan style quagmire for Russia in Ukraine.

Anyone familiar with Germany’s Operation Barbarossa—launched through Ukraine on June 22, 1941—intuitively understands how nervous it made the Russians when the US government, military, and CIA established a forward operating base against Russia in Ukraine in the years 2014-2021. The northeast corner of Ukraine lies about 350 miles from Moscow — about a 100 miles further than the distance from New York City to Washington DC.

Cuba lies about 1,300 miles from Washington DC. Imagine how the US foreign policy establishment would react if Russia established a de facto regime in Cuba, replete with twelve forward operating Russian SVR (intelligence service bases) along the north coast and a major campaign to train and arm the Cuban military.

Likewise, the Channel Islands are about 190 miles from London—about 160 miles closer than the northeast corner of Ukraine of is from Moscow. How would the British government feel if Russia made the Channel Islands a de facto Russian protectorate?

I thought of this when I listened to a recording of Jacob Rees-Mogg’s conversation with Tucker Carlson about the Russo-Ukrainian War. The high-profile British traditionalist and conservative stated that he does not seek war with Russia, but advocates that Britain prepare for war with Russia.

I was surprised to hear him say this, because it seems to me that — by virtue of supplying Ukraine with British long range weapons such as the BAE Systems Nyan drone and Storm Shadow cruise missile, Britain is already at war with Russia. Ukraine used a Storm Shadow to strike the Bryansk Chemical Plant, a major military-industrial site producing rocket fuel and explosives. Why doesn’t Russia respond by hitting the Storm Shadow manufacturing facility in Stevenage, England with ballistic missiles? I agree with Tucker Carlson that only Russian restraint can explain it.

Surely—it seems to me—Sir Jacob understands this. I wonder if it’s possible that he doesn’t understand the concept of Balance of Power.

There was a time not so long ago when anyone acquainted with elementary principles of foreign relations understood the doctrine of “Balance of Power.” Such was the subject of Henry Kissinger’s 1954 doctoral thesis at Harvard University, which he subsequently published in book form under the title A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812–1822.

As Kissinger understood it, the Congress of Vienna in 1812, which concluded the Napoleonic Wars, established a “Balance of Power” in Europe, with the Austrian Foreign Minister (and later Chancellor) Metternich demonstrating exceptional understanding of this concept. British Foreign Secretary Castlereagh understood and appreciated Metternich’s perspective and aspired to cooperate with the Austrian chancellor in maintaining a balance of power on the European Continent.

Our current political and media class struggles to understand this doctrine because—it seems to me—they fail to understand that foreign relations are not categorically different from any other form of human relations.

Imagine a woman who marries young and supports her husband for twenty years as he climbs the career ladder while she primarily cares for their children. Twenty years into the marriage, she discovers that he is having an affair with his young secretary. At the same time, she discovers she has no idea what he has done with much of the money and assets he has acquired over twenty years of marriage with her steadfast support.

When she tells him she is contemplating hiring a forensic accountant to perform an investigation, he replies, “Oh, you don’t need to worry about that. Trust me. I won’t take advantage of you.”

Now imagine that your family has owned a cattle ranch in Montana since the mid 19th century. Because you enjoy ranching, you stick with the enterprise, even though it becomes increasingly difficult to make a living at it. One day an extremely rich and powerful real estate developer from California arrives. He aggressively acquires all the property around you, and funds the election campaigns of local and state officials to make zoning changes that favor his development objectives, which have serious, adverse consequences for your land and ranching operation.

You tell the developer that you are feeling threatened about the future of your family property, which you want to pass down to your kids and grandkids. To your concern he replies: “You don’t need to worry about that. Trust me. I won’t take advantage of all the power and influence I have amassed in this county to your detriment. I’m a good citizen.”

Anyone who has ever been in a marital or property dispute will recognize instantly it would be the height of naiveté to trust the untrustworthy spouse or the unscrupulous neighbor.

Consider how few arrangements or deals are maintained on a strictly handshake basis. The vast majority of deals are formalized by legally binding agreements. This is not because people will necessarily behave in bad faith if they aren’t constrained by legal agreements, but because they may be tempted to press their advantage if they acquire an advantage over the course of the relationship.

Reflecting on this general tendency of human nature, Machiavelli observed:

How we live is so different from how we ought to live that he who studies what ought to be done rather than what is done will learn the way to his downfall rather than to his preservation.

Many thought Machiavelli was being cynical. I believe he was being scrupulously honest.

This brings me back to my theme of the Balance of Power in foreign relations. In 1997, George Kennan—the chief architect of the U.S. Cold War policy of containing the Soviet Union—was appalled by the Clinton administration’s 1996 expansion of NATO to the east, in spite of Secretary of State James Baker’s assurance to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that NATO would not “expand one inch eastward.”

Kennan expressed his protest in a 1997 editorial in the New York Times titled “A Fateful Error.” As he noted:

Russians are little impressed with American assurances that it reflects no hostile intentions. They would see their prestige (always uppermost in the Russian mind) and their security interests as adversely affected. They would, of course, have no choice but to accept expansion as a military fait accompli. But they would continue to regard it as a rebuff by the West and would likely look elsewhere for guarantees of a secure and hopeful future for themselves.

On a personal note, I find Kennan’s reflections especially persuasive because I myself don’t trust the assurances of the U.S. government. This being the case, it seems to me that Vladimir Putin would have been a perfect fool to accept U.S. assurances that NATO enlargement into Ukraine posed no threat to Russian security.

Imagine if the Russian government had simply accepted NATO’s inexorable expansion eastward, all the way into Ukraine, ultimately placing sophisticated military hardware on Russia’s border as close as 350 miles from Moscow.

Does any reasonable grownup in the world really believe that the U.S. would not press this advantage in innumerable ways (foreseen and unforeseen)?

It seems to me that Kennan was obviously right in 1997, and that the current, ongoing disaster in Ukraine is precisely what he predicted would happen if the U.S. government followed through with its NATO expansion to the east.

Finally, I wonder if Sir Jacob is familiar with Lord Salisbury’s view of Russia. In many ways, Sir Jacob reminds me of my teacher, Roger Scruton, when I was in college and graduate school in the early nineties. Sir Roger was an admirer of Lord Salisbury (Prime Minister from 1885 to 1902) and was the founding editor of the Salisbury Review, in which I first became a published author with a report on the Sokol affair in 1996.

Departing from the marked Russophobia of his era, Salisbury believed Britain should only oppose Russia when vital, tangible British interests—such as the Persian Gulf or Constantinople—were directly threatened. In all other areas he preferred friendly diplomatic relations.

The British government should focus on solving its own considerable domestic problems and quit waging a proxy war against Russia— a war that in no way serves the British people and places them in considerable danger.