News from the New Party

Peace in our time?

Every time there is an international crisis we discover plenty of people in politics and the media scraping around looking to blame the West.  The situation in Georgia is no different.  What is of even more concern is that governments in Europe are so divided on the issue; the Italians openly sympathise with the Russian position, while France and Germany have counselled a softly-softly approach to Russia.

Gerard Baker in The Times gets it right: trying to draw an analogy between the invasion of Iraq and Russia's invasion of Georgia is entirely false; similarly, the case of South Ossetia is no Kosovo.

Baker is scathing about the efforts of European diplomacy:

Nicolas Sarkozy, the French President, in his capacity as head pro tempore of the EU, came back from a trip to Moscow and Tbilisi, waving a piece of paper and acclaiming peace in our time.

But the one-sided ceasefire that he negotiated was more or less dictated to him by Mr Putin. It not only left the Russian military in place in the disputed enclaves. It allowed them free rein to continue operations inside the rest of Georgia.

That disastrous piece of European diplomacy finally seems to have stirred the US into tougher action. Goaded by John McCain, who has been brilliantly resolute in his measure of Russian intentions over the past few years, the Bush Administration at last dropped its credulous embrace of Mr Putin and upped the ante with direct military assistance to Georgia and threats of tougher diplomatic action.

But we should never forget what Mr Sarkozy and his EU officials got up to this week. There can be no clearer indication of the perils that threaten the West if the EU gets its way and wins more clout in the world.

This, remember, is the same EU that wants to take over foreign and security policy from member states, an institution that is always eager to pump itself up at the expense of democratic institutions in those member states, but which crumbles into puny submission when faced with authoritarian bullying overseas.

With NATO due to meet to discuss the crisis, one hopes that the Europeans improve their game.  If not we will only encourage the re-emergence of a Soviet-style empire, hostile to the West and intolerant of dissent among its neighbours.