Sleepwalking into War

Our international editor, John O’Sullivan, has compiled an excellent collection of essays called Sleepwalking into Wokeness, which I heartily recommend to readers. It prompts me to wonder whether the West is now sleepwalking its way into a Third World War, or at least a war engaging great powers on three continents: North America, Europe, the Middle East and the Far East.

After my three-month fellowship at the Danube Institute in Budapest, of which O’Sullivan is the founder and president, the Russian invasion of Ukraine feels far too close for comfort.

It’s not just that Hungary shares a land border with Ukraine, and Budapest is located less than 1000 kilometres from the front line. Up to 75,000 ethnic Hungarians live in Ukraine, many of whom are fighting the Russian invasion, and more than 60,000 refugees from Ukraine have arrived in Hungary, of whom more than 44,000 have registered for temporary protection.

Meanwhile, Russia and Belarus have weaponised the entry of up to 400 illegal migrants a day into Poland, some of them violent and armed with homemade spears and broken bottles, one, on June 6, stabbing a Polish border guard to death. Finland has closed its border with Russia entirely after it experienced a sharp increase in migrants from Somalia and Iraq who had been aided by Russian security agencies.

The European Union was outraged at Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s audacity in independently promoting peace negotiations by calling on all the key protagonists while Hungary is President of the EU, but he may have helped focus minds on the end game.

One prospect of a speedy end to the conflict rests on the second coming of Donald Trump. Perhaps Orban’s visit to Mar-a-Lago reminded the warring parties of Trump’s bold promise that if he is re-elected he will end the war before he reaches the White House.

Trump’s formula for peace is to force both sides to the negotiating table by withholding funding from Ukraine unless it sits down to negotiate a peace agreement. On the other hand, if Russia refuses to come to the party Trump says he will dramatically increase funding for Ukraine.

Russia has long insisted that in return for peace, Ukraine must give up the 20 per cent of its territory that Russia currently occupies as well as any aspiration of joining NATO. These terms were unacceptable to Ukraine.

Perhaps it was the prospect of Trump-led negotiations that prompted Ukraine’s audacious cross-border incursion into Russia. Already in May, a Ukrainian drone struck a Gazprom oil refinery in Bashkortostan. In June, Ukraine hit a Russia fighter jet in Astrakhan. In July, it struck a Russian bomber in Murmansk. Yet the Ukrainian incursion into Kursk took this to another level. It represents the first time Russia has been invaded since the Second World War.

The aim is not just to show its allies that despite its smaller size, Ukraine can outwit the invader. It is seeking to demoralise Russia by degrading its military, economic and social infrastructure and forcing it to divert military forces away from the front line to liberate its own territory. Having seized Ukraine’s nuclear power plant in Zaporizhia early in its invasion, Russia is now digging trenches around the Kursk nuclear power plant for fear of it falling into enemy hands. More than anything however, Ukraine’s goal is to bring Russia to the negotiating table as soon as possible in control of something that Russia really wants—the return of its territory.

How all this will play out is far from clear. While many in the West worry that what we are seeing is a repeat of 1938 in which the cardinal error was the woefully misguided appeasement of a bloodthirsty dictator hell-bent on conquering the world, what we may actually be seeing is a repeat of 1914 in which the cardinal error was miscalculation. Nobody expected that the response of the Austro-Hungarian empire to the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand by a Serbian nationalist would cascade into a global conflagration, much less that it would bring about the collapse of four empires—the Austro-Hungarian, the Russian, the Ottoman and the German. The attempted assassinations of Trump and of Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico conjure up some of the feverish polarisation of the early twentieth century.

There is no doubt that the margin for miscalculation in this European war is vast.

Reading the bellicose tweets of former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, the Deputy Chair for the Security Council of the Russian Federation, and Markus Faber, the head of the Bundestag Defence Committee, does not inspire confidence.

On August 9 Medvedev tweeted, “The German newspaper Bild has published a revanchist article where it proudly announces German tanks’ comeback to the Russian land. In response, we’re going to do everything to bring the newest Russian tanks to Platz d. Republik.” Days later Faber tweeted that the Kursk operation is laying the groundwork for “peace negotiations with Putin’s successor. And negotiations with Putin before the International Criminal Court”.

These sort of comments bring to mind the Second World War adage that “careless talk costs lives”. In any event there seems to be precious little justification for such braggadocio from either Russia or Germany. More than anything else, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has destroyed any illusion of its invincibility and exposed it as more of a Potemkin force with nuclear missiles. As for Germany, it only started spending the NATO target of 2 per cent of GDP on its military after the Russian invasion of Ukraine and still has far too little of everything.

Yet at the same time as European nations start to beef up their defence spending, the European Union is doing its best to bankrupt the continent with its crippling decarbonisation program at a cost of 1.5 trillion euros a year, an amount equivalent to 10 per cent of Europe’s GDP.

In addition, the social fabric of Western Europe is being stretched to breaking point by uncontrolled migration, and nowhere more so than in England, where the new Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has brought his honeymoon to an abrupt close and earned the moniker “Two-Tier Kier” by emphasising that right-wing protesters, otherwise known as white working- and middle-class Britons, feel the full force of the law while a blind eye has been turned to serious crime in ethnic Muslim enclaves.

The repeated calls at mass rallies in Western cities and campuses for Hamas sympathisers to “Globalise the Intifada” is inspiring some to move from words to deeds. Incredibly, ISIS jihadists were hired as security guards for the Taylor Swift concert in Vienna. They had chemical bombs and planned to drive a car into fans before attacking them with knives and machetes. Up to 90,000 fans were expected in the vicinity of the concert each night.

Meanwhile, in the Middle East, Iran is contin­uing to try to destroy Israel through orchestrated attacks from its proxy armies—Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza and the West Bank, the Houthis in Yemen, and the Shiite military forces in Iraq and Syria. The Iranian Ambassador to Australia helpfully underlined Iran’s genocidal goal by tweeting that he was looking forward to wiping out the “Zionist plague” from Palestine “no later than 2027”. At least that suggests that Iran is not planning on attempting to wipe out Israel this week.

As for China, only former Labor prime minister Paul Keating, and China, think that it is the United States rather than China that poses a threat to regional security.

Between 2021 and 2023, China conducted more than 180 “dangerous” intercepts of US aircraft, a hostile act that it has also tried on Australian aircraft and those of other nations such as the Philippines. After the recent meeting between the US and Australia’s ministers at the annual AusMin forum, China’s Global Times claimed that the US is “weaponising” Australia, and our enhanced security co-operation constitutes “a provocation in the Asia-Pacific”. This seems a bit tardy given that Australia and the US have been allies since the First World War. Indeed, China participated in the same alliance with the Entente Powers.

In reality, it is China’s threat to invade Taiwan and its illegal claim to virtually all of the South China Sea that is destabilising the region and has led it into conflict with numerous other countries who have legitimate claims to part of those waters or want to ensure freedom of navigation through the Strait of Taiwan. The more China threatens its neighbours, the more they seek safety in alliances such as the Quad (the US, Japan, India and Australia), the Squad (the US, Australia, Japan and the Philippines), AUKUS (Australia, the UK and the US) and other alliances aimed at shoring up security and dealing with an ever more belligerent China. Geoffrey Blainey famously wrote of Australia as being shaped by the tyranny of distance. At times like these however, Australia’s distance from just about everywhere feels like an undiluted blessing.