On Friday evening, Donald Trump handed Vladimir Putin another reason to smile. The US President waived sweeping sanctions against Russia that Congress had passed and he himself signed into law barely a month ago.
The Act, named after the late Senator Lindsey Graham, would have allowed tariffs of up to 100 per cent on goods from the biggest buyers of Russian oil and gas, with China and India chief among them.
It could have hit Putin’s war chest hard. So why did Trump tear it up?
Not grand strategy. As Lord Ricketts, a former diplomat and national security adviser, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: ‘Nothing is strategic in Trump’s world. Trump wants cheaper diesel before the midterms, Putin has diesel to sell, and Volodymyr Zelensky, who accused Trump of rewarding Moscow, is an inconvenience.’
Taken alone, it is an alarming enough development, but an unnerving pattern is hoving into view if we draw the dots of recent days.
Take the Starshield controversy. Last week, Ukraine woke to discover that the military version of Elon Musk’s Starlink internet connection had been throttled without warning, cutting off anything travelling faster than about 100mph. That includes interceptor drones Kyiv relies on to destroy Russia’s Shahed drones.
Musk insisted Starshield was owned by Washington and restrictions were ‘decided by the US military and ultimately Potus’. Trump denies ordering the change, and reports yesterday suggested it was Musk’s idea first.
A European war is being fought with technology that someone thousands of miles away can turn off, writes Philip Ingram
Who flicked the switch matters less than the lesson. A European war is being fought with technology that someone thousands of miles away can turn off.
Then, yesterday, it was revealed that in February two RAF aircraft had near-misses with drones over the North Sea. In one, a drone passed over a Voyager tanker refuelling a Typhoon off Cromer in Norfolk at around 17,000ft, more than 40 times the legal ceiling for civilian drones.
Neither appeared on radar. No one has proven who sent them. But a career in military intelligence teaches you not to dismiss patterns.
Could they have been launched from one of Putin’s shadow fleet vessels? We have already seen suspicious drone activity linked to shipping elsewhere in Europe. A high-flying, radar-dodging drone watching RAF tankers refuel fighters is precisely the reconnaissance a hostile state wants: routes, timings, procedures and vulnerabilities.
This unsettling prospect chimes with MI5 Director-General Sir Ken McCallum’s warning last week that Moscow is escalating hybrid warfare with tactics that stop short, ‘though sometimes not much short’, of conventional conflict. MI5 now devotes more resources to state threats than it did during the Cold War.
Now consider the country that will be absent from next month’s military exercise in Poland. At least 1,500 British, French and German troops will rehearse a possible post-ceasefire mission into Ukraine. The nation conspicuously missing is the United States.
Join the dots: an American President increasingly transactional towards Moscow, a Nato alliance under strain, and a Russia probing ever harder at our defences. It amounts to war – one that we are in already, whether we like it or not. Don’t get me wrong, I do not believe Russian tanks are about to thunder across the North German Plain. Putin’s army remains bogged down in Ukraine, its gains limited and bought at horrific cost.
That is the wrong assumption of how a war with Russia would look, for it does not need to declare war to wage one. Its weapons are sabotage, cyber attacks, disinformation and proxies hired online for a few hundred pounds.
According to Lord Ricketts, the danger is miscalculation: ‘These hybrid attacks are getting more reckless, more dangerous. One day, people are going to end up being killed.’
Some commentators say Britain is safe because we don’t share a border with Russia. But traditional geographic borders are old hat – our border with Russia is now the sea, the seabed and the internet.
Russian armour will not cross the Channel. But we could be attacked from within the Channel, from the Western Approaches or from inside our own ports.
Imagine a cargo ship carrying drones hidden beneath the false roof of a shipping container. Offshore, the roof opens, and the drones launch at RAF bases, ports, radar sites or power stations.
A destroyed apartment block in Ukraine following a Russian airstrike on Saturday
We have no defence against such an attack. Science fiction? Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb did exactly that to Russia’s bomber fleet last year.
Now imagine what President Trump’s response could be: You aren’t spending enough on defence, so why should America protect you? Without the US, there would be no collective Nato response, as demanded by Article 5 of its founding treaty.
Almost all of Britain’s international data, and much of our energy, runs through seabed cables and pipelines. The Russian spy ship Yantar has loitered over them in British waters, its crew aiming lasers at RAF pilots tracking it.
Look west to the Irish Sea. The cables and interconnectors binding Britain to Ireland and the rest of the world pass through waters that Dublin, with a tiny navy and no fast jets, struggles to police. That is our soft underbelly.
The aim is to inflict power cuts, freeze bank accounts, ground aircraft, collapse mobile networks and paralyse ports.
Chaos ensues and within hours British society cracks.
The mass casualties demanded of previous wars are not needed. That doesn’t mean we should ignore the lessons of those wars.
History, as Mark Twain is supposed to have said, does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes. Today it is rhyming loudly with 1936. That was the year Hitler marched into the Rhineland and the democracies did nothing. America was retreating behind its Neutrality Acts.
Today Nato is fracturing, America’s support for Europe wobbling and militarism is on the march from Moscow to Beijing. And our Government is doing nothing for defence but (maybe) promising something later.
But 1936 offers another lesson. It was also the year the Spitfire first flew, and Britain’s factories began preparing for rearmament. They came dangerously late, but four years on they helped save us, and the rest of Western Europe, from tyranny.
The arguments for increasing our defence spending have long been made but Lord Ricketts also points out that ministers have ‘got to start a conversation with the British people about what may be coming’.
Finland and Sweden tell every household how to prepare for crisis or war. Britain needs the same honesty. What happens if the electricity goes off for days? If cash machines stop working? If mobile networks fail?
Preparation is not panic. It is deterrence. A country that is hard to disrupt and quick to recover is a poor target for a Kremlin that feeds on weakness. The bill will be large. But it will be tiny compared with the cost of getting this wrong.
Ministers must be honest about what it will cost and who pays. As Lord Ricketts said: ‘That is a discussion that needs to start now.’
In 1936, Britain almost left it too late. We may not get the same chance again.