Too many shades of grey?

When a Russian MP approves the orchestrated violence by Russian fans in Marseilles in the early stages of the recent European football championship, what should one think? When the IAAF recommends that the Russian Track and Field team should be banned from the Olympics as a result of overwhelming evidence, not just of widespread doping, but of the active involvement of the state, what should one think?

When the Russian President creates a new Russian National Guard, numbering well over 200,000, to be responsible for the whole spectrum of internal security and appoints as its head his judo and boxing sparring partner, Viktor Zolotov, a former steelworker and bodyguard, what should one think?

There is some evidence of what many Russians think. A recent report in The Times revealed that in 2015 350,000 people emigrated from Russia and, in one survey conducted by a headhunter, 40% of senior managers said that they would emigrate, if they could. Given that the population is already in decline, as a result of falling birth rates and worsening life expectancy, rising emigration cannot help, particularly if it is the educated, professional classes who are emigrating. What happens to a country whose managerial expertise falls below the critical mass required to manage a modern economy? Nothing good, I’d wager.

Who can blame people for wanting to leave in search of a better life? In 2015 real GDP fell in Russia by 3.7%, coupled with a fall of 10% in Gross Domestic Income, resulting, according to some reports, in some people having to spend more than 50% of their income on food. Trade between Russia and the USA is down by more than a quarter; the price of oil fluctuates around $50 per barrel, which is not enough to allow the Russian economy to function; the number of people classified as 'poor' in Russia rose by 3.1 million to 19.2 million. The World Bank is forecasting a small rise in GDP by 2017 or 2018, though that will depend greatly on what happens to the price of oil. Currently there is a world surplus of 700 million barrels and it is believed that a similar amount is stockpiled in China. This glut could easily hold oil prices down until at least 2018, which will not help the Russian economy.

Despite this thoroughly gloomy picture, there is a strong sense in parts of the press that Russia is a force to be reckoned with, a proper global power. As a result of the Russian intervention in Syria, and the recent stationing of cruise missiles in the Kaliningrad Oblast, one might get the feeling that somehow Vladimir Putin has undermined the role of the USA as the 'global policeman' and enhanced his own stature as the man who is restoring Russia to a great global power. That is certainly how the story is playing at home - and playing loud and constantly, reminding one of Josef Goebbels' dictum to ‘think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play.’

So much of what Russia does on the world stage would appear to have more to do with domestic propaganda than with acting as a permanent member of the Security Committee, by which one might mean acting responsibly in the best interests of world security, as a result of 'judicious study of discernible reality.'

So when a key senior figure in politics says ‘that’s not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’

Isn't that just breathtaking cynical? Doesn't it fit, so well, what we see Russia doing in Syria, Ukraine, Ossetia, Georgia, the Baltic states? And doesn't that sound just like Vladimir Putin? If only. It's Karl Rove, one of George W Bush's senior advisers, in an interview he gave Ron Suskind in the New York Times in October 2004.

On July 23rd 2002, before the start of the 2nd Gulf War, Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister, met with his senior officials to discuss Iraq. Sir Richard Dearlove, head of the SIS, reported that "Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.'

Just writing this makes me feel queasy, especially when one considers the hundreds of thousands of lost and broken lives and the pandora's box of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism released by 'fixing facts and intelligence around the policy.' but if this is the world we're living in, we need to remind ourselves that Vladimir Putin and his oligarchs did not create it. They looked to the master, the USA, and slavishly copied her, as, curiously, did Goebbels. The sources he drew from were Edward Bernays, author of Propaganda, who wrote, in 1928, ‘arguments must therefore be crude, clear and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instincts, not the intellect. Truth was unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology.’

The real father of propaganda is Walter Lippman, who worked with Edward Bernays for US President Woodrow Wilson on the US Committee on Public Information. In 1925 Lippman wrote ‘Public opinion is not a rational force...it does not reason, investigate, invent, persuade, bargain or settle.’

So what? When we look at Russia and try to work out what it is doing, and why, we need to remind ourselves that the things we find so reprehensible about the way the story is being told, are things that have been in widespread use in the west for almost a century. The key is to look through the narrative as presented in order to study the real story. This requires effort, and patience, and the willingness and will to try to tell a better, truer story and to deal with the Russian leadership as it is - a ruthless, fearful, kleptocracy - not a global power. Can Mr Putin really have been given a State Visit to the UK? Did Mr Cameron really go and pay court on him at Sochi? Can it really be true that there is no BBC Russian radio broadcast anymore?

NATO must stand firm and the west needs to extend the hand of friendship, by whatever means, not to Putin and his cronies, but to the Russian people, with whom we have no argument. Russia respects strength and despises weakness. I haven't read of a single incursion, by a Russian aircraft, into Turkish airspace, since a Turkish F16 shot down the SU24 in November 2015. I wonder why? Sometimes black and white is better than the endless shades of grey preferred by pusillanimous politicians. The nice thing about ‘grey’ is that it is invariably cheaper than ‘black’ or ‘white’. Trump is right in pointing the finger at all of the European NATO nationsfor spending too little on defence – and the Secretary General is right to do the same. But is 2% of GDP enough?