Valdai Club

There is clear disappointment that no lasting East-West settlement has been achieved over the past quarter century that would erase that division. But there is also a new sense of hard-headed realism.

Last autumn, when the Valdai Discussion Club met at Sochi, it was not hard to discern in the theme of the meeting - War and peace in the 21st century - the continuing impact on international relations of events in Ukraine. There was the strong sense not only that the post-Second World War settlement was long over, but that the hopes fostered by the end of the Cold War had evaporated, too.

This comes across even more strongly from the report published on the meeting this week, with the subtitle “International stability and balance of the new type”. There is clear disappointment that no lasting East-West settlement has been achieved over the past quarter century that would erase that division. But there is also a new - or so it seems to me - sense of hard-headed realism.

Those years have been lost; the opportunities for a new settlement were squandered, but now it is time - as people say - to “move on”. There is no point in regretting what could not be. Both Russia and what we still call the West will have to accept that competition and even conflicts will go on, but they will not derail economic and political relations, which will - and should - go on.

In some ways, this amounts to an admission of defeat and is to be regretted. There were opportunities for a new beginning in East-West relations after the dissolution of the Soviet Union which would have enabled post-Soviet Russia to take its new place in the region and the world much more easily than has actually happened. Those opportunities were lost. One of the reasons - but not the only reason - was the West’s failure to appreciate how the Nato alliance was seen by Russia - as a Cold War fixture and a potential threat. The early 1990s was the time when the security arrangements for the whole of Europe could have been re-thought. That did not happen.

War and Peace in the 21st century suggests that, after a decade or more of attempts to rectify this, including the European security plan drawn up during Dmitry Medvedev’s presidency, Russia is ready to settle for a world in which it will be the West against a disparate rest, or “non-West”; for a framework, as the report puts it in what seems to me a key passage, that will “most probably keep the free fl ow of people, goods and capital” even as conflict rumbles on in other areas. “In some sense the future system will be an antipode of that, which existed during the Cold War, and also of that, which failed to come about at the end of the Cold War. It will be characterised by maximum flexibility and variability, necessitated by the impossibility of establishing hard and fast rules.”

Such a solution leaves much to be desired. The report says “Both groups will pursue a periodic “hybrid”, more or less intensive struggle with each other. The global “great game” will be played out both in the geographical spaces of the “grey area”, and in the globalised spheres of information, technology and others.” There may be more changes of borders - “The possible transfer of territories, which may become inevitable in the context of numerous territorial disputes and dilution of the solid international legal base - but, the report suggests, these “will also be less than catastrophic. In some cases de-facto transfer or withdrawal of territories will be compensated by the preservation of economic openness. Sanctions and countersanctions, both explicit and implicit, will be usual practice.”

Idealists would argue that we could surely do better than this - despite the evidence of the past 25 years to the contrary. For the time being, though, an arrangement that accepts a degree of rumbling conflict that will nonetheless not disrupt normal human and economic interaction may be the best that can be done. The proposal that the G20 should become the main forum for international diplomacy - because the UN Security Council and the G7/8 both reflect an old order - is something that may come about de facto, even as the old structures continue.