Over the past few days 30,000 Russian and Belarusian soldiers have conducted the Zapad exercise, figuring out how best to expand Russian colonial aggression.
By way of the warm-up, 23 Russian drones violated Poland’s airspace on 9 September, obviously to test the state of NATO air defences.
That state turned out to be rather worrying: the combined efforts of Polish, Italian, Dutch and German contingents managed to shoot down only four invaders. By comparison, the Ukrainians tend to destroy up to 90 per cent of Russian drones.
That performance must have encouraged the commanders of the Zapad exercise to put even more effort into preparing to recreate the Soviet empire. Missile launches, simulated airstrikes, logistics fine-tuning have all been honed to maximum sharpness.
But, as Messrs Stalin and Hitler demonstrated in the 1940s, it’s not enough to have efficient soldiers, planes and tanks. Success in war may well depend not only on martial efforts but also on diplomatic ones.
Hitler found it out the hard way, by forming his Pact of Steel with Mussolini’s Italy first and then turning it into the Axis by adding Japan. Yet on balance those allies did more harm than good for the Nazi war effort.
The Italian army constantly needed help from German troops that could otherwise have been deployed on the eastern front. The German Supreme Commander in Italy, Field Marshal Kesselring, often complained that it took one German division to keep one Italian division in the fight, which rather negated the overall purpose.
Moreover, not being an industrial power, Italy could produce little in the way of armaments other than state-of-the-art warships. However, after the first clash with the greatly outnumbered Royal Navy in the Mediterranean, those wonderful ships still afloat stayed bottled up in their harbours for the duration of the war.
Meanwhile, Hitler was begging his other major ally, Japan, to strike at Russia from the east just as he was attacking her from the west. Had Japan done so, the Soviet Union would have probably collapsed before 1941 was out.
But, deaf to those entreaties, Japan chose to strike against the US instead. That enabled the Soviets to throw their fresh and now superfluous Far Eastern divisions into the Battle of Moscow, which stopped the German advance and enabled Stalin eventually to win the war.
The other effect of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor was enabling FDR to take the US into the war, against the wishes of most Americans and a sizeable congressional pressure. Hitler must have been muttering the German equivalent of “with allies like Italy and Japan, who needs enemies?”.
Stalin, on the other hand, had the US and Britain as allies, and what a difference. Not only was Hitler forced to fight a two-front conflict, but British Arctic convoys and American Pacific ones also carried supplies to Russia, without which Stalin admitted he would have lost the war.
The US in particular supplied over $11 billion worth of goods (some $150 billion in today’s money), including 400,000 vehicles, 14,000 aircraft, 13,000 tanks and mountains of food, fuel, explosives, metals and other raw materials.
This time Russia and the West aren’t allies but enemies, which the former realises more keenly than the latter. As a result, while Trump continues to alienate America’s current or potential friends, Putin is doing his level KGB best to secure useful alliances for Russia in her war on the West.
He can count in his camp both China and India, together amounting to 36 per cent of the world’s population. China is a separate case, what with her harbouring global ambitions of her own. But India could have swung either way before Trump announced a 50 per cent tariff on Indian goods.
He also hosted the head of the Pakistani army at the White House, boasting that he had personally ended a four-day conflict between India and Pakistan in May. Thereby Trump reinforced, mainly in his own eyes, his claim to being a peacemaker worthy of divine blessing and, more to the point, the Nobel Peace Prize.
In the past few weeks Trump also claimed to have singlehandedly ended the war between Azerbaijan and Armenia, the first time on a radio show in late August: “And I said, ‘I’m not going to do a trade deal if you guys are going to fight – it’s crazy. Anyway, one thing led to another, and I got that one settled.”
Unfortunately, he said ‘Aberb-aijan’ instead of Azerbaijan and ‘Albania’ instead of Armenia. That confused stenographers no end as they assumed the president spoke of some mysterious ‘Arabaijan’. As for Albania, another Muslim country, as far as they knew she wasn’t at war with either Arabaijan or anyone else.
That slip of the tongue was put down to Trump’s venerable age, which probably was true. However, a fortnight later he confused Armenia with Albania a second time, again claiming credit for bringing peace to two countries whose names he either didn’t know or couldn’t pronounce.
Focusing on the president’s deeds rather than words, one has to admit with some chagrin that they are just about as incoherent. He has successfully pushed India into an alliance with China and hence Russia at a time when India was beginning to edge closer to the West.
In late August, the Indian prime minister Modi engaged in public foreplay with Xi and Putin at the summit of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation. That was the first time in seven years that Indian leaders had agreed to meet with their Chinese counterparts.
Then the Indian government issued a press release, saying it wanted to “further strengthen defence co-operation and foster camaraderie between India and Russia, thereby reinforcing the spirit of collaboration and mutual trust”.
In that collaborative and trustful spirit, 65 Indian officers from elite regiments took part in the Zapad exercise demonstrably aimed against the West (which is what the Russian word zapad means). The number may be symbolic but symbols matter, not by themselves but by what they, well, symbolise.
In this case, they symbolise a singular failure of Trump’s foreign policy to secure strong alliances for America and NATO in the likely future war with Russia. Russia, on the other hand, seems to be doing better in that department. If China and India throw their bulk behind Putin’s aggression in Europe, that juggernaut will be so much harder to stop.
All in all, the world would be more secure if Trump got his coveted Nobel Peace Prize, possibly augmented with the Vatican accolade of canonisation, and then withdrew himself from peace-making efforts. They are making a Third World War more, rather than less, likely.