27 May 2021
The Prostasevich Affair
Hitting Hard
By Robert Kilconner
Sniggering, that is what they are doing, Putin, Lukashenko and their friends. To them the capture of Roman Protasevich is a successful piece of political housekeeping. An irritant who challenged the Belarus dictatorship has been removed. A neat military operation has wrong footed the West and left it groping for a response. Who cares that it involved the effective hijacking of an Irish airliner? Who cares that the basis of international travel has been undermined?
Very well then, first mover advantage to them. How though should NATO reply? A ban on overflying Belarus? Several airlines have already put that in place. A ban on flights in and out of the country to NATO members? Poland and Ukraine have imposed these and no doubt others will follow. Sanctions against individuals? Of course, all these things are right and proportionate but at the end of the day they will let make little difference. Mr Protasevich will still be tried and Moscow and its friends will continue with the pattern we have seen developing since the poisoning at Salisbury, an assassination here, a kidnapping there.
Palmerston would have handled it differently. In 1850 Don Pacifico, a former Portuguese consul general to Greece made a claim against the Greek government for damage to his house and property resulting from riots said to have been incited by the Greek authorities. As it happened Don Pacifico was a British subject and Palmerston as foreign secretary advised him to press his claim. When the Greeks, egged on by the French and Germans, refused it the Navy was sent to detain the Greek fleet and impose a full naval blockade which lasted for two months, Palmerston justifying his extreme reaction in the House of Commons with the famous words:
“As the Roman, in days of old, held himself free from indignity, when he could say, Civis Romanus sum, so also a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England will protect him from injustice and wrong.”
The circumstances of course were different. Britain as a unified power had far more freedom to operate than members of NATO; also the military strength of 19th century Britain meant that its action would be unresisted. Don Pacifico was a British citizen where Protasevich is not a citizen of a NATO state. The point to note though is that in choosing to send in the fleet Palmerston never gave any thought to proportionality or fairness but instead chose a course which must have put the bejabbers up the rest of the world. No one would challenge the dignity of a Britain after that.
The Don Pacifico incident is regarded as the quintessential example of “gunboat diplomacy” but more importantly it illustrates the advantage of the non-proportional response, something often exploited by top managers. I remember once working with a charming man who was the chief executive of a large corporation. He was polite. He took the trouble to listen. He gave credit to his underlings. In every way he was the epitome of enlightened and friendly management. I mentioned how impressed I was to one of his subordinates and I have always remembered the reply:
“He is what is known as a basking shark,” I was told. “Most the time he is easy-going and charming but every now and then for some entirely trivial reason he will take someone’s leg off. After that he can go on being easy-going and charming but no one will dare to take advantage of him.”
One of the weaknesses of a proportionate response to aggression is that it frightens no one. The Russians and their friends in Belarus will not tremble in their shoes because NATO is considering sanctions. They know roughly what those sanctions will be and that they will not last forever. They will of course protest but the likelihood that their protests will be ignored will have been factored into the decision to kidnap Protasevich. If NATO really wishes to prevent further acts of state terrorism it needs to do something unpredictable and disproportionate. Send a snatch squad to seize Lukashenko, for example, and bring him back to face trial? An air raid to destroy important parts of Belarus’s infrastructure? Give military backing to a coup? If the West reacted like this the chances of any further outrages would be much reduced and it would also change the dynamics. Rather than NATO sitting worrying about whether it’s response might cause war and then reacting feebly reaction, it would be Belarus and its friends who would find themselves having to react and to deal with dangerously unpredictable people to boot.
The risk, with all this is, of course, that it leads to a spiral of violence but if we keep our response proportionate outrages of this type are likely to get steadily more common. War is hell and of course we should do all we can to avoid it but from a practical point of view to be too soft is perhaps as dangerous as to be too hard. As the rector in Saki’s story “For the Duration of the War“ wrote
‘You are not on the Road to Hell,’
You tell me with fanatic glee:
Vain boaster, what shall that avail
If Hell is on the road to thee?
NATO needs to ask itself where the various roads lead.
Tile photo:Vadim Sadovski on Unsplash
