As news of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s re-election rolled in, I wondered if I could ever have achieved his 76 per cent victory in my old constituency of Richmond, North Yorkshire.
On balance, I think I could have. If I had been able, as he was, to have my main opponent disqualified, hand-pick the other candidates to be a “millionaire Communist” and a TV-show host, I reckon I could have got 76 per cent, there or pretty much anywhere.
As Russian bombs have smashed down on the homes of innocent civilians in Syria, Moscow has insisted that it is only fighting terrorists. After a Russian missile brought down the Malaysian airlines flight over Ukraine in 2014, they tried unsuccessfully to argue that it was not theirs. And Russia conducted massive, state-sponsored abuse of Olympic drug testing for years.
Jeremy Corbyn, the British Labour Party leader, needs to ask himself what exactly it is about a regime of proven liars and cheats that makes him want to bend over backwards to give them the benefit of some doubt, rather than believe Britain’s own intelligence services and scientists. So Britain has a Leader of the Opposition who preaches about human rights, but averts his gaze as much as possible from atrocities committed abroad — and even attempted murder on British soil by Russia — because believing that such things happen would logically lead to accepting that Britain needs to defend itself.
He can only keep his long-held view of the world, in which the West is always the villain, if he keeps being fooled.
In Corbyn’s case, this has been amply demonstrated in the last week. Yet, across Europe there are more mainstream political leaders who want to turn a blind eye to Russian behaviour if they can, rather than face up to the need to do something. Cyberspace is an ideal grey area for Moscow, lending itself to shadowy attacks without the need to admit to them.
The massive cyber attack on Estonia by Russia in 2007, for example, set out to paralyse banks, ministries and broadcasters, but did not involve declaring war. Russian operations in Ukraine have included coordination of social media and armed groups as a new way of invading a country without saying so.
Nato has now recognised that this requires some new thinking, and is set to discuss this “hybrid warfare” at a summit in July. It is already well behind the game. Really facing up to this means, first of all, acknowledging the scale of the problem, so that democratic societies can see that they have to act. The head of the United Kingdom National Cyber Security Centre said in a speech in November last year that Russia had attacked Britain’s “media, telecommunications and energy sectors”. Some other countries, however, still seem reluctant to avow, openly, that Russian hackers are almost certainly doing the same to them.
Collective attribution and identification of cyber attacks, or of secret positioning to launch them in the future, is a crucial step to a common strategy. So is agreement that Nato is the right vehicle for this. French and German officials, I understand, have been arguing for a big role for the European Union — the effect of which would be to dilute, confuse and weaken the western response, divorcing it from the United States and Canada.
Then Nato leaders should be instructing their experts to evolve a new doctrine of hybrid warfare and contemplate reinforcing the Nato treaty of 1949 to accommodate it. Article 5 of that treaty is the famous clause that commits all 29 members to come to each other’s defence if under armed attack.
But what if the attack takes the form of vital services being disrupted, communications mysteriously cut off, millions of messages on social media discrediting the country’s armed forces, and men without uniforms raiding the border — all while RT pours scorn on the very idea it could be anything to do with Moscow? Does that trigger Article 5 or not? And if it does, do tanks roll and bombers take to the air, starting a full-scale conflict?
Merely asking these questions shows that Nato now needs an entirely new concept of attack and defence and a new treaty article or protocol to back it up: An Article 5B. A new doctrine would make clear that the use of a hybrid and undeclared attack would trigger a collective response from the alliance — a response that can be scaled up or down and, like the attack itself, stop short of all-out war.
It would mean that the 29 allies would state clearly together what is happening, and that all would support each other in defending themselves in cyberspace and the media, and through limited physical force. It would also mean that all would join in retaliation, if necessary — including cyber attacks on Russia.
Military leaders need to integrate all this into their thinking, which they have so far been too slow to do, so that they plan for taking action against an enemy without knowing whether they are, in a conventional sense, at war.
The purpose of this, like Nato doctrine during the Cold War, would not be to start a conflict but to deter one, through making clear that the new murky type of hostilities that technology has now thrown up cannot be exploited without consequences.
The updating of Nato would be a far stronger check on a bullying Kremlin than any number of diplomatic expulsions, correct and well judged though they have been. And it would mean that the Western alliance, so accustomed to the black and white choice of peace or war, would at last be adapting to the new world so beloved of President Putin and displayed in his election victory — a world of permanent grey.
— The Telegraph Group Limited, London, 2018
William Hague is a former British foreign secretary.
