Russia

Is international conflict really just a fight over oil? It sometimes seems that way. In Syria and Iraq, the militants of the so-called ‘Islamic State’ sell captured oil while battling to establish a puritanical Sunni theo-cracy. From Central Asia to Ukraine, Russia is contesting attempts (backed by the US) to minimise Europe’s dependence on Russian oil and natural gas. Meanwhile, Obama’s ‘pivot to Asia’ allows the US to threaten the choke points through which most of China’s oil imports must pass. Conspiracy-mongering petrodeterminists who try to reduce world politics to nothing but a clash for oil are too crude (pun intended). No shadowy cabal of oil company executives pulls the

‘Keep your temper’, from The Spectator, 8 August 1914: ‘When a nation goes to war the policy of the Government nearly always fails to carry with it the convictions of a minority.  It is, of course, very rare for a Government who make war to find themselves without the support of the majority – for, as a rule, they would not even contemplate war without ascertaining the general tendency of public opinion – yet such cases have happened. It is probable that the majority were opposed to the war of George III. and Lord North against the American colonists. Even when the causa causans of a war in past history

A letter to the editor from the 8 August 1914 Spectator, from Evelyn Baring, 1st Earl of Cromer: ‘Sir, – A septuagenarian may perhaps profitably remind his countrymen of events which happened some fifty years ago, and of which the present generation may possibly be unmindful. In 1866 Napoleon III. allowed himself to be lulled into security by Prussian assurances, and stood aside whilst Austria was crushed at Sadowa. He paid dearly for his neglect four years later at Sedan. Had we declined to stand by the gallant French nation in the present emergency, not only should we have rightly incurred the scorn and derision of the civilised world, but

‘Sanctions,’ said Kofi Annan, ‘are a necessary middle ground between war and words.’ Neither the EU nor the US will deploy troops or missiles to defend Ukraine against Russian-backed separatists, while Vladimir Putin basks in hostile Western words and turns them to domestic advantage. That leaves sanctions as the only means of seeking to influence him. But do they work? Evidence is not persuasive: in 200 cases studied by academics in Washington, from the League of Nations action against Italy’s aggression in Abyssinia in the mid-1930s to Russia’s assault on Georgia in 2008, sanctions were judged successful in one third of cases; in many of those, success was ‘partial’. In

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, told Parliament that President Vladimir Putin of Russia should end his country’s support for separatists in Ukraine, some of whom it had provided with a training facility in south-west Russia. Licences to export arms to Russia were found still to be in place. Theresa May, the Home Secretary, announced a public inquiry into the death of the Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB officer who died in 2006 in a London hospital after he was poisoned with polonium. Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, was criticised by some MPs from rival parties for appearing on television sampling tequila instead of somehow doing something