Any honest person would quickly admit that Saudi Arabia is a horrible women-hating regime where ordinary citizens who dares to voice criticism are beheaded or lashed. For decades it has been the prime source of funds for religious extremism across the world and right now it is responsible for a great deal of death and destruction in the Yemen.
A cynic would say that they buy our arms and we need the money. That same cynic would say that the Western World currently runs off oil and they are a reliable source of it.
This week it hasn’t been hard to decide which side of the fence Theresa May sits. She knows where her bread is buttered and is mouthing a whole series of platitudes that are just not true. Reform isn’t encouraged by selling a nasty regime weapons that it can use to control its citizens. Bad wars aren’t brought to a positive end by selling boatloads of armaments to one of the more violent protagonists. Women’s rights aren’t secured by praising a small elite of ‘royal’ men for permitting a few women to drive and to sit in the cinema provided that they are firmly segregated.
The position of Labour in opposition has been more impressive. Corbyn has asked some excellent questions about why we are rolling out the red carpet to welcome a dictator, mass murderer and oil sheik. It will be interesting to see how strongly that criticism is sustained if Labour returns to power and comes under pressure from trade unions to shut up and protect members jobs. In the past their Prime Ministers have done exactly the same as May and ethical foreign policy has lost out to a focus on jobs.
Yet, if you really want a master class in dishonesty, the place to go is Putin’s Russia. He is in the run up to his election campaign. So it is in his interests to do two things. The first is to intimidate his opposition and make their life as hard for it as possible. The second is to present himself as the only strong and stable choice and the best defender of Russian national interests against a hostile world.
That is why opposition leaders with any influence within Russia had to either be arrested and accused of corruption or had to meet with an accident. Boris Nemtsov was a former Deputy Prime Minister who had a reputation within the country for honesty. He ended up dead on a bridge in Moscow in 2015. It has proven curiously difficult to trace the killers. Other opposition leaders have proven rather more fortunate. They have just spent time in jail on trumped up corruption charges that were sufficient to finish them off as a serious political alternative and then banned from standing. That’s what happened to Alexei Navalny. As a consequence the only people appearing on the ballot paper against Putin are going to be unpopular nonentities that have been allowed to stand to help maintain an illusion of choice.
Retaining and using power is also the reason why Putin has backed Assad in Syria despite significant internal dislike of the body bags that have been coming home from the war. Putin has calculated that there are more people who will be pleased to see their country winning a war than there are grieving mothers who know where to place the blame. He has also, calculated that taking territory occupied by Russian speakers from Ukraine by force plays very well with a Russian audience. Especially when it is so very obvious that the West has been powerless to do anything meaningful to stop him. Then there is his enthusiasm for huge set piece sporting events taking place on Russian soil. If you want to cheer up an electorate then there is a very long tradition amongst cynical politicians for staging games.
All of this is also the overwhelmingly likely reason for the poisoning of two Russians in England this week. We will never know for certain who did this and there is a queue of regime supporters telling us that it is nothing to do with Russia. The most extreme example of a bare faced lie was when the killer of Litvinenko came on the TV to tell us that Skripal probably did it to himself or had a heart attack. A rare example of father and daughter trying to commit suicide on a public street or sharing the exact same moment to have a heart attack.
The only way we will ever get to the truth behind Skripal’s killer is to ask the question: who benefits? The answer to that is simple. Putin looks very good inside Russia if it is known that he is able to kill traitors even if they are living in Britain. It sends the perfect message for him. It shows just how strong he has become and how long the reach of his punishment can be. No one gains more than him. Indeed, he is probably the only person in the world whose reputation internally would improve if this action was directly traced to him. Inside Russia this poisoning is viewed in almost exactly the same light that Britain would have looked on it if we had poisoned Kim Philby in Moscow.
In these circumstances there are a lot of hot headed people who are telling us that the UK must strengthen its armed forces and build better Trident missiles in order to stop Putin. That plays right into Putin’s hands. He needs the narrative that he is surrounded on all sides by enemies. There is no amount of spending on the defence budget that would enable Britain to win a conventional war in the east of Ukraine even with the aid of the US. There is no way that the UK can unseat Putin by building nuclear weapons. We just help him with his own bombastic posturing and give him an easy justification for wasting billions of oil money on better mass destruction. So we might as well use our money more wisely.
There is one very clear way to remove any realistic threat from Putin’s Russia. It just happens to be exactly the same thing that will also remove much of the threat from Saudi religious extremism. We can cut the amount of money we send them to buy oil and gas as quickly and as comprehensively as possible.
The single most effective way of reducing the threat of terrorism and the threat of a resurgence of Russian dictatorship is to invest in alternative sources of energy and energy conservation and storage. You won’t hear that policy coming from the mouth of UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson. But it is the honest truth.