Earlier this month, the British Prime Minister survived a vote of no confidence from his parliamentary party in which more than forty percent of his own Tory MPs demanded his resignation. 

Boris Johnson is almost certainly the worst Prime Minister that the United Kingdom has ever been forced to endure. He seems constitutionally unfit for the responsibilities of high office. It’s not that he’s a warmonger or a zealot. He’s not even particularly financially corrupt, certainly not when compared to some of his predecessors and his colleagues. It’s simply that he is a profoundly dishonest and dishonorable individual, and that his lack of integrity is poisoning all the fundamental decency out of British public life.

The day after the vote, a former Conservative leader wrote in the right-wing Times newspaper that Mr. Johnson should quit. That same day, the president of an embattled Eastern European nation currently enjoying an ad hoc military alliance with the UK announced that he was ‘very happy’ that Boris Johnson had remained in power. This attempted intervention in Britain’s domestic politics was not particularly welcome or well judged. His view that Johnson’s survival was ‘great news’ hardly captured the mood of the British public. 

Diplomacy is a fine art, and no country likes the thought of foreign interference in their internal affairs. Under such circumstances, it is extraordinary how decisively a nation’s sympathies can shift. That leader’s words may yet eventually rebound with unforeseen consequences. Just because Britain believes it has the God-given right to get involved in other countries’ politics does not mean that it’s happy for those other countries to try to involve themselves in its own.

The price we pay for internationalism lies in the hazardous complexities which that approach involves. As every student of European history knows, the First World War was the unforeseen outcome of a structure of defensive military alliances designed to prevent such a conflict from ever taking place. Just as that conflagration had been the result of a series of unbreakable international pledges, its sequel conversely erupted from the breach of another set of diplomatic promises. 

There are now very real concerns that a Third World War may develop out of similarly irrational conditions. Wars occur when we can no longer summon the reason, understanding, and effort necessary to avoid them. They represent a triumph of geopolitical entropy and moral attrition, of the banal chaos toward which history may, when unattended, tend.

The relentlessness of international tragedies and disasters – from wars and famines to environmental crises – eventually numbs our better sensibilities. In desperation, we come to accept their inevitability, just as we slowly grow inured to the aches, pains, and trials of our own lives. Our loyalties and our capacities for compassion are subject to the exigencies of our more pragmatic concerns, and our willingness to sacrifice our comforts and securities for the sake of others is as limited as our patience with their plight.

Increasing numbers of ordinary people may therefore find themselves moving toward the isolationist impulses famously characterized (and caricatured) by the politics of Donald Trump. The former American President has recently argued that the West would do better to fortify its high schools and attend to its urgent material needs, than to arm its distant allies overseas. Mr. Trump might have betrayed democracy in his own nation, as an ongoing series of congressional hearings is currently seeking to prove, but his appeal to his followers’ most visceral instincts remains strong. He knows their measure well; he presses his finger firmly against that atavistic pulse. He senses that, in the end, of course, as one of his more progressive predecessors proposed, ‘it’s the economy, stupid’.

Geopolitical relationships are rarely as black and white or as cut and dried as they may at any moment appear. They are determined by context and nuance and can therefore become highly ambiguous, unpredictable, and indeed even volatile. Things are not always as they seem. 

Twenty years ago, I lived and worked in Eastern Europe, in one of the former Soviet states. I used to write regular features for a regional newspaper and on a couple of occasions published articles that expressed concern for the limited rights of local Russian-speaking populations. 

These were hardly rabid pro-Kremlin polemics but simply observed that individuals who had been born in these territories prior to their independence, but who did not speak the national language, were often denied citizenship and had as a result become stateless, disenfranchised from electoral processes, and beholden to the whims of these new nations in their annual applications for the right to live and work in the lands in which they had been raised. 

Around a quarter of the people living in that former Soviet nation lacked the right to vote in national elections and even the permanent right to reside. I must admit that, in my naivety, I was taken aback by the disquiet that the publication and discussion of this information had, in some quarters, caused.

In one article, I had quoted a member of the Russian parliament with whom I’d debated this subject. He was a moderate who empathised with the aspirations and anxieties of such newly independent states, but who also expressed concern at the direction their politics were taking them. He said that he shared their historical fears and resentments. Past tyrannies, he said, had murdered members of their families, just as they had robbed him of members of his own. Millions, he suggested, had been enslaved and oppressed by the excesses of a command economy, regardless of the language they spoke.

These fledgling nations’ relationships with their own histories were often similarly problematic. They tended, quite understandably, to demonise their periods of occupation and to gloss over other more unfortunate geopolitical collaborations in which they had once engaged. In one notorious case, this ostensibly centrist state had even briefly permitted the installation of a public statue of a Second World War freedom fighter dressed in a uniform bearing the regalia of the Third Reich. 

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I recall around that time visiting a municipal museum in the nation’s capital which included a room featuring an array of Soviet-era propaganda. A single Nazi propaganda poster was ‘displayed’ (or, rather, hidden) behind a screen. You had to push the screen aside to view it. When you moved on to the next exhibit, an attendant discreetly moved the screen back into place. 

A neighbouring, neutral country had recently opened a public inquiry into its own complicity in the genocides of the Second World War, but this new NATO member chose to ignore those difficult aspects of its history. This was more than revisionism, worse than denial. It was almost a form of cultural amnesia, a moral blind spot caused by severe historical trauma.

During my four years living in that country, I developed a great respect for its culture and its people. One evening during my time there, I attended a party at the Russian embassy. It was a grand old building, decorated in a typically gilded imperial style. Representatives of all major European nations and global powers were present.

I was frequently invited to such diplomatic gatherings in my capacity as a journalist and an academic. On that occasion, I’d been invited by a mid-ranking diplomat who, as is often the case in such situations, was also reputed to fulfil a range of additional and covert responsibilities.

Towards the end of that evening of canapés and sparkling wines, I was approached by my host’s counterpart from the British embassy, who requested that we meet afterwards for an informal conversation at a local bar. I agreed to do so. 

There, over a couple of whiskies, and beneath the glare of jaded eyes, I was quizzed as to the geopolitical sympathies of my journalism and my acquaintance with members of various other diplomatic missions. It was like something out of a cheap thriller. The temperature outside was in the minus twenties. The Cold War might rarely have felt much chillier.

I assured my increasingly paranoid compatriot that I maintained no specific political alignments or national affiliations, but that I simply tried my best as a journalist to report events and situations as I found them. I was not, I also stressed, an asset of any foreign intelligence service. It surprised me somewhat that it appeared I needed to make this point. In truth, the words ‘asset’ and ‘intelligence’ had never featured prominently in any vocabulary I might have used to describe myself.

I hugely admired the country in which I lived, its people, and their long quest for freedom. But it was, I explained, entirely possible to respect the independence and integrity of a nation while at the same time questioning and challenging its policies and politics. Such scrutiny is the first duty of the so-called Fourth Estate. Constructive heresy is the responsibility of every citizen and patriot.

I feel the same today, looking out across this same continent, as I felt then. I believe in freedom of expression and the freedom of the press. I believe that journalists and citizens should be free to speak the truth without fear for their liberty, livelihoods, or lives.

I appreciate the values and ideals of my cultural heritage, but not exclusively, nor to the detriment of all others. I am not blind to their flaws or their faults. I know that ideology must never become a vital priority. I hope I shall never fall prey to the geopolitical paranoia that seems to have grown so prevalent these days.

I also remain fundamentally opposed to war. I do not endorse military interventions of any kind, except in direct, immediate, and proportionate defence of civilian life, nor do I approve the violence of the oppressive apparatus of the established state. I do not believe it is beneficial in any conflict to demonise either side. I believe that the key to the resolution of such conflicts lies in the painful process of coming to terms with their historical causes and in the mutual acceptance of the validity of our differences.

This requires of course that we overcome our own suspicions of our enemies and acknowledge that those things we hold in common must vastly outweigh those differences. This is the true secret of international diplomacy, the strategy by which nations may learn to discard the lies they tell each other and themselves – and by which we might start to speak truth and peace to our own peoples and to the rest of the world.

International law – which should include respect for human rights and the Geneva Conventions – must apply to all, although it often fails to do so. It is crucial that all sides recognise this inconvenient and uncomfortable truth.

There are, as far as we can tell, individuals and institutions which display totalitarian aspirations and authoritarian practices on every side. There always have been. From the Monument of Lihula to the Azov Battalion, the West must understand that the smiling faces of its allies may disguise secrets as dark as those harboured by its enemies, and indeed as dark as its own. It might therefore be wiser to assume the moral high ground of open and transparent self-scrutiny than to continue to proclaim the incontrovertibility of its own positions from its old moral high horse.

And the friends of the West might similarly sometimes come to question the appropriateness of their choice of western friends. History will not always judge us in the ways we might hope. Those who choose to laud frauds and liars on any side would be well advised to remember that.