BOOK REVIEW: What if the boot were on the other foot?

I read this book on my Kindle app and it ended on page 59. It is less a book than a booklet, a pamphlet. Something you can start and finish during a single Eskom blackout.

So why bother at all with something so flimsy? I think it’s because you don’t need a lot of book to make an important point. And Abelow does make one.

His thesis — and maybe this is more of a thesis than a book? — is that Putin may be vile, but he isn’t the only villain. What of the West?

Abelow asks : “Is the Western narrative about the Ukraine war correct?”

Could it, indeed, be the case that by expanding its sphere of influence into areas that were once under the control of the old Soviet Union, Nato has stirred up a hornet’s nest and brought the world closer to nuclear destruction than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962?

If so, maybe all the blame for the current mess should not be directed at Moscow.

Abelow writes: “The underlying cause of the war lies not in an unbridled expansionism of Mr Putin, or in paranoid delusions of military planners in the Kremlin, but in a 30-year history of Western provocations, directed at Russia, that began during the dissolution of the Soviet Union and continued to the start of the war.”

There can no doubt that, as Abelow insists, there has been a move eastward of Western influence, with both Nato and the EU admitting and embracing former Soviet satellites.

However — and this is where I strongly differ with the author — these are sovereign nations and democracies. They should be allowed to do what they like. If they want to join the EU for economic reasons or a masochistic lust for more red tape — or to climb into bed with Nato for security reasons — then why shouldn’t they?

Russia may be peeved, but so what? Democratic decisions by democratic governments should not be blocked by the bully in the Kremlin.

Yet Abelow suggests that if Russia were to do what the West is doing, the West would be forced to be as aggressive as Russia now is.

“Any foreign power that places military forces near US territory knows it is crossing a red line. In fact, this conviction is the cornerstone of American foreign and military policy, and its violation is considered reason for war. Yet when it comes to Russia, the US and its Nato allies have acted for decades in disregard of this same principle. They have progressively advanced the placement of their military forces towards Russia, even to its borders.

“Had Russia taken equivalent actions with respect to US territory — say, placing its military forces in Canada or Mexico —Washington would have gone to war and justified that war as a defensive response to the military encroachment of a foreign power.”

This argument makes some sense — on the surface — but it ignores the fact that — apart from Cuba — there are no US neighbours who are in any way likely to allow in the Russian military.

This book does touch on concerns about internal Ukrainian matters, and there can be little doubt that the sainthood so many would wish to bestow on President Volodymyr Zelensky should not be granted.

Putin felt provoked by Nato, and the Ukrainians themselves are also far from blameless. Maybe we have all watched too many James Bond and Austin Powers movies, where it is so easy to differentiate between good and evil.  The real world is not like that.

As Abelow suggests, Putin is not a one-dimensional baddy. “The story of an evil, irrational, intrinsically expansionist Russia with a paranoid leader at its helm, opposed by a virtuous United States and Europe, is a confused and strange confabulation, inconsistent with a whole series of directionally aligned events during the past 30 years — events whose significance and meaning should have been readily apparent. In fact, the predominant Western narrative might itself be viewed as a kind of paranoia,” he writes.

“My primary goal in this book is to correct a false narrative, and for a very practical reason: because false narratives lead to bad outcomes.”

The conflict in Ukraine has been going on for so long — with David proving far more of a problem than Goliath-the-red initially thought — that there is a danger it will fade from our thoughts and from the headlines.

However, its complexities are so much more complex than the complexities of any spy film.

While this intriguing book is short, it helps to expand the debate, to explain why portrayals of the Russian leader as an unnuanced comic book villain are so dangerous.