Abbott’s historic perspective

Sobering as it was, Tony Abbott’s warning that a “new iron curtain will ring down in Europe” if Russia seizes Ukraine and that a “Moscow-Beijing axis” could spur China to invade Taiwan, shifting the international order against the world’s democracies, should not be dismissed lightly. The former prime minister’s speech to the Danube Institute think tank in Budapest, Hungary, which borders Ukraine, was not unrealistic.

Two elements set the speech apart. First, Mr Abbott put current geo-strategic tensions and flashpoints into their historical context, noting that the five decades after 1945 showed the only way to keep aggressors at bay was collective security. Second, he made good use of his experience with Vladimir Putin. Mr Abbott related a revealing conversation he had with the Russian leader at the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit in Beijing in 2014, after a Russian missile battery had shot down Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board including 38 Australians. During the conversation Mr Putin suggested that “Ukraine was really Russian”. Mr Putin would not cease, Mr Abbott predicted, until Ukraine became a Russian colony, when the Russian President would turn his attention to the Baltic States, to Poland and to other former Soviet satellites until Russia was “again the overlord of eastern Europe”. With an economy smaller than Italy’s he had already invaded Georgia, annexed Crimea, occupied the Donbas and restored Russia as a military superpower.

Mr Abbott’s assessment of how Mr Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping see the West was undoubtedly accurate. They were witnessing the US in retreat, he said, with no other country or group of countries with the strength and goodwill to step up.

That impression, he said, was fuelled by the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan and the West’s “self-flagellation over race and identity … even though there has never been less racism and minorities have never had a fairer go”. Beijing and Moscow had concluded that a “decadent West is unlikely to defend itself with vigour, let alone stand up for others”.