Putin's War Is a Strategy to Fragment the West, Argues Former Attorney-General George Brandis

At a private lunch among diplomatic representatives to NATO in Brussels this year, the ambassador of a major European nation said something blunt: the problem for Europe is that the White House is currently occupied by a Russian asset. The US ambassador was not at the table. According to the account George Brandis was given, nobody present disagreed.

Brandis, a former Australian high commissioner to the UK, former Liberal senator and federal attorney-general, and now a professor at the ANU's National Security College, heard the story this month in Tallinn from a guest at that lunch. That guest was Marko Mihkelson, the long-serving chair of the Estonian parliament's foreign affairs committee, a Russia scholar and former Moscow correspondent. Brandis writes in an opinion piece for The Age that the remark was not meant as a conspiracy theory. In his reading, it dramatised an observable truth: that Donald Trump's foreign policy, more likely through foolishness and ignorance than design, serves Vladimir Putin's interests remarkably well.

The conversation took place during a week-long visit to the Baltic nations, which followed the Yalta European Strategy conference in Kiev. The Latvian embassy arranged the program under the auspices of foreign minister Baiba Braze, whom Brandis knew from their time as diplomatic representatives in London. It brought him together with politicians, senior officials, military leaders, journalists and think tanks.

Brandis argues that Trump has abandoned any pretence that America champions liberal democracy and defends the global rule of law, and that this plays into the hands of Putin and the other dictators Russia works alongside. He points to a fresh example: a fortnight after his conversation with Mihkelson, Trump decided to buy diesel from Russia, which helps fund the Russian war machine, and to suspend sanctions against it. In Brandis's view, that undercut NATO allies who agree that Russia's war against Ukraine must not succeed.

The Baltic states, which border Russia and its client state Belarus, feel this most sharply, because for them the issue is existential. Artis Pabriks, a former Latvian defence minister, told Brandis that Ukraine is a litmus test of America's attitude toward the Baltics. Yet the Baltics are NATO members and hold the Article 5 mutual security guarantee. Ilze Milta, Latvia's current national security adviser, resists describing them as a separate bloc standing in a different relation to Russia. She said it is not about the Baltic states being next; it is NATO that is next, and they do not stand alone. She did not predict imminent Russian aggression, but like every official Brandis met, she voiced uncertainty about Putin's intentions beyond Ukraine, whenever and however that war ends.

Brandis's central claim is that the war is neither a limited territorial grab rooted in Putin's reading of Russian history nor merely a step toward rebuilding the Soviet empire, whose collapse Putin called in 2005 the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the century. He calls it the opening gambit of a grand strategy to fragment and weaken the West. He cites NATO analyst Carlo Masala, whose essay If Russia Wins became a European bestseller last year. Masala wrote that the war is a conflict over the future structure of the international system, pitting states that want to preserve the liberal order against those seeking radical overhaul, and that Western European leaders have been too slow to grasp it. Brandis says the Baltics grasp it, as does NATO secretary-general Mark Rutte, while too many Western leaders do not. Trump, he writes, is at best ignorant, at worst complicit.

Brandis also spent an hour with Krisjanis Karins, Latvia's prime minister when Russia invaded. Karins ordered most of Latvia's Stinger missiles sent to Ukraine, which Brandis says helped Ukrainian forces deny Russian paratroopers a decisive foothold at Hostomel Airport near Kyiv in the invasion's early days; had they succeeded, he writes, Kyiv would probably have been undefendable. Karins, American-born with a PhD from an Ivy League university, despairs that so many Western politicians miss the scale of Putin's ambition. Quoting Janis Joplin, he said freedom is another word for nothing left to lose, and that Latvians have everything to lose.

What to watch is whether US sanctions policy on Russia shifts further, and how NATO allies respond to the diesel purchases and the suspension of sanctions.