Valdai Club

Prime Minister Theresa May has been humiliated: she called an election to strengthen her grip on power and failed. There is likely to be chaos in the Conservative Party and a change of leadership. Most people were wrong about the Labour leader, the old-fashioned Left-winger Jeremy Corbyn. He fought a surprisingly good campaign, and his party took a number of seats from Conservative ministers.

Iraq and the parallel fiasco in Afghanistan have undermined Britain’s relationship with America, and its willingness to go to war abroad. Britain’s foreign and defence policy find themselves in deep uncertainty.

Seventy years ago today, Winston Churchill delivered his famous speech in Fulton, Ohio, widely seen as the symbolic beginning of the Cold War. Today, more and more people believe that the Cold War has made a comeback. Valdai Club expert, writer and diplomat Sir Rodric Braithwaite shares his view of whether fears of a new Cold War are valid.

Primakov was an expert in the Middle East, and earlier in his career, he had spent some time there. After Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in the summer of 1990, Gorbachev sent him on a couple of missions to Baghdad to try to persuade Saddam to withdraw and thus avert a war.

Twenty-five years have passed since the Russians finally pulled out of Afghanistan: long enough to look back with some objectivity, and to draw parallels with the war which the Americans have been fighting there since 2001. If the failed interventions in Afghanistan demonstrate anything, it is that terrorism can best be countered by good intelligence and police work, and only occasionally by the very limited application of force.

By 1992 Russia was being given food aid by its former enemies: a degree of humiliation which people do not easily forget. There are many flaws in the Putin system. But it has restored Russian self respect, and laid the ground for future prosperity and reform.