International Skripal Response Shows There is Life Yet in Anti-Russian Western Front

For decades, professional politicians of center left or center right persuasion, as well as their officials, military and intelligence professionals, held a common stance towards the Soviet Union, and later Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Their unquestioned conventional wisdom was that this power was a malign actor, a natural geopolitical foe of the West. And so, governments of different stripes in different countries generally coalesced around a united front against this threat.

That post-war consensus has, of course, been broken spectacularly by President Donald Trump. He has suggested moral equivalence between the US and Russia; urged Russia’s readmission to the G8; and, most notoriously, appeared to cower before Putin himself on that stage in Helsinki.

All of this has led to a gradual drip of ever increasing despair among traditional Russia hawks on the right; and “I told you so” confirmation glee among newly converted Russophobes on the left.

In their different ways, they all fear the post-war framework may be gone for good.

But not so fast.

There is cause for at least a crumb of comfort, and maybe more, in the international response to the UK’s decision to name and charge Russian suspects in the case of Sergey Skripal.

Skripal is of course the former Russian intelligence officer who turned against his former masters and sought refuge from the vengeful reach in the leafy English city of Salisbury. In March, he and his daughter, Yulia, were found unconscious and in a critical condition, slumped on a park bench.

Miraculously, they survived and were discharged after many months of hospital care.

But the mystery of their poisoning with the deadly nerve agent Novichok continued.

Now, there are some of the Trump and alt-right persuasion who might have said: let the Russians do what they need to do their own traitors.

But the death of an innocent British woman in Salisbury as a result of the attack has changed that equation.

Within hours of UK prime minister announcing charges against Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov and declaring them agents of Russia’s elite international spy service, the GRU, four of Britain’s closest allies declared loudly they had London’s back.

Britain, France, Germany, Canada and the United States issued a powerful statement last week promising to work to disrupt “the hostile activities of foreign intelligence networks” and called on Russia to disclose its nerve agent program.

In a separate joint statement, the other four countries said they backed Britain’s assessment that Russian officers were behind the attack.

“We have full confidence in the British assessment that the two suspects were officers from the Russian military intelligence service, also known as the GRU, and that this operation was almost certainly approved at a senior government level,” the statement said, adding that the countries urged Russia to provide “full disclosure of its Novichok program.”

Now, this isn’t going to stop the pro-Russian alt-right and others whispering in Trump’s ear. It isn’t going to stop Trump taking orders from Putin.

But it is a chink of light in a dark sky.

It shows that the common values that bind members of the Western alliance still endure somewhere in the corridors of power across these countries. Those values still mean something. And, yes, there are still some things so outrageous that they can bind back together that which otherwise appears to be unraveling.

It may not be much. But it is something to celebrate nonetheless.