Confrontation the only way
Sir: I deeply admire Philip Bobbitt’s writings on constitutional orders and counter-terrorism, but his essay (‘A portent of perils to come’, 16 August) was off the mark in several respects. His claim that after 1991 ‘we were preparing for Russia to be an enemy once again’ does not square with the persistent Russian coercion — sanctions, support for separatism, intimidation — of its ‘near abroad’ in the 1990s. Revanchism preceded Nato wariness, because it had never ceased.
Second, Bobbitt is too timid to push his line of thought to its logical conclusion: that if Japan, Poland and Germany are worthy of collective defence by virtue of being ‘states of consent’, so too is post-2003 Georgia. Nato membership is beside the point, as the case of Japan shows. A consistent policy would see British and American troops guarding Tbilisi.
Third, it is astonishing that Bobbitt can conclude that ‘Nothing can have a higher priority than organising an international system that avoids confrontation.’ If the price of that is complicity in only the second UN-era annexation, then the only humane policy can be confrontation. Shashank Joshi
Department of Government, Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts
Sir: Professor Philip Bobbitt refers to ‘the Soviet invasion of Finland in 1939’. Finland has never been invaded by the Soviet Union. The Finns withstood the Soviet attack in the famous Winter War of 1939–40.
Carola Sandbacka
Swansea
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