IN 2022’S New Year editorial the Morning Star warned of the dangers of war in Europe.

We noted the military build-up on both sides of the Russian border and the United States’ contemptuous rejection of a number of de-escalation proposals from Moscow, such as an agreement by both countries not to station nuclear weapons abroad.

We are now 10 months into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with no end in sight — and no sign that politicians recognise how acute is the risk of escalation.

Nor is it acceptable in “official” politics to look for explanations of a war that is depicted either as the responsibility of Vladimir Putin alone or down to the character of Russia itself as an eternal menace.

The reaction to a tranche of declassified files published as 2022 ends therefore portrays Tony Blair as naive for advising Washington that Putin could be brought into the fold and become a loyal satellite.

For supporters of the US-led world order, Russia’s failure to “integrate” like this is a great tragedy of post-Soviet international relations. 

The declassified Blair files are interesting for shedding light on the period when Western governments still considered this course. Liberal commentators wonder why Blair turned a blind eye to Putin’s brutal war on Chechnya as if he had missed something about the Russian leader’s character — but domestic repression and war crimes are no barrier to being part of the US club. 

It was largely US decisions — to decline Russian queries about joining Nato, and to expand that alliance up to Russia’s borders in breach of commitments made in 1989 — that ensured Moscow didn’t join the US camp, and in that sense paved the way for today’s proxy war in Ukraine.

There are serious (if blood-drenched) US imperialist strategists — Henry Kissinger being the most prominent — who see that as a mistake. It is hardly the main point, however.

Reports on the declassified files imply that a benevolent Blair was somehow taken in by Putin. Examples of the latter’s duplicitous behaviour even include that he promised to back the US against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

This, of course, reminds us of other ways in which the US set the scene for today’s war in Ukraine.

The succession of aggressive wars Washington launched from 1999 made it clear to all — including the nascent kleptocratic Russian capitalist class — that international law and UN authority were for little countries.

The forcible severance of Kosovo from Yugoslavia following great power backing for a local independence movement presaged Russia’s attitude to the breakaway “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Lugansk, now formally annexed.

Now US power is in decline, other actors — Turkey as well as Russia — are jockeying for higher status in any rearranged world order.

But the utter devastation wrought on Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya in the years of US unipolar dominance give the lie to any idea that incorporating Russia into that world order would have spared the world armed conflict.

Bush and Blair’s invasion of Iraq had many consequences. The destabilisation of the Middle East and the global spread of jihadist terror; a heightened authoritarianism in the US and Britain which has worsened ever since.

But it bred a new wariness among the public about the truthfulness of our leaders — and a deep public scepticism about launching military conflict, one reflected in Labour’s 2013 defeat of a government bid to join the war in Syria.

Our politicians are trying to use the Ukraine war to reverse those trends and smear as borderline treacherous any hint of peace activism.

But these causes are more important today than a year ago, with politicians and pundits making a virtue of their refusal to negotiate or compromise despite the ever-present threat of nuclear Armageddon.

Official politics must not be permitted to silence the peace movement. Its voice of sanity must be heard loud and clear in 2023.