The End of the West? One East-West relationship endures

The overarching mood at the Munich Security Conference (MSC) in mid-February was one of stability unravelling on multiple issues. The provocative focus was on ‘Westlessness’. The MSC’s newly invented description highlights the fact that the cohesion of the West, which had strengthened over the past 75 years, is now coming unpicked.

Tension with Russia and China, especially, is deepening. Globally, the ties binding nations who long believed they were part of The West are becoming frayed.

This is precisely what Thinking the Unthinkable first identified six years ago. Our work was catalysed by Russia’s subversive activities in eastern Ukraine, then Moscow’s annexation of Crimea.

Despite the evidence, at the time most leaders we talked to found it hard to believe our analysis of the existential threat to global stability and the international rules based system. They were stuck in the optimistic mindset of a “reset” between the US, Europe and Russia agreed several years earlier.

That ‘reset’ soon unravelled. Except in one place.

One of NATO’s only land borders with Russia is in Norway’s far North East corner well inside the Arctic Circle. Here Russian trawlers freely land their lucrative catch of king crabs.