It was the disastrous consequences of nuclear conflict I was highlighting

However, first may I make some observations. To suggest that because, selected events happened more than 50 years ago, they have become irrelevant is surely disingenuous. In fact, in much of his letter he contradicts his own contention.

States may frequently use ‘morality’ to justify their actions, but they rarely, if ever, go to war for moral reasons. They wage war for territorial, natural resource and, ultimately, financial gain. When nations go to war international law becomes irrelevant and ‘might becomes right’.

For example, in 1848 Mexico did not voluntarily sign the ‘legal’ Treaty of Hildago, which Mr Lee appears to use to justify the US’s theft of over half a million square miles of Mexico. The Mexicans signed it in the face of overwhelming military force from the US – regardless of the fact that it had invaded Mexico’s territory on a pretext. (Interestingly, a similar pretext to that Germany used in 1938 to annex the Sudetenland.)

Britain and France did not withdraw willingly from Suez in 1956 for moral reasons after they had defeated the Egyptians. They withdrew in the face of the threat of overwhelming military force and financial pressure from the US and Russia, because both these countries, for different reasons, considered it was in their interests to diminish the UK’s standing internationally.

As I clearly stated in my letter, I am no apologist for Russia, therefore will refrain from commenting on Mr Lee’s selective history of the relationship between the Ukraine and Russia. Greater minds than mine (and I suspect his) have failed in trying to judge the rights and wrongs of a tortuous history.

It is naive to think that those mid-European countries that have been allowed to join Nato became members simply by saying: ‘Please may we join?’

Furthermore, it is ironic that Mr Lee makes a point of stressing ‘Putin’s lies’ when we live in a society that has been dominated by the lies of so many British Prime Ministers since the time of Edward Heath, who, by his subsequent own admission, lied to the British people to dupe them into tolerating his ceding of UK sovereignty in 1972 to unelected bureaucrats who, behind closed doors, without recorded minutes of their meetings, even now still make decisions which profoundly affect all of our lives.

I did not ‘blame’ the West for the war in the Ukraine. What I actually said was ‘Regardless of the tortuous historical legacy of the Ukraine and its constituent parts, the realpolitik of the tragedy unfolding in Ukraine is that political actions taken by the West in recent years have reignited a threat to European stability’. What I did do was blame the West for its exploitation of a regional conflict for America’s and the EU’s financial and political purposes.

In the process, it continues to increase the sufferings of Ukrainians and is putting its own peoples, indeed all people, in harm’s way.

To support my view, I can do no better than refer to Ambrose Evans-Pritchard’s report from Davos, 23 May 2022, that ‘Veteran US statesman Henry Kissinger has urged the West to stop trying to inflict a crushing defeat on Russian forces in Ukraine, warning that it would have disastrous consequences for the long term stability of Europe’.

It was those disastrous consequences (nuclear conflict) that I sought to draw attention to, because neither Western politicians nor popular media appear to be conscious or heedful of it.

Is that because the consequences of recognising it are too frightful for a soft society to contemplate?

MICHAEL A WARD