Was Liz Truss wise to be photographed in a tank?

A striking image on our screens this week has been the sight of Liz Truss emerging from the turret of a tank. As everyone immediately pointed out, the Foreign Secretary was thereby channeling one of the most celebrated Cold War memes: Margaret Thatcher atop a tank in 1986. Soviet propaganda had given her the sobriquet “the Iron Lady” even before she became Prime Minister: the helmet fitted and she was happy to wear it.

Now Ms Truss is echoing Mrs Thatcher’s martial persona while on a visit to British forces stationed in the Baltic states, prompting her colleagues at home to ponder whether the Cabinet minister whom Tory members currently see as their favourite might be on manoeuvres in more than one sense. This is dubious speculation, however: the Foreign Secretary has been conspicuously loyal to the Prime Minister and still has to prove herself in the demanding post she has held for less than three months. There is in any case no prospect of a vacancy in Downing Street before the next election, still at least two years away.

Yet the Truss-in-a-tank image has resonance, as she must know. It is all the more surprising given that the role of a Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs is, essentially, to be Britain’s chief diplomat. The Iron Lady herself never cared much for the Foreign Office, which she felt was better at representing foreign rather than British interests, but even she knew the value of diplomacy and was especially adept at cultivating our adversaries: notably Mikhail Gorbachev and Deng Xiaoping.  

So it is remarkable that Ms Truss has chosen to emulate her heroine, not as the statesmanlike Prime Minister who astonished her allies by announcing that the Soviet leader was a man she “could do business with”, but as the Boadicea-like warrior queen, symbolically leading Nato armour against the Red Army.

It is, of course, no accident that Ms Truss has let herself be photographed in this pose at a time when Russian forces are massed on the borders of Ukraine, perhaps poised to invade the former Soviet republic. She has calculated that one image may be worth a thousand tanks if it sends the right signal to the Kremlin. Whether President Putin will not only receive it but react by withdrawing his troops, as he did last April after menacing Ukraine during the chaotic early days of the Biden Administration, is more doubtful. The man who has already sent troops into Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea and the Donbas is certainly not quaking in his boots.

Yet it is worth reflecting on how much has changed on the geopolitical map of Europe since Mrs Thatcher’s dashing photo-icon. In 1986, Soviet forces were stationed on the Elbe, in the heart of Germany; today the Russians are well over a thousand miles further east. Then, there were half a million Russians still occupying East Germany; only large, well-equipped Nato forces, including the 50,000-strong British Army of the Rhine, protected Western Europe from the numerically superior legions of the Warsaw Pact.

No wonder Helmut Kohl, the West German Chancellor, was glad to be pictured racing across the plains alongside Mrs T (he in a Bundeswehr Leopard, she in a Royal Armoured Corps Centurion), even though at a personal level neither leader could stand the other. Until the Berlin Wall fell three years later, the Soviet Union posed an existential threat to Germans and indeed all West Europeans. Would Angela Merkel or for that matter Olaf Scholz, who will succeed her in office next week, be photographed in a Panzer, let alone next to Boris Johnson? Not likely — even if Putin were to unleash his myrmidons on Kyiv.  

The fact that no German leader would risk such a provocation is precisely why Ms Truss may have been right to don the armour of the Iron Lady. The Nato units she was visiting are based in Estonia, less than 200 miles from Putin’s native St Petersburg. The Atlantic alliance now borders the Russian Federation. So much has changed in the 35 years since 1986 that it is easy to forget that the doctrine of deterrence has not fundamentally altered at all.

Vladimir Putin has made it quite clear that he does not regard Ukraine as an independent country. More than that: he has supplied arms to rebels in its eastern regions, who have conducted a low-intensity conflict there that has cost at least 14,000 lives in seven years. He is supported by the dictator of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, whose forces would join their Russian comrades in any invasion. Putin must be deterred from stepping up this conflict into a full-scale war that could destabilise the whole of Eastern Europe.

The British are crucial to this policy of deterrence, even though we have only a few hundred troops in the region. As I wrote here in the Daily Telegraph this week (behind a paywall), appeasing Putin won’t work — yet Scholz is fated to play the part of Neville Chamberlain vis à vis the Russian despot. History, politics and temperament, combined with dependence on Russian gas, mean that the German Chancellor is likely to prefer the mirage of “peace in our time” to showing solidarity with a state that isn’t even a Nato member. Only the British, among European members of Nato, are fully committed to the doctrine of deterrence that is indispensable to the containment of Russia.  

What this means is that if British forces are ordered to fight for their Nato allies, or even for Ukraine, they won’t hesitate to do so. The Russians need to be reminded of that — and so do our allies on both sides of the Atlantic. The Americans, who alone have the power to stop Putin’s divisions in their tracks, will only use it if they are persuaded that Europeans, too, are ready to fight in defence of democracy.

As Roger Boyes writes in the Times today (behind a paywall), the Ukrainians are prepared to die to preserve their independence — and deserve support from the West. Their struggle is too often seen here as “an intermittent spectator sport rather than as one of the most potent issues of our time”. Liz Truss has — admittedly in a none-too-subtle way — let it be known that the British, too, are ready to fight: “We will stand with our fellow democracies against Russia’s malign activity.” She has sent Putin the message he needs to hear: that we know our freedom is also at stake. From the Thames to the Dnieper, and from the Channel to the Baltic, it is all for one and one for all.

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