Testing The Limits

The Weekly Standard, October 20, 2014

Brāļu Kapi, Riga, March 1994 © Andrew Stuttaford

“I don’t think it’s 1940,” the woman in Riga told me in June, referring to the year the Soviets brought their own variety of hell to Latvia. “But then, I wouldn’t have expected 1940 in 1940 either.” And then she laughed, nervously. With Russia’s ambitions spilling across the borders that the breakup of the Soviet Union left behind, and talk from Vladimir Putin of a broader Russian World (Russkiy Mir), in which the Kremlin has the right to intervene to “protect” ethnic Russian “compatriots” in former Soviet republics, the once bright line that had cut the Baltic states off from the horrors of their past now seems fuzzy.

And in a more literal sense the borders that separated the Baltics from their old oppressor have lately appeared more vulnerable than once believed. Moscow has been pressing and provoking in the Pribaltika for years​—​some subversion here, some denial of history there. There have been maliciously random trade bans (Lithuanian cheese, Latvian sprats, and quite a bit more besides) and carefully planned cyberattacks. But the bullying has been stepped up sharply this year. The saber-rattling has evolved from menacing “training exercises,” such as last year’s Zapad-13 (70,000 Russian and Belarusian troops war-gaming their way through a fight against “Baltic terrorists”), to include too many flights by Russian fighters near or even in Baltic airspace to be anything other than part of a significantly more aggressive strategy.

On September 3, Barack Obama traveled to Tallinn, the Estonian capital, to reaffirm NATO’s commitment to the three Baltic states, all of which have been members of the alliance since 2004. Two days later Eston Kohver, an Estonian intelligence officer investigating smuggling across Estonia’s remote and poorly defended southeastern frontier, was, claims Tallinn, grabbed by a group of gunmen and dragged across the border into Russia. His support team at the Luhamaa frontier post nearby were distracted and disoriented by flash grenades and their communications were jammed: They were in no position to help.

Shortly afterwards, Kohver turned up in Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo prison. According to Russia’s rather different version of events, the Estonian was captured while on a mission on the Russian side of the border. Kohver faces espionage charges that could mean decades behind bars. He has “decided” to drop the lawyer that the Estonian government had arranged for him. Court-appointed lawyers will fill the gap. The stage is being set for a show trial, complete, I would imagine, with confession.

After a year of Russian lies over Ukraine, I’m inclined to believe democratic Estonia over Putin’s Russia. The timing was just too good. Barack Obama descends on Tallinn with fine words and a welcome promise of increased support, and Russia promptly trumps that with a move clearly designed to demonstrate who really rules the Baltic roost. In the immediate aftermath of Kohver’s kidnapping the Estonians signaled that they were prepared to treat the whole incident as an unfortunate misunderstanding. No deal. The power play stands, made all the more pointed by the way that it breaks the conventions of Spy vs. Spy, a breach that comes with the implication that Estonia is not enough of a country to merit such courtesies.

If anything could make this outrage worse, it is the historical resonances that come with it. There are the obvious ones, the memories of half a century of brutal Soviet occupation, the slaughter, the deportations, the Gulag, and all the rest. But there are also the echoes of a prelude to that: the kidnapping of a number of Estonians in the border region by the Soviets in the days of the country’s interwar independence, intelligence-gathering operations of the crudest type. These days Russia prefers more sophisticated techniques: Earlier this year, it polled people in largely Russian-speaking eastern Latvia for their views of a potential Crimean-type operation there (as it happens, they weren’t too keen).

But whatever the (pretended) ambiguities of the Kohver case, there were none about what came next. Moscow reopened decades-old criminal cases against Lithuanians who acted on their government’s instructions and declined to serve in the Red Army after Lithuania’s unilateral declaration of independence in March 1990. That government may not have won international recognition at that time, but recognition​—​including from Moscow​—​followed within 18 months. To attempt to overturn now what it approved in the interim comes very close to questioning the legitimacy of Lithuanian independence today.

This could turn out to be more than merely symbolic harassment. The Lithuanian government has advised any of its citizens theoretically at risk of Russian prosecution on these grounds not to travel beyond EU or NATO countries. That’s not as paranoid as it sounds​—​Russia has been known to abuse Interpol’s procedures in ways that can make for trying times at the airport for those it regards as its opponents.

As if that was not enough, injury has since been added to insult: A week or so later, Russia detained a Lithuanian fishing boat in waters that are international but within Russia’s exclusive economic zone. Lithuania acknowledges that’s where the vessel was, but argues that it had every right to be there. Russia maintained that the boat had been illegally fishing for crab, and took it back to Murmansk. Such disputes blow up from time to time, but once again the timing is, well .  .  .

And of course these actions are unfolding against a background not only of Russian aggression in Ukraine, but heightened verbal violence against the Baltics. We can be confident that when (as it seems he did) Putin boasted to Ukraine’s president, Petro Poroshenko, last month that Russian troops could be in the Baltic capitals (and, for good measure, Kiev, Bucharest, and Warsaw) “within two days,” he did so safe in the knowledge that his threatening braggadocio would be passed on.

Konstantin Dolgov, the Russian foreign ministry’s Special Representative for Human Rights, Democracy, and the Rule of Law (yes, really), obviously didn’t want to rely on third parties to get the message out: He went straight to Riga to deliver the message that Russia “would not tolerate the creeping offensive against the Russian language that we are seeing in the Baltics.” He pledged Russia’s “most serious” support to its purportedly embattled “compatriots.” No matter that they are, in reality, considerably freer (and generally better off) than Russians in Russia itself.

To be sure, Balts have heard this sort of talk before, but it’s hard not to suspect that this time something wicked might be on its way. A direct assault remains highly unlikely. This is not 1940. But the probing, the baiting, and the bullying will intensify, and so will efforts to foment trouble among the large Russian minorities in Latvia and Estonia. The October 4 election in Latvia passed peacefully, but the fact that “Russian” parties took about a quarter of the vote nationally (out of an electorate that excludes 300,000 mainly Russian “noncitizens”) and over 40 percent in Latgale in eastern Latvia will not, to put it mildly, have been overlooked in Moscow.

As to what Putin might want out of the Baltics in the end, it’s hard to say. If he succeeds in proving that NATO’s shield is nothing more than bluff (with all the consequences elsewhere that such an unmasking would bring in its wake), leaving Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia with nominal independence​—​flags, folk dancing, presidents, elections, and all that​—​would probably be acceptable so long as real power resided in Moscow. Continued Baltic membership in the EU might still be possible, even desirable: A Trojan horse or three within the EU could come in handy one day. Guesses too far? Maybe, but what we know is that Putin will try to take what he thinks he can get away with.

That’s why deterrence counts. Both Latvia and Lithuania have committed to increase defense spending from current (meager) levels to the NATO minimum target of 2 percent of GDP, a target that Estonia has met for a while. Latvia recently bought 123 secondhand armored combat vehicles from the United Kingdom. Estonia has announced that it will improve the demarcation of the border with Russia and will reinforce its border guard with special response teams. Recruitment is running at much higher levels for volunteer home defense units such as Estonia’s Kaitseliit and the Lithuanian Riflemen’s Union. Again, this is not 1940: This time the Baltics would fight.

That’s all well and good, but it’s important to remember that the Estonian military can boast fewer than 4,000 regulars. Latvia may be getting those combat vehicles, but it only has three tanks. In the end, the security of the Baltic states depends on their membership in NATO and the guarantee that comes with it: An attack on one NATO member, be it France or be it Estonia, is treated as an attack on all. In recent months, NATO has sent a blunt message​—​from tough declarations to an increased and increasing presence in the region​—​that this would indeed be the case, but Moscow’s continued pressure indicates that it is not convinced.

Until it is, this dangerous game will continue.

Baltics on the Edge

National Review Online, September 4, 2014

Hermann Castle, Narva, Estonia (with Ivangorod Castle, Russia, in the background), March 2015 © Andrew Stuttaford

Prisoners of geology, Icelanders make it their business to understand volcanoes. Prisoners of geography, the peoples of the Baltic States do the best they can to understand the unruly, dangerous, and enigmatic superpower next door.

So, when Janis Berzins of Latvia’s National Defense Academy published a report in April titled “Russia’s New-Generation Warfare in Ukraine,” it was worth paying attention. Since then, Russia’s actions in Ukraine have evolved beyond the deployment of “little green men” and other irregulars of nominally uncertain provenance into an old-fashioned invasion, plain, simple, and bloody, but the West still needs to focus on what Berzins had to say. His subtitle — “Implications for Latvian Defense Policy” — suggests why.

With Putin seemingly set, so far as opportunity will allow, on reconstituting the “Russian World” (Russkiy Mir) that fell apart with the Soviet Union, it’s easy to imagine that Latvia and Estonia might be somewhere on the target list. They are both former Soviet republics. For two centuries, they were part of the Russian Empire. Both have large, imperfectly assimilated Russian minorities, who, Putin reckons, belong within that Russian World, a status that entitles them — lucky “compatriots” — to his “protection.” Each has a major, almost 100 percent Russian-speaking city (Daugavpils, Latvia, and Narva, Estonia) temptingly close to the Russian border.

Both countries are in NATO, and thus theoretically covered by Article V of the NATO Treaty, which provides that all the alliance’s member states “agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.” But in an age in which war can proceed by half-denied incursions and bogus popular uprisings (“non-traditional combat,” in Berzins’s phrase), who is to say what an “armed attack” really is? Berzins asks what would happen if a “Crimea-like situation” were to erupt in Narva. After all, Russia would undoubtedly insist that this too was the exercise of a “democratic right of self-determination.” And that, Berzins clearly fears, would cloud the picture enough for some Western politicians to claim that Article V should not apply. If that sounds too cynical, recall the lengths that some of them went last month to avoid calling the Russian assault on Ukraine (a country without the benefit of an Article V guarantee) by its right name: invasion.

According to the (anti-Putin) Russian commentator Andrey Piontkovsky, Putin is well aware that many NATO countries would be reluctant to be drawn into conflict by Article V. And even if they did come to Estonia’s aid, “Putin [could] respond with a very limited nuclear strike and destroy for example two European capitals. Not London and not Paris, of course.” Were that to happen, Piontkovsky believes, Putin would calculate that “all progressive and even all reactionary American society” would shout “‘We do not want to die for f***ing Narva, Mr. President!’”

Far-fetched? Probably. Putin is a gambler, but he’s not reckless. That said, it is worth noting, as did Anne Applebaum in a recent article for the Washington Post, that “Vladimir Zhirinovsky — the Russian member of parliament and court jester who sometimes says things that those in power cannot — argued on television that Russia should use nuclear weapons to bomb Poland and the Baltic countries . . . and show the West who really holds power in Europe.” Zhirinovsky is not, thankfully, in a position to shape policy, but he is occasionally used by those in the Kremlin to float ideas that they would like to see in circulation. As (notes Applebaum) Putin has put it, he “gets the party going.”

That this sort of talk is even out there will, as Putin knows, encourage a good number of NATO members to define Article V as narrowly as they can. Psychological pressure has always been a part of warfare, but it has an even larger role to play in Russia’s notion of a “New Generation” war. Within that, writes Berzins, “the main battle-space is the mind. . . . The main objective is to reduce the necessity for deploying hard military power to the minimum necessary, making the opponent’s military and civil[ian] population support the attacker to the detriment of their own government and country,” a strategy (essentially what once might have been called subversion, but taken to a whole new level) peculiarly suited to some of the more fragile countries that emerged from the wreckage of the Soviet Union. In this respect, Berzins’s account of the early months of the Russian onslaught in Ukraine makes depressing reading: “In just three weeks, and without a shot being fired, the morale of the Ukrainian military was broken [in the Crimea] and all of their 190 bases had surrendered.”

But Ukraine, I was repeatedly told during a visit to the Latvian capital, Riga, in June, was a failed state. Latvia is not. Nor is Estonia. Both have made remarkable strides since winning back their freedom from the USSR. They are members of the EU as well as NATO. Their economies have grown fast (if not smoothly), delivering a standard of living far better than that of their Russian neighbor. That is not the case in Ukraine. At their core, Latvia and Estonia have a powerful sense of national identity. Memories of their independent inter-war republics and the nearly half a century of brutal Soviet occupation that followed still sear. In 1940 they were annexed by Moscow without a fight. That would not happen again.

Nevertheless, their political structures are not yet as developed as they could be, and their economies are far from robust. There is a lot of Russian money floating around, particularly in Latvia, and their Russian-speaking populations (30 percent or so of the population in Latvia and approximately 25 percent in Estonia) are not only a cause for Putin, but a potential source of instability that the Kremlin is continually trying to exploit. This should not be overestimated: Most Latvian and Estonian Russians feel at least a degree of loyalty to those countries, and the approval that some of them show for Russian adventurism abroad (in the Crimea, for example) does not necessarily mean that they want Russian troops showing up at their front door.

Looking specifically at Latvia, Berzins cites instances of the early phases of New Generation warfare, including “supporting pseudo human-rights organizations, backing the organization of a referendum for Russian to be the second official language [it failed, but, tellingly, won a majority in Eastern Latvia], and surveying the population of the eastern border to get intelligence on their inclination to support a [Crimean-style] scenario.” Plus, adds Berzins, “in a more subtle way, Russia has been successfully influencing internal politics through some of the political parties.” That may be a reference to, amongst others, Harmony Center, Latvia’s largest, a party that draws most of its support from the country’s Russians, and that has links to Putin’s United Russia party. Its leader is the mayor of Riga, a city in which the population divides roughly evenly between Russian-speakers and ethnic Latvians.

Then throw the Russian media into the mix. It’s no secret that Russian television has become a pathway to a world of nationalist delirium, a world where two plus two does indeed equal five, a “parallel reality,” in Berzins’s words, “legitimizing . . . Russian actions in the realm of ideas.” And this is the TV that most Baltic Russians watch most of the time (local Russian programming is thin gruel). Its poison may be diluted by the fact that these viewers live in the West, but still . . .

And then there is the constant saber-rattling at the border, the incursions into Latvian or Estonian airspace, military exercises such as, most notoriously, Zapad-2013 (“West 2013”), in which some 70,000 Russian and Belarusian troops massed near the Latvian, Lithuanian, and Polish borders to war-game a scenario in which “Baltic terrorists” were the villains, an exercise designed to demonstrate who was really boss in this part of the world.

But for now, the spying, the probing, the pressing, occasional trade embargoes, cyber-attacks, dirty tricks (check out the way that Interpol was abused in the 2013 mayoral elections in Tallinn, the Estonian capital, for one example), a gnawing at the foundations is “all” that there has been. Polling the inhabitants of the border region is as close as Russia has come to crossing the line that would herald the next phase of a New Generation war — the seizing, maybe, of a building or two in Narva or Daugavpils by a bogus “people’s republic” and the arrival of those “little green men” — a phase that, for now, seems mercifully far off.

Berzins has suggestions as to how Latvia might head off that moment. These include increased funding for economic development in the poorer regions, a boost to military spending (Latvia has since committed to hike its defense spending to 2 percent of GDP, the minimum NATO target that nonetheless hardly any member states hit), and the introduction of something like Swiss-style conscription. But perhaps the most important — and the most optimistic — revolves around securing the revision of Article V to reduce the dangerous ambiguity that New Generation warfare has opened up, an ambiguity that quite a few NATO members might well prefer to keep intact.

It’s an ambiguity that comes with terrible perils — not just for Latvia and Estonia (and, quite probably, Lithuania as well: the third of the Baltic trio has a far smaller Russian-speaking population, but cuts off the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad from Moscow-friendly Belarus), but for NATO too. Standing by our Baltic allies — three democracies that have emerged from Soviet darkness — is the right thing to do, but it is a matter of self-interest too. If Putin prevails over the Baltic countries despite their NATO membership, that would, argues Piontkovsky, “mean the end of NATO, and the end of the U.S. as a world power, and the complete political dominance of Putin’s Russia not only in the area of the Russian World but in the entire European continent.” That may be overstating it, but such a blow to the prestige of Article V would at least risk an unraveling of NATO, with all the nightmares that would come in its wake.

Ambiguity can tempt the aggressor into believing that he get can get away with his next coup at little cost. This can, in turn, lead to catastrophe. Hitler was unconvinced that the British and the French would truly stand by Poland in 1939. The ambiguity over the Baltic guarantee can never be eliminated, but it can be reduced. The symbolism of Obama’s speech in Tallinn this week — and the promise to send additional U.S. Air Force units and aircraft to the Baltics — will have done no harm. The increasing presence of NATO aircraft in Baltic airspace in recent months is a good move, as is the stepped-up pace of joint NATO exercises on Baltic territory. A NATO rapid-response force of several thousand troops, capable of deployment within 48 hours, is now being proposed. Its equipment and supplies would be based in the east. Permanent manned NATO bases would be better still. As Estonia’s President Ilves remarked earlier this week, maintaining a “two-tier” NATO, divided between those countries with permanent bases and those without, sends the “wrong signal” to a “potential aggressor.” We can’t be sure that even bases would be enough to do the trick, but the more the West does now, the less likely it is that Americans will ever be asked whether they are prepared to die for Narva.

Latvia Divided

National Review, August 25, 2014

Riga, Latvia, June 2014 © Andrew Stuttaford

Riga — The cover of the British edition of Anna Arutunyan’s The Putin Mystique features a grainy, somewhat sinister image of the Russian leader, remote, mysterious, distant. In a bookstore on Riga’s Krisjana Valdemara Street, the Latvian edition is on sale; its cover shows Putin at the shooting range, a gun in his hand, a wry smile on his face, close, too close.

The key to understanding Putin, explained one Latvian official, is to think of him as a petulant and badly behaved teenager who likes to provoke, prod, and see what he can get away with. For quite some time now, that’s what Russia has been doing in the Baltic. Planes skim and sometimes cross borders. Military exercises are staged that seem intended to intimidate rather than to train. Last year saw some 70,000 Russian and Belarusian troops war-gaming a scenario in which “Baltic terrorists” were the villains.

Walk into the Latvian foreign ministry and you’ll see three large flags, Latvian, EU, and NATO. The EU is meant to secure Latvia’s economic development, NATO its safety. Article 5 of the NATO treaty provides that an armed attack on one NATO member is to be treated as an attack on all, but in a paper written in April, Janis Berzins of Latvia’s National Defense Academy wondered how NATO’s politicians would react in the event of a Crimea-like assertion of “self-determination” in Narva, an Estonian city on the Russian border where almost all the inhabitants are of Russian descent. It’s a question that’s just as easy to ask about Daugavpils, the overwhelmingly Russian-speaking capital of Latvia’s poorest, easternmost region.

Daugavpils, Latvia, June 2014 © Andrew Stuttaford

And it’s not a question that can safely be confined to Daugavpils. When Putin speaks about the plight of his “compatriots” cut off from their kin by the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is countries like insultingly independent Latvia that he has in mind. Around 26 percent of Latvia’s 2 million people are of Russian descent (and, more significantly, a higher percentage speak Russian at home). Riga itself is roughly evenly divided between Latvian and Russian speakers. The city’s mayor, Nils Usakovs, an ethnic Russian, heads up the leftish Harmony Centre, a political alliance that draws much of its support from the Russian community and, less than reassuringly, has links to Putin’s United Russia party.

But if Putin is to play his games here, he needs his “compatriots” in Latvia to be not only numerous but unhappy. Ukraine, I am frequently told, was a failed state, but Latvia is not. Latvia’s Russians are freer, and generally richer, than their counterparts in the motherland. And they know it. At the same time, there’s no denying the sense of exclusion that many of them feel, especially the nearly 300,000 who are “non-citizens,” a status that Putin has described as “shameful” and worse.

To talk to Elizabete Krivcova of the Latvian “Non-Citizens” Congress is to hear an echo of Selma, but, to add some proportion to that picture, consider that Latvia’s non-citizens have permanent residency, can travel visa-free through most of the EU and (unlike Latvians) in Russia too, and are eligible for most social benefits. They are excluded from voting and a range of jobs, most of them in the public sector, but the door to citizenship is wide open. Quotas have long since been scrapped, and the citizenship requirements (residency, a language test, some knowledge of Latvian history, and so on) have eased over the years: Some 140,000 (including Krivcova) have now been naturalized.

The House on The Corner, Riga, Latvia, June 2014 © Andrew Stuttaford

But when I suggest to one prominent Latvian politician that it might be time to lance this boil and grant citizenship to all the rest, he flinches, quickly adding that this would mean “losing Riga.” His body language says more than his reply: This is not just an expression of political calculation. In 1989, a future president of Estonia spoke of the “biological and social terror of belonging to a people that is dying out.” That’s a fear evidently shared by a good number of the 1.2 million Latvians who remain in their native land, the last of the last after half a century of Soviet occupation in which Latvians were brutalized, imprisoned, exiled, slaughtered, and denied their right to be. It was a systematic process of national obliteration, and it was reinforced by a continuous inflow of Russian settlers designed to swamp the people whose country Latvia once was.

Many local Russians supported Latvia’s bid for independence, which it finally won in 1991, and most of them thought that they should automatically become citizens of the republic in which they had lived for a good part, or maybe even all, of their lives. Latvians did not agree. From a strictly legal point of view — and during an occupation denied legal recognition by much of the West, strictly legal was all Latvians had had — the restoration of the pre–World War II Latvian republic meant that only its citizens (or their descendants) would be immediately eligible for a Latvian passport: The settlers would have to wait in line.

This bought time for Latvia to reestablish itself as a national republic, time in which the population balance shifted in a direction that favored ethnic Latvians, but not by enough to resolve the demographic impasse that history had left behind. For ethnic Latvians, the way to proceed was with a unitary state, with Latvian as its sole official language: “We are too small to be Canada.” Russian speakers would be slowly assimilated: Indeed, those under 35 can generally now manage pretty well in Latvian. Left (usually) unsaid: The problem of the non-citizens, a significant percentage of whom are elderly, would fade away as the Soviet generations died off.

Riga, Latvia, June 2014 © Andrew Stuttaford

For many Russian speakers, this will not do. What they argue for is integration rather than assimilation, perhaps not formal bilingualism but certainly increased recognition by the state of both the Russian language and a distinct Russian cultural identity. The current generation is, it is maintained, not responsible for the crimes of the past. Maybe, but too many of Latvia’s Russians are still reluctant to acknowledge the full horror of what happened here. Whatever one thinks of criminalizing speech (I’m not a fan), it is still a jolt to see the poster in Krivcova’s office mocking recent legislation banning the denial, justification, or trivialization of both Nazi and Soviet aggression against Latvia. This is not the best way to reassure Latvians nervous about the bully next door and a fifth column within.

Nevertheless, despite occasional bouts of bad feeling — such as that generated by a failed 2012 referendum to introduce Russian as a second official language — the two communities rub along well enough. The difficulty is that there is a third party — Russia — in this mix, and it seems set on contributing all the poison it can. Latvia’s NATO membership means that the likelihood of a direct attack by Russia is very small. What can be expected instead is an intensification of Russia’s longstanding attempts to subvert the country from the inside. For now, a Donetsk- or Crimea-style “uprising” is unlikely: The Russians reportedly took soundings in the Daugavpils area and found, even there, little enthusiasm for a move of that type. Meanwhile, Riga is quiet. Even the polling that showed that most Russian-speaking Latvians supported the annexation of Crimea should not be cause for too much concern: Cheering on the ancestral motherland at a safe distance is very different from wanting it to turn up on the doorstep.

Freedom Monument, Riga, Latvia, June 2014 © Andrew Stuttaford

But the potential for trouble exists, made more dangerous by the fact that a huge majority of Latvia’s Russian speakers get so much of their information from Russian TV. The Russian stations are typically more entertaining than the local offering, but they act as portals into the venomous parallel universe where Kremlin propaganda roams. The loyalty of many of Latvia’s Russians to Latvia is real, but it is not particularly deep. It’s easy to see how Russia could stir the pot. It has the resources, and Latvia’s is a divided society, history is still raw, and there is more than enough resentment to go around. Another risk is that further Russian adventurism, even if well away from the Baltic, creates a heightened climate of mutual distrust within Latvia that rapidly degenerates into something worse. And then there is the general election due in October. Best guess is that Harmony Centre will again come out on top, if less convincingly than in 2011, and will once more be kept out of power by an unwieldy coalition of the weak, often chaotic “Latvian” parties, a result that will only emphasize the divisions that Mr. Putin will undoubtedly still be looking to exploit.

Cameron Cornered

The Weekly Standard, June 23, 2014

A time bomb does not have to be elegant; it just has to be lethal, primed, and in the right place when the moment comes. Britain’s next general election is set for May 7, 2015. That is likely the day when David Cameron will pay the full price for failing to have defused the revolt on his right.

Britain’s Euroskeptic U.K. Independence party (UKIP) is a poorly run protean mess, unhealthily dependent on the wit, zest, and charisma of its leader, Nigel Farage. And yet in the spirit of Farage (who has survived a plane crash, cancer, and being hit by a VW Beetle), UKIP keeps confounding those who so eagerly draft and redraft its obituary.

The run-up to the election to the European parliament in May was not the party’s most glorious stretch. Sustained battering by mainstream media and mainstream parties—much of it galvanized by UKIP’s heretical emphasis on immigration control—took a toll, and was reinforced by campaign missteps (Google “steel band,” “Croydon,” and “UKIP” for one notably ludicrous instance), including a pre-election radio interview of Farage that went so badly that his spin doctor tried—on air—to bring it to a close.

Less than a week after that interview, Britons went to the ballot box, voting both in the EU poll and, in some regions, local elections too. Results for the latter were counted first. UKIP took 16.5 percent of the popular vote, down from the remarkable 23 percent the party had scored the preceding year, but a reasonable tally considering that these elections were held in less UKIP-friendly territory than in 2013.

The election for the European parliament, however, involved the whole country, and UKIP topped the poll with 27.5 percent, well up from the 16.5 percent it secured in the 2009 EU vote. UKIP may have been assisted by a low turnout (34 percent), but it nonetheless became the first party other than Labour or Conservative to win a national election in over a century. Labour had to make do with regaining (and more) the ground it had lost in 2009 (a Labour government had been presiding over Britain’s slice of the financial crisis), boosting its score from 15.7 percent to 25.4 percent. The Conservatives slumped from first to third place with 23.9 percent. Their coalition partners, the hopelessly Europhile Liberal Democrats, saw their vote cut by roughly half and their team of EU parliament members reduced from 11 to 1, a richly deserved fate marred only by its incompleteness.

But a few days later UKIP ran into a reminder that one barrier remains unbroken. On June 5, it failed yet again to win a seat in the House of Commons. On paper, the constituency—Newark, a pleasant Conservative-voting market town unlikely to be confused with its namesake in New Jersey—looked promising. UKIP had done well there in local elections in 2013 and had headed the poll in that part of Britain in the EU vote. Helping still further, Newark’s (robustly right-wing) Tory MP had just resigned following a lobbying scandal that fit neatly into the UKIP narrative of establishment misrule. Typically, UKIP did not make the most of its opportunity. Perhaps tellingly, Farage opted not to run. Instead the party chose as its candidate a (robustly right-wing) septuagenarian member of the European parliament all too easy to caricature as UKIP at its most primitive.

The result was far from disgraceful: UKIP took over a quarter of the vote, up from the 3 percent or so its candidate managed in 2010. This was despite a concentrated Tory blitz (party workers, activists, and MPs by the hundred were shipped into Newark) that a hollowed-out Conservative party could not hope to reproduce on the national scale that a general election would require. Nevertheless UKIP’s second place (the Tory candidate romped home) meant that the party still had no MPs, a failing frequently cited as a mark of UKIP’s fundamental lack of seriousness. This was only underlined by the convivial Farage’s decision to spend the day before the Newark vote at a tourism conference in Malta. And, yes, he was photographed there in the early hours with a blonde who was not Mrs. Farage. There was a respectable explanation, but .  .  .

Bellowing at Brussels and, for that matter, 10 Downing Street is an unsurprising response to both EU overreach and the metropolitan liberalism of David Cameron’s government. There are numerous infuriated traditionally Conservative supporters who are prepared to “lend” a vote to UKIP in European and, increasingly, local elections, but will balk at doing anything that risks helping “Red Ed” Miliband’s unsettlingly left-wing Labour party into government.

As they fully understand, voting for UKIP could easily do just that. Under Britain’s first-past-the-post voting system, a protest vote can prove expensive. There’s good evidence to suggest that UKIP ballots (around 3 percent of the total) cost the Tories an absolute majority in the 2010 general election. With UKIP now attracting growing numbers of former Labour voters, the math is trickier than it was, but a higher UKIP percentage would undoubtedly do even greater damage to the Conservatives in 2015.

Making the choice sharper still, David Cameron has committed to an in/out referendum on Britain’s EU membership if he is reelected. Euroskeptics ought to remain, well, skeptical about this, not least because Cameron (a politician too unimaginative to contemplate a breach with Brussels) will try to gull Brits into the pro-EU camp with largely meaningless “concessions” allegedly wrung from the U.K.’s European partners. And he will probably succeed, meaning that Britain’s long European nightmare will continue. On the other hand, Cameron’s referendum would represent a chance, however remote, of a withdrawal, which is better than what Brussels-friendly Labour has on offer: nothing.

And right-of-center voters have another reason to be wary of voting for UKIP next year. “Europe” has evolved as an encapsulation of the broader discontent that many Tories (or former Tories) feel for Cameron’s mushy brand of conservatism, a discontent brilliantly exploited by Farage, playing Mrs. Thatcher’s finest tunes and meaning it. That has taken him a long way. The UKIP leader’s conundrum now is somewhat similar, ironically, to that faced by Cameron a little under a decade ago. Modern Britain is no longer the country that voted (often grudgingly) for the Iron Lady. Cameron tried to deal with that change by dragging the Conservative party to the center, calculating that the Tory right had nowhere else to go. Had it not been for Nigel Farage he might have gotten away with it.

The not unrelated difficulty for Farage is that he has harvested about as much of the right as he can, and thanks to the brutal math of first-past-the-post, that will not be enough to deliver the MPs to make the breakthrough he needs. So UKIP’s leader has attempted to widen his support by reaching out to what he has described as “patriotic old Labour” (put less diplomatically, the white working class), using immigration (Britain has received huge numbers of immigrants from elsewhere in the EU, immigrants that under EU law it is powerless to turn away) as the bridge to get there.

This has been a success, but it has involved downplaying UKIP’s earlier free market vim. The evolution of “red UKIP” is less of a problem for the party’s Conservative refugees than some of UKIP’s intellectual cheerleaders might imagine: Standing up for socialized medicine and generous state pensions plays pretty well with an older, often far from affluent crowd. But throw in some other leftish sub-currents, add the harsher edge to the party’s immigration rhetoric, and subtract some Thatcherite grace notes (talk of a flat tax has, for example, disappeared), and it becomes easy to suspect that a good number (especially on the upscale side of the social divide) of UKIP’s once-Conservative or libertarian-inclined voters will return to the Tory fold, particularly with Ed dread to push them there.

But neither this, nor the unappealing Miliband’s failure to click with the wider British electorate, nor the U.K.’s improving economic performance is likely to save Cameron. Britain’s embarrassingly outdated constituency boundaries favor Labour, which only has to win some 35 percent of the national vote to prevail. With the Liberal Democrats floundering, that modest target ought to be one Labour can hit despite recent stumbles in the opinion polls. UKIP meanwhile can expect to win few (if any) actual MPs once the general election comes round, but the party’s share of the poll will not sink back to that 3 percent grabbed by UKIP in 2010: UKIP—and the loyalty it can expect—is now entrenched too deep for that. And it is still the Conservative party that will miss its defectors most. At this late stage, it’s not clear what the Tories can do to entice enough of them back in time.