But now, all the Russian tourists are gone and the border traffic has ground to a halt. The Allegro train no longer runs. Finnish media recently called Imatra “the emptying city”. Its sprawling Tsar Outlet Village, which once catered to Russian shoppers, is deserted. Imatra’s economy, already reeling from the pandemic, is seriously ailing. The city has an unemployment rate of 16.4%, well above the national rate of just under 12%. And South Karelia is said to be losing an estimated €1 million in tourism revenue each day.

Many residents say it’s a worthwhile sacrifice. The border with Russia has been closed since late 2023, when the Finnish government accused Russia of weaponizing migrants by sending waves of asylum seekers into Finland. Helsinki claimed this was retaliation for the Nordic country’s decision to join Nato earlier that year, a choice made in the aftermath of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The Finnish government responded by closing the entire 1,340-kilometer border and announcing the construction of a 200-kilometer border fence. The forbidding metal barrier was finished last month, but the beefing up of security continues. On Monday, the Finnish government announced that it was procuring one million anti-personnel landmines for the border, following a decision by Helsinki and other regional capitals to withdraw from a humanitarian UN treaty banning their use.

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The border region’s economic decline and rapid militarization are emblematic of the entire Nordic region’s radically changed approach to relations with Russia and the United States. During the Cold War and to a lesser extent after it, Finland and Sweden managed relations with Moscow through a combination of pragmatic diplomacy, deterrence, and trade. Today, after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, both diplomacy and trade have been severely downgraded. These two Nordic nations, which touted an enlightened neutrality during the Cold War and maintained good relations with both the Soviet Union and the West, have recently joined Nato. Meanwhile, New Defense Cooperation Agreements (DCAs) signed with Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark, have given the US armed forces “unimpeded access” to 47 military bases across the region, some of them perilously close to the Russian border. Sweden and Finland are even weakening their long-standing taboo on nuclear weapons.

As the region’s security order has undergone an accelerated Americanization, Nordic societies have also increasingly been remade in America’s image. They have become more militarized, more hawkish and more hostile to diplomacy, while their once-robust social welfare states have been gutted and inequality has soared. In Finland, there has even been a marked increase in homelessness. Many say the deteriorating quality of life is a small price to pay in the face of Russian aggression in Ukraine. But others warn that the Nordic countries have surrendered their sovereignty to an unpredictable United States, which has left them weaker and more exposed — rather than more secure.

Overt dependence on the United States would have been unimaginable not so long ago. During the Cold War, Finnish President Urho Kekkonen saw neutrality as a natural state for his country, a function of both its geography and its history of wars with Russia. Neutrality, Kekkonen said, “is not the product of abstract thought nor is it imported from elsewhere: it has grown out of the soil of Finnish history”. Finland’s neutral position was articulated in the preamble to the 1948 Agreement of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance with the Soviet Union, which emphasized the country’s desire “to remain outside the conflicts of the great powers”.

Complicating matters, however, was the fact that the same agreement also contained a military-consultation clause: if an adversary like Germany were to launch an attack on the USSR from Finnish soil, then Finland was expected to consult with Moscow about a response. The clause was politically sensitive, as it would permit the Soviets to exert diplomatic pressure on Helsinki. Indeed, Atlanticist critics have characterized Finland’s Cold War neutrality as quasi-neutrality, one that supposedly cloaked deference to the Kremlin in neutral garb. There is even a pejorative word for it: “Finlandisation”. And yet, Finland’s foreign policy was also effective. It kept the peace, and by the Eighties, Finland was one of the richest countries by per-capita income in the world, exceeding both Britain and France. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Finland lost one of its most important trading partners. The effect was immediate and devastating: Finnish economists call the ensuing crisis “The Great Depression of the Nineties”.

Sweden embraced neutrality much earlier, following a succession of wars with Russia, particularly the devastating 1808-9 Finnish War that saw a defeated Sweden lose more than a third of its territory. The country’s longstanding doctrine was “non-alignment in peace, so as to maintain neutrality in war”. Indeed, non-alignment was part of Sweden’s nation-branding as a “moral superpower”, which supporters saw as a “cherished model for the world” ripe for emulation. During the Cold War, the policy was best embodied in the figure of Social Democratic Prime Minister Olof Palme. The late premier, who was assassinated in 1986, presided over what Swedish sociologist Göran Therborn has called “a radical independent internationalism”. Over the years, Palme was photographed chomping on cigars with Fidel Castro, protested the war in Vietnam (prompting the US to recall its ambassador on two occasions), and likened the 1972 American bombing of Hanoi to “Guernica, Oradour, Babi Yar, Katyn, Lidice, Sharpeville, and Treblinka”.

While Finland’s and Sweden’s decisions to join Nato may have looked like an abrupt decision made entirely in response to the war in Ukraine, Euro-Atlantic integration had actually been a long, gradual process that started soon after the 1991 Soviet collapse. Finland’s choice to purchase 64 McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 hornet fighter jets from the US in the early Nineties was a critical turning point. Finland and Sweden joined the Partnership for Peace program in 1994, and began participating in military exercises with Nato. The next year, Finland and Sweden joined the EU, unofficially ending their neutrality. Throughout the early 2000s, both countries supplied troops to Nato-led combat and stabilization missions, including in Afghanistan and Kosovo. These steps laid the groundwork for their rapid accession to Nato. All that was required was a trigger that could convert public opinion to Atlanticism en masse, and Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine provided it. Nato accession was presented as the only response to the shock of the Ukraine war, and with no alternatives discussed and the public afraid, the final push towards membership was made with a conspicuous lack of debate.

But Nato accession was just the start. Some commentators, including former Finnish President Sauli Niinistö, say the recent defense agreements have been even more pivotal than Sweden’s and Finland’s decisions to join Nato. The surge in DCAs actually began shortly before Russia’s full-scale invasion, with Norway. In 2021, Oslo and Washington signed an “SDCA”, or Supplementary Defense Cooperation Agreement, which eventually gave US forces and contractors “unimpeded access” to 12 military bases. After the Russian invasion, the SDCA with Norway served as a template for the entire region. In December 2023, the US signed new DCAs with Finland, Sweden and Denmark, bringing the total number of Nordic military bases granting unimpeded access to the US military to 47. The DCAs also authorize the US to take “necessary and proportionate measures” to protect US forces “within or in the immediate vicinity of” said bases, meaning they give US military personnel and military police power over local civilians in and around these locations. In addition, they grant the US exclusive control over who enters specified military facilities, construction rights to build on Nordic soil, and jurisdiction over crimes committed by American soldiers.

The DCAs have not passed without controversy. In 2022, the top military and civilian prosecution authorities in Norway expressed concern that the Americans’ threat perception might differ from that of Norway’s. Some fear that US forces might therefore drag the country into a confrontation without its consent. Others worry that an enhanced American military presence in Nordic countries would make them obvious targets in a war between the US and Russia. These concerns grew more acute after the start of the US-Israeli war on Iran, when American allies in the Middle East found themselves on the receiving end of Iran’s retaliatory strikes. Meanwhile, analysts at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute have warned that a US decision to deploy missiles to Nordic bases close to Russian assets could provoke a situation akin to the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The agreements were signed with an initial duration of 10 years. Researcher Joel Linnainmäki, at the Finnish Institute for International Affairs, notes that this 10-year duration “somewhat cushions against political turbulence in the transatlantic relationship”. The DCAs were drawn up at a time of both deteriorating regional security and uncertainty over trans-Atlantic security guarantees. With the specter of Donald Trump omnipresent, the Nordic states sought stronger bilateral defense relations with the US outside of Nato. The DCAs also reflect the belief that even the Nordics’ accession to Nato is insufficient to counter the Russian threat.

“The underlying idea has been that Nato alone is ultimately not enough,” Markku Kangaspuro, professor and research director at the Aleksanteri Institute at the University of Helsinki, tells me. “Rather, the commitment of the United States is indispensable for a military deterrent that, in the final analysis, rests on nuclear weapons.”

Indeed, Sweden and Finland are doing away with their long-standing aversion to nuclear weapons, another dramatic transformation. During the Cold War, Finland championed disarmament and nonproliferation, hosting the first US-Soviet Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) in Helsinki from 1969 to 1972. Over in Stockholm, Prime Minister Palme joined a 25,000-strong anti-nuclear protest in 1983; demonstrators formed a four-mile human chain linking the American and Soviet embassies to protest against the planned deployment of 108 American missiles in Western Europe. The Stockholm protest was part of that year’s Europe-wide demonstrations against the stationing of US “Euromissiles” on the continent, which drew up to five million people.

The mass mobilization of the Eighties contrasts with the comparative silence that reigns today. In June, Finland lifted its blanket ban on nuclear weapons. The Nuclear Energy Act, on the books since 1987, had criminalized the import, transport, and possession of nuclear weapons on Finnish soil; amendments passed this summer have lifted those prohibitions. Kangaspuro tells me: “Finland is now signaling in many ways that its priority is no longer to promote international control and limitation of nuclear weapons, or nuclear disarmament, as it has done until now.” While there was political opposition to the decision and some small protests, it did not prompt demonstrations of the kind seen during the Cold War.

Similar changes have been floated in neighboring Sweden. Earlier this year, Defense Minister Pål Jonson said that Sweden should consider allowing nuclear weapons to be deployed on its territory in wartime. It was a pronounced shift from even just a few years prior, when both then-Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson and conservative leader Ulf Kristersson agreed that Sweden’s decision to join Nato should not change its prohibition on nuclear weapons on Swedish soil. Earlier this year, Sweden, Norway and Denmark were also among the first countries to join France’s Forward Nuclear Deterrence Initiative, while Finland became a member in mid-December last year. The war in Ukraine and Trump’s unpredictability have again made the unthinkable thinkable.

Meanwhile, Nordic countries have dramatically increased their defense spending in recent years. Sweden, Norway and Denmark have more than doubled their spending since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, while Finland has nearly doubled it. In Finland, the government has tied brutal austerity measures in part to wartime necessity. Campaigning in 2023, Riikka Purra, the chair of the nationalist Finns Party and current minister of finance, declared culture “a luxury service, which unfortunately costs too much money in present-day Finland”. As the Nordic countries have adopted a more US-dependent security policy, their economies have also grown to resemble the American one. The marketization of education and health care, rising inequality, and beefed-up military budgets are bringing once strong welfare states more in line with American free-market orthodoxy.

The Atlanticization of the Nordic states’ security policies occurred in tandem with the liberalization of their economies, and with direct and indirect influence from the United States. As Swedish historian Jenny Andersson describes it, during the late Sixties, the Swedish Employers’ Confederation (SAF) began to “actively promote international neoliberal ideas”, with the aim of changing attitudes towards the welfare state within Swedish society. Meanwhile, the neoconservative Swedish think tank Timbro, founded in 1978, “was directly modeled on the American Heritage foundation”. In 1982, SAF director Sture Eskilsson initiated the Market Economic Alternative for Sweden (MAS), adopted from the Heritage Foundation’s own Mandate for Leadership, a vast policy program prepared for Ronald Reagan’s administration during the early Eighties. One of the activists for MAS was Sweden’s uber-Atlanticist former Prime Minister Carl Bildt, who was a young MP at the time. In Finland, meanwhile, the adoption of economic liberalism was directly tied to the notion of “joining the West” — liberalization and free markets were always bound up with geopolitical alignment with Nato.

Today, between Trump’s demand that Europe spend more on its own defense and the threat of war with Russia, Nordic social welfare is being squeezed out of existence. The remnants of Cold War Nordic distinctiveness in both security and the economy are disappearing. These nations are gambling that all the breakneck changes are worth it. But by allowing the US armed forces unimpeded access to their military bases, the Nordic countries have sacrificed some of their sovereignty in pursuit of security. This has been presented to the public as an unambiguous good, with little discussion of the risks. But in tethering their fates to Washington’s whims, Nordic nations have reduced their own ability to act autonomously and painted a target on their own backs.

Following a Russian strike on an air-defense system in Poland a week before, which Putin framed as retaliation for Nato involvement in the war in Ukraine, the alliance has sheepishly declared Article V. But, leaning on the North Atlantic Treaty’s legal technicalities, Donald Trump has refused to intervene, preferring to support European allies in “other ways”. Without American backing, only a handful of European states have deployed their armed forces to bolster Poland and Estonia. And with a second Russian army assembling in western Belarus, and the prospect of missiles flying at Warsaw from Kaliningrad, Poland’s large and robust military is mostly tied up at home. As American envoys arrive in Moscow to negotiate Putin’s terms on Estonia, and likely much of Nato’s east for that matter, British commanders aboard HMS Duncan train their guns on the Neustrashimy, a Russian frigate just appeared on their radar. With fighters screaming into action overhead, the Duncan’s crew hold their breath, as their ship enters the range of Russian guns.

I’m hardly the first observer to speculate on what war between Russia and Nato might look like — and, given the storm clouds gathering in Eastern Europe, I surely won’t be the last. After months of escalating Russian gray-zone attacks against Nato, ranging from drone incursions to stray missiles and attempted bombings at Leipzig airport, warnings about Putin’s plans for Europe have grown louder on both sides of the Atlantic. And now, just last week, Polish and Lithuanian leaders have both separately claimed to have intelligence that Russia is planning “accidental” rocket and drone strikes on pro-Ukrainian members of Nato, a conclusion corroborated by Emmanuel Macron. Together with CIA chief John Ratcliffe’s unannounced visit to Moscow last month, among other things to warn Putin off attacking Nato, the atmosphere feels worryingly similar to the months leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Yet if a flashpoint on Nato’s borders appears increasingly likely, we equally shouldn’t expect a shooting war to start tomorrow. If he does indeed choose to throw his armies westward, Putin’s aim will first be to break the alliance’s internal cohesion, and to exploit its central weakness in an age of hybrid warfare: that the cost of actually honoring Nato’s self-defense clause is too much for most members to contemplate, until it’s too late anyway. It helps, here, that just like in Ukraine, Putin’s goal wouldn’t really be recovering lost territories. As always, rather, it’d be about control. Removing Nato as a cohesive bloc would allow Russia to once again dictate terms to its European neighbors, a generational shift in the balance of power on the continent, and marking the apotheosis of Putin’s decades-long political project. And, if all went to plan, the Russian premier could plausibly achieve all of this without triggering the world war many in the West have feared.

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The first phase of any Russian provocation campaign would likely start with a strike on a border crossing between Poland and Ukraine. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has already warned of just such an attack, claiming that one has already been foiled via a joint Polish-Ukrainian operation. Russian forces have already been striking targets mere kilometers from the Polish border, and attacked a civilian Warsaw-Kyiv train not long after European officials including Boris Johnson had traveled along the line. Hitting border crossings would benefit Russia from several standpoints: Putin could plausibly claim attacks were accident; could make weapons shipments to Ukraine via Poland more logistically difficult; and crucially, could broaden the “acceptable” field of operations of the Ukraine war.

Now is where things would start to get really dangerous, with drones of the sort that were shot down by Nato jets over Lithuania this week finally starting to find their targets, striking critical energy or security infrastructure close to the border with Belarus. Such strikes may start innocuously enough, with drones “accidentally” hitting unmanned border watchtower or rural power lines. But then, one might damage an oil pipeline in Latvia; or a critical LNG terminal in Lithuania; or even a section of Poland’s Rzeszów-Jasionka Airport, which serves as a logistics hub for transferring Western arms to Ukraine.

Ultimately, though, the real aim of such attacks would not be material damage — but instead making low-level air assaults a regular part of European life. Poles, Germans, and Lithuanians alike have already become inured to headlines about Russian-sponsored arson attacks or drone incursions, and it’s not a huge stretch to imagine they’d do the same with this new wave of provocations. That matters: for despite the alliance’s tough talk, no one, including Putin, realistically expects that Nato would go to war with Russia over a damaged pipeline, no matter how important it might be. We already have clear proof of this: Nato failed to act even after a Russian drone struck a residential building in the Romanian city of Galați in May, injuring two residents. The trouble with the alliance’s intentionally defensive framework is that there is no clearly stated middle ground; war and peace are the only two options available. And, within such binary parameters, Nato will almost always choose an insecure peace over a highly disruptive total war.

All the same, European Nato states would have to send a message to Moscow sooner or later. Rather than striking at Russian soil directly, however, they’re more likely to give Ukraine the intelligence and hardware to hit drone-launching sites on their behalf. In the end, though, politicians in Nato’s east would still have to signal to their citizens that they were willing to take decisive steps to protect them and their infrastructure, and would finally take a leap into the unknown: shooting down Russian projectiles heading toward their borders. This is something Polish leaders have been discussing for years, and within such a volatile threat environment, it would be the obvious next step for the alliance short of full-scale war.

At this point, for Putin, all the pieces would be in place for the final step in the escalation ladder. The Russian leader, and the Russian public for that matter, have considered themselves to be in a de facto state of war with Nato for quite some time now. Not only would all of these developments make this even clearer, but would also fit squarely within the foundational push of Putin’s national narrative. Russian aggression against Georgia in 2008, Ukraine in 2022, and the West in 2026 has always been justified by the politics of grievance — and, by becoming directly involved in Ukraine, Nato will have crossed a red line. Coming off the high of a record win in Russia’s latest State Duma elections, Putin’s party would gladly use these events as fuel for another, much-anticipated mass mobilization, adding some 300,000 new conscripts to his armed forces. Russian authorities would still face plenty of resistance, but much less than if the drive had been solely framed around the war in Ukraine.

With Europe besieged but complacent, Putin could then make his biggest gamble: a direct missile or drone strike against a Nato battery involved in aerial combat in Ukrainian airspace. Poland’s Small Narew surface-to-air missile system, stationed in the quaint city of Zamość near the Ukrainian border, would make a perfect target. And this time, there would be no beating around the bush: Russia would own the attack, framing it as a retaliation for Nato intrusion in Ukraine, and demanding that the alliance reverse course to safeguard Russia’s “legitimate security concerns”.

A tired Europe would finally consider Article V at Poland’s request. But the outcome would be a foregone conclusion: the appetite and social cohesion necessary for a war of this scale simply isn’t there, especially in Washington. What’s crucial to understand here is that, in a Nato-Russia shadow war, there wouldn’t be some single event, like the 1939 invasion of Poland, that suddenly snaps Europe from its lethargy. This is what lies at the core of Putin’s strategy: even if the frog finally realizes it’s being boiled, things will be too far-gone for it to gather the strength to jump out the pot.

Far from Nato’s frontline, meanwhile, publics in both Western Europe and the US would hardly be willing to leap headfirst into a conflict with Putin: the strike on Zamość would hardly be shocking at this point. More than that, Putin’s rhetoric of victimhood would play well with both MAGA and Left-wing campists, who’d probably see the circumstances of the Zamość strike as yet another reason to disengage from both Ukraine and Europe. With the Iran war still unresolved, meanwhile, Trump would see no reason to commit troops to a European theater he has long seen as marginal — especially if Pete Hegseth’s “force posture review” ends with the withdrawal of up to 25,000 American soldiers from Europe later this year.

Though the US might acquiesce to an Article V declaration, in short, it would likely also use the Treaty’s open-ended language around mutual-assistance obligations to weasel its way out of fighting. Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico has already stated he would do exactly that if Article V were ever invoked. Of course, no one will miss Slovak troops in the event of a conflict with Russia, but the lack of American involvement would surely dissuade many smaller countries from sending help. So Article V or not, make no mistake — American apathy would break the alliance, something Putin himself is well aware of.

Nato structures may remain strong on paper, in this scenario, but the organization would actually resemble a malleable “coalition of the willing” — far more than an all-encompassing defensive alliance. That would be a massive blow for the bloc’s frontline states, and with dramatically lower stakes and a broader field of movement, Putin would act accordingly. Any strike against Poland likely wouldn’t lead to an actual invasion, but it would keep its forces locked in a cross-border standoff. That leaves Estonia. Though Britain, France, Germany and Poland, perhaps alongside Denmark or Canada, are likely to send troops or ships to defend a threatened Tallinn government, US indifference precludes a broader campaign. Even nearby Sweden and Finland would likely be cautious about overextending themselves too early, mobilizing their populations but then remaining holed up for whatever comes next.

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What would come next? Certainly, whatever the limitations of the Russian military machine, victory for the new anti-Putin coalition would be far from guaranteed. Yet even if, to borrow our scenario, the Neustrashimy’s commander relented off Hiiumaa, or else engaged HMS Duncan, lost, and rendered Russia unable to enforce a blockade, Putin might still hope to carve a new European order from the chaos — especially if he felt he still enjoyed Trump’s good graces.

Alongside what we might call the “Belarusification” of Ukraine, that would surely include attempts to disarm the Baltics, while keeping heavyweights like Poland contained and self-interested. To be clear, Putin would likely be unsuccessful in meeting all of his goals here. Indeed, surrounded by sycophantic generals, he may well stumble. But like in Ukraine, after suffering an initial loss in Estonia, the Russians could yet regroup, adjust their strategy, and lock Nato’s rump in a fresh quagmire, turning border cities like Narva into Bakhmuts on the Baltic. Whatever happens, Putin will understand that, without America, the old equation in Europe has gone, while his new opponents will hardly have time to react.

Some might see these hypotheticals and conclude that the only way out for Nato is to disengage completely from Ukraine. But this would simply kick the can further down the road — Russia at this stage sees Ukraine as merely one theater within a much greater war over the future of Europe. Even if Trump decides to unilaterally welcome Russia back into America’s embrace, Putin’s steadily escalating gray-zone war with European Nato would anyway likely continue, regardless of events in Washington or Kyiv. The choice facing the Europeans, then, is not simply between peace and war, but between accepting Russian hegemony over Eastern Europe — and opposing it. Exactly how they do that remains the challenge of our time.

Trump is such a natural at this, though, that he can have a similar effect on Europe’s elite. There’s the spectacle of Emmanuel Macron massaging his ego and Mark Rutte calling him “daddy” — but however unedifying this may be, it is just diplomacy. Stranger still is the way they often seem to cede to him, unforced, a kind of moral authority. Trump brings out their masochistic streak; they become eager participants in his hobby of Europe-bashing. What pathetic little leeches we are, they cry out, when the President attacks them for being defense freeloaders, exploiting American goodwill: he has us bang to rights. 

They do not take this line on other aspects of the White House’s critique of European policy. They do not say that Trump has them bang to rights on free speech or trade or energy or immigration — to say this would be to admit the defeat of an entire moral worldview. But on the specific subject of defense their usual reflexes are suspended. All of a sudden they turn MAGA. We have been free-riding for decades, they say; Trump is “simply right” that Europe should spend more. It was only a matter of time, one can almost hear Mark Rutte suggest, before somebody intelligent and manful enough would catch on.

This is not the posture of MAGA’s European outriders. Europe’s insurgent Right-wing parties tend to take a more hard-headed view of American objectives. The nationalist Right in France, Italy, and Germany has a long tradition of anti-Atlanticism: they never subscribed to the view that American support for European defense was an act of supreme, selfless benevolence. Indeed, they increasingly appear to recognize that MAGA is an albatross around their necks. Giorgia Meloni recently had a public falling-out with Trump; she knows, in a country where only 8% have a favorable opinion of the President, that some distance from the White House can only be a good thing. Beatrix von Storch of the AfD may have a “Make America Great Again” cap on her desk in the Bundestag; but, at the same time, her party and its base tends to look at Trump’s America with a certain coolness. 

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They are well aware that Trump is extremely unpopular in Europe. His reckless statements and interventions, and his encroachments on the sovereignty of other countries, can be a major liability for Right-wing politics internationally — as the cautionary tale of Pierre Poilievre in Canada goes to show. One wonders sometimes whether MAGA understands the toxic effect it can have on “sovereigntist” Right-wing parties in the rest of the world, and even exploits this in order to keep the establishment parties in charge.  

For Europe’s establishment parties are the real marks for Trump’s rhetoric on defense. They are the lackeys whose humiliation Trump craves and enjoys. They are used to taking their orders from Washington, and defense spending is an easy concession for them to make to Trump, in word if not in action — easier, anyway, than accepting his counsel on immigration, energy, or other areas of policy that he is wont to berate them about. So somehow, in this single instance, the Trumpian line has become a piece of European elite consensus. Sanna Marin, the former prime minister of Finland and now a strategic counselor for the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, wrote for the Economist last year commending the American taxpayer for having aroused from his slumber to question “why they should shoulder more of the cost of European security than Europe itself”. Alex Younger, the late chief of MI6, said similarly: “We have been infantilized and it hasn’t been healthy… we should be extraordinarily grateful to America for its generosity.” He likened Europe to a spoilt child on a “trust fund”, a spoilt child which now has to toughen up, get wise, and make its own way in the world. A belligerent Russia, the argument runs, is Europe’s problem, not America’s — and so it’s high time that Europeans take matters into their own hands. 

That Europe should spend more on defense, and on containing Russian aggression, is a fair proposition, and one which many previous American presidents have supported. “Nato 3.0”, where Europe assumes principal responsibility for its own defense, could indeed be a good thing for Europe — and, perhaps especially, for Ukraine. This is a message which Britain badly needs to hear, especially now that John Healey has conveniently forgotten the national security imperatives that caused him to resign as Defense Secretary less than three months ago. None of this means, however, that Europe’s leaders should accept the framing that American support for European defense was motivated by “generosity”, which Europeans have been greedily exploiting and for which we should now be “extraordinarily grateful”. If Europe has been “infantilized”, then that is something that the Americans deliberately engineered, over the course of many decades. Trump is not meting out “tough love”; he is not Matron making the medicine go down, or a wealthy father cutting off his pampered, profligate children “for their own good”. The “trust fund” was always an investment, and quite a profitable one at that. 

The Americans realized, after being drawn into two world wars, that isolationism was a risky and unworkable strategy. They had an interest in preventing future war in Europe. They were anxious to prevent nuclear proliferation, and to stop countries like France and Italy from falling into Communist hands. The end of the Second World War left them in a fortuitous position in Western Europe, and one they were in no hurry to relinquish. They got — and still enjoy — a military foothold in Europe, which can come in handy when, say, they want to direct logistics and communications from somewhere within striking distance of Iran.

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It was a good arrangement, while it lasted. America got fat off Pax Americana. We in Europe got a lot out of it too: a “holiday from history”, the luxury to spaff billions on welfare; billions which, in a previous age, would have been spent on dreadnoughts and munitions. Not that we Europeans were totally useless on military matters: we tended to accept that our obligations were a two-way street. If the Americans were footing the bill, then it was only fair for them to expect what little military assistance we could offer during their moments of need. That guided the decision made by many European countries to join the American-led coalition in Afghanistan and Iraq. One reason Trump’s Greenland gambit earlier this year left such a bitter taste in many European mouths is that Denmark was one of America’s more devoted European allies. Denmark had the third-highest per-capita casualty rate among Nato nations in Iraq and Afghanistan, behind America and Britain. Trump’s obsession with gratitude could easily be turned on its head. The Americans could say thank you for our help in the War of Terror; the Americans could say thank you for Ramstein, Lakenheath, and Fairford. 

The European country which has come closest to implementing Trump’s advice is of course France. France clears its Nato target of 2% of GDP on defense, and seems to spend it more effectively than other countries do, including Britain. Earlier this year this caused Britain some embarrassment when French warships, rather than British ones, sailed to Cyprus after the RAF base at Akrotiri was hit in an Iranian drone strike. France pulls its weight. And France, to the chagrin of George W. Bush’s White House, did not join the war in Iraq. Nor does it host US bases on its soil: General de Gaulle chased all of them out in the Sixties. Because France has tended to pull its weight, it has also enjoyed more strategic independence from America in foreign policy. The two go hand-in-hand. 

Suppose, now, that the rest of Europe were to follow Trump’s admonition to the letter. Suppose that the rest of Europe were to become truly “sovereigntist”, perhaps under the aegis of MAGA’s sister movements on the populist Right, and to figure out what the French figured out long ago. Is that an outcome that Trump and his coterie would actually want to come about? Recall Trump’s fury earlier this year when the Kingdom of Denmark moved a few dozen troops to another part of the Kingdom of Denmark; or his rage that European countries did not fall immediately into line when he embarked on his Iran adventure. Those countries would be a lot less pliable than they currently are if they really did get their defense spending in order. Nor is it the case that Trump is that invested, in general, in the sovereignty of his European allies. He routinely makes demands about how they should direct policy on fossil fuels and immigration, and with whom they should and should not trade. 

Europe’s leaders should, as ever, be careful not to take Trump’s words at face value. But even if they do, they are unlikely to put them into action: as John Healey’s recent U-turn reveals, welfare spending must always come first. Their hope is that Trump is succeeded in the White House by someone with a less capricious attitude toward their allies, someone who understands the upsides of the postwar arrangement, and thinks that it is still worth paying for. The alternative — slashing welfare to fund defense — is somewhat more conceivable under parties on the nationalist Right; but the practical consequences of that, a Europe composed of sovereign states capable of pursuing their own interests as they define them, would not be to Trump’s liking. Trump claims to want Europe to stand on its own two feet, but he does not want Europe to be strategically independent. He should, perhaps, be careful what he wishes for. 

However, a better assessment would have understood the Ankara summit as Nato returning to its roots. In recent months, the theme of Nato reverting to its original Cold War purpose — European deterrence and defense — has been advanced by the Trump administration. The idea was rolled out in February as “Nato 3.0” and is the brainchild of Undersecretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby, a restrainer who advocates for limiting military interventionism and who has therefore been maligned by the liberal Atlanticist set and reportedly spied on by Israel. As Colby describes it, Nato 3.0 is not an abandonment of Nato but rather “a return to and validation of its foundational purpose”. In other words, “make Nato great again” by ensuring Europeans pour billions into defense industrial production and technological innovation so they can take care of their own conventional (non-nuclear) defense. 

At this year’s summit, I witnessed the transition to Nato 3.0 in real time. The Trump administration surely regards Europe’s acceptance of its shift in policy and philosophy as a major foreign policy “win”. Multiple senior Nato officials spoke of the need to build “a stronger Europe in a stronger Nato”, and repeatedly recited figures testifying to leaps in European defense spending in accordance with Trumpian demands. One senior Nato official spoke of the “simultaneity problem” — the Trump administration’s concern about a scenario in which the US military would be forced to fight multiple major conflicts at once, which he described as the reason “why Europeans are stepping up and taking more responsibility for their own defense”. Whatever their distaste for Trump’s bullying rhetoric, it was clear that Nato officials and allies are now taking the Trump administration’s words very seriously.

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A few weeks ahead of the summit, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth echoed Colby at the Nato defense ministerial meeting in Brussels, tying Nato 3.0 to Washington’s demands that allies raise defense spending. “That’s what defense spending commitments are all about,” he said, “transforming Nato into a real military alliance that’s focused on hard power and real deterrence, a Nato 3.0 modeled on the Nato 1.0 that won the Cold War.” During the same meeting, Hegseth gave trans-Atlantic allies an ultimatum. Going forward, he said, American Nato dues would be contingent on allies meeting their own defense spending targets. “Where other allies do not spend with urgency, our dues contributions will go down,” he warned. He also told allies to expect a review of their progress in six months. If insufficient strides had been made by then, the US would spend less on Nato. This threat contributed to a sense of elevated fear in Ankara. It wasn’t an entirely irrational one either: the Trump administration is dramatically scaling back its involvement in other multilateral institutions. In January, the United States withdrew from 31 UN entities and is currently withholding around $4 billion in mandatory UN dues.

To understand “Nato 3.0”, it’s essential to understand the alliance’s evolution. Nato’s founding was rooted in Cold War ideological and military competition with the Soviet Union. As such, Nato 1.0 was a firmly Right-wing organization, one interested above all in strengthening American dominion over Europe and confronting the Soviet threat. But it also had several other functions, among them spreading the gospel of free markets and crushing internal Left-wing subversion. The North Atlantic Treaty signed in April 1949 established the military alliance and outlined Nato “values”; the pact promised “to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilization of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law”. From the very beginning, not all members lived up to the pompous rhetoric. Founding member state Portugal was then ruled by dictator Antonio Salazar, whose one-party regime Estado Novo, or New State, employed a menacing secret police and outlawed all opposition parties; the dictatorship’s “new” name was an irony, as according to Tom Gallagher, the puritanical Salazar “manifested the true reactionary’s horror of change”. 

The United States was often the alliance’s biggest proponent of working with unsavory regimes, pushing for Franco’s Spain to become a member of Nato with overwhelming support in Congress and the Senate. The US saw Francoist Spain as an ideal ally owing to its “strategic location and furiously anti-communist sentiment”. When some European member states objected to admitting Franco’s regime into the alliance, the United States signed the Pact of Madrid with Spain in 1953, furnishing the dictatorship with aid and allowing the US to build military bases on Spanish soil. French colonial Algeria was also an original part of Nato, with Article 5 extending to the colonized country where systematic torture and concentration camps were used to subdue the population. Meanwhile some former Nazis from West Germany’s supposedly “clean Wehrmacht” — the alliance shamelessly propagated the myth that Wehrmacht officers fought honorably during the Second World War — were also integrated into the pact, with some rising to Nato’s senior leadership. In the face of the Soviet threat, there could be no enemies to the Right.

Nato 2.0 covered a period we might describe as the “long Nineties” and was characterized by End-of-History hubris and excess: rapacious eastward expansion, self-aggrandizing rhetoric about liberal values, and zealous out-of-area operations. Nato’s “out-of-area” actions — operations undertaken beyond the territorial limits of member states — undermined its claim to be a “purely defensive alliance”. As “humanitarian” operations, their results ranged from mixed to disastrous. While the 1999 Nato bombing of Yugoslavia forced Serbian security forces from Kosovo, it did not bring down President Slobodan Milošević; he wouldn’t fall until a contested election several months later. Indeed, Milošević’s own Minister of Information during the bombing, Aleksandar Vučić, has been leader of Serbia in some form for 14 years, and his regime employs Serbian nationalist rhetoric barely distinguishable from that of his former boss. In 2011, Nato intervened in Libya with even more catastrophic results: though sold to the public as a “humanitarian intervention” to protect civilians, the real goal was regime change, with the removal of leader Muammar al-Gaddafi judged a strategic imperative worth many Libyan lives. In the end, a report from Harvard’s Belfer Center determined that “Nato’s action magnified the conflict’s duration about sixfold and its death toll at least sevenfold”. Nato 2.0 also included the Great War on Terror, which meant the emergence of non-state actors as a new threat; costly cross-border operations and occupations ensued. If Nato 1.0’s main purpose was containing the Soviet Union in Europe, then Nato 2.0 represented the mother of all mission creep.

The summit in Ankara was the alliance’s response to Trumpian demands for a Nato 3.0: a scaled back, “Europe-led” pact that doesn’t rely on the United States as the guarantor of Europe’s conventional defense. As such, the summit kicked off with a grandiose Defense Industry Forum, where Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte repeatedly invoked the term “defense industrial revolution”. The event was an opportunity for Turkey to hawk its indigenous defense industry wares, but it was also an opportunity for Europe. As one official from a European defense ministry wryly put it to me, the forum allowed allies to make a big show of complying with Trumpian dictates to spend more on their defense.

Just to drive the point home, President Zelensky gave a speech at the event likening the current revolution in drone technology to the invention of missiles. He described Ukraine as a reluctant defense industrial powerhouse forged in war and asserted that it should therefore be admitted to Nato. In other characteristically immoderate statements, the Defense Industry Forum was widely touted as a success. A Nato official confirmed that “at least” $50 billion in new defense deals were announced at the forum; among them were $40 billion worth of investment in counter-drone capabilities and multi-country initiatives for the continued militarization of space. The pivot to Nato 3.0 would appear to be well underway.

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Turkey is perhaps the model Nato 3.0 ally, which makes its hosting of the first summit of this new chapter richly appropriate. Though Turkey has contributed to Nato 2.0 peacekeeping missions and interventions in places like Kosovo and Bosnia, Turkish President Recep Erdoğan, like Trump, has no time for liberal internationalist pieties. Like Trump, he would like to see Nato stripped bare to its raw essentials of defense and security, ditching democracy promotion and the dissemination of “Western values”. Turkey has the second largest army in Nato and a burgeoning defense industrial base: Turkish defense and aviation exports broke records last year, exceeding $10 billion. All of this has won admiration from Trump. Throughout the summit, Trump repeatedly praised Erdoğan, calling him “really a great man”, “a great leader”, and “a strong person”. Trump’s affinity with Erdoğan suggests that what is most valued in Nato 3.0 is a capacity for deterrence and defense; democratic deficiencies are of little concern in an ally that is seen to be pulling its weight.  

Despite the notable absence of liberal rhetoric in Ankara, elements of Nato 2.0 remain for now, including the tradition of the annual summit. During the Cold War, Nato held just 10 summits. Today, it holds a wildly expensive summit every year. Last year’s one in The Hague reportedly cost about €1 million per minute, with some media reporting that it was the most expensive meeting in the alliance’s history. Preparations for this year’s summit reportedly cost €235 million. In addition to being expensive, international relations scholar Patrick Porter believes that annual summits present risks. “The curse of regular summitry…wasn’t a feature of Cold War Nato,” he tells me. “There are these relentless opportunities for trouble and mischief and misunderstanding.” It’s a critique now shared by some other allies. While Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte told journalists in Ankara that the next summit will be in Albania, he would not confirm that it would happen next year.

Whatever the similarities between Nato 3.0 and Nato 1.0, there are also a few striking differences. Nato once justified itself with the Cold War platitudes of prosperity and liberty. This was propaganda to be sure, but it was still integral to winning an ideological battle that once divided the world. Now, the rhetoric of prosperity and freedom has been replaced with the cold, uninspiring promise of “security” — a nebulous, constantly expanding concept emblematic of an ideology that has lost the ability to excite or be believed, and must now rely on coercion, censorship and repression to get its way. While Nato holds a lavish summit each year and member states ramp up spending for a “defense industrial revolution”, people living in allied countries are being told they must endure brutal cuts to health care, education, and social welfare to pay for it all. Alliance boosters like to boast that Nato “protects one billion people”. If it does, it does so at a steep cost.

We have been here before. At regular intervals since Putin’s invasion, the Western political-media complex has worked to convince the public that victory for Ukraine was just around the corner, and that Russia itself was on the verge of collapse. In 2023, for instance, Western journalists and agenda-setters spent months hyping Ukraine’s counteroffensive, which was going to “turn the tide” in Kyiv’s favor. The campaign was a catastrophic failure, producing mass casualties and negligible territorial gains.

The latest alleged game-changer is Ukraine’s drone-strike campaign inside Russia — reaching as far as Saint Petersburg and Moscow — targeting logistics, fuel depots, refineries and supply lines. Several civilian targets have also been hit, causing numerous casualties. On Monday, Moscow suffered the largest drone attack so far. President Zelensky has now announced a 40-day operation against Russian targets to “influence the aggressor state in order to press for an end to the war”, which is likely to mean many more such attacks. These measures coincide with the EU’s disbursement of the first €3.2 billion installment of its €90 billion loan to Ukraine.

The timing is not coincidental. On Tuesday, a crucial Nato summit began in Ankara, where the pro-war lobby — both in Europe and in Washington — is desperate to make the case that Ukraine is winning. It’s a narrative that Trump himself appears happy to indulge, probably to compensate for the Iran fiasco: he even signed the G7 leaders’ recent statement committing to “increase the delivery of air defense capacities, additional systems and interceptors, and long-range capabilities”; to consider extending production licenses to Ukraine; and to “strengthen our sanctions, including those on the oil and gas sectors”.

It is also, in all likelihood, a response to mounting war fatigue in the West, confirmed by the refusal of the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary to finance the aforementioned loan — an opt-out that Hungary’s new pro-EU government has strikingly not reversed so far — followed by the new Bulgarian government’s decision to prohibit arms supplies to Ukraine.

Kyiv’s drone campaign is certainly having an impact. Russian oil production has been affected; there have been serious fuel shortages across the country, as even Putin has admitted. Ukraine has also disrupted Russian supply routes north of the Sea of Azov, causing power outages in Crimea and in the Russian-held part of Ukraine’s Kherson region nearby. But these attacks are unlikely to change the course of the war. The Russian economy is faltering, yet it remains in a better position than much of the EU. Indeed, citing higher oil prices, largely a consequence of the Iran war, the International Monetary Fund in April raised its forecast for Russia’s 2026 GDP growth by 0.3 points, to 1.1%. Meanwhile, it revised the forecast downward for the EU’s top three economies — Germany, France and Italy — to 0.8%, 0.9% and 0.2% respectively.

More crucially, though, the Russian army continues to advance on the battlefield. It is steadily closing in on its goal of conquering the entire Donbass. Just the other day, Moscow announced the capture of Kostiantynivka — a town in Donetsk and the largest settlement it’s taken since Mariupol. The city was one of the last strongholds on the road to important Ukrainian-controlled cities, Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, whose capture is the Kremlin’s ultimate objective in the Donbass. Russian troops are also advancing around Chasiv Yar and Toretsk, making gains in urban fighting and on elevated positions, and continue to advance around Lyman and Rai-Oleksandrivka. All this flatly contradicts the prevailing “Ukraine has turned the tide” narrative.

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If further proof were needed that things are going badly for Ukraine, one need only look at the increasingly widespread “busification” policy — the kidnapping of conscription-age men off the streets to be sent to the front, which is fueling growing domestic opposition to the war — or at the EU’s proposal to exclude military-age Ukrainian men, in practice all men aged 23 to 60, from the bloc’s temporary protection scheme.

In this light, the drone campaign looks less like a game-changer than a sign of desperation: given Ukraine’s inability to turn the tide on the battlefield, Kyiv and Nato have decided to “bring the war to Russia”. Yet there is no evidence that Ukraine’s drone campaign will turn the war around — much less force Putin to capitulate. Indeed, over the past few days, Russian forces launched some of the largest drone and missile strikes on Kyiv so far, killing dozens of people.

How much Ukraine’s campaign is affecting public support for Putin is hard to say. It is true that it is having an effect on Russian morale, but as Leonid Ragozin has written, the situation in the country remains relatively stable: for all the dramatic visuals of burning refineries and queues at petrol stations, most Russians have seen worse in their lifetimes, and the vast majority still enjoy a standard of living comparable to that of the poorer EU countries — a far cry from what they endured throughout the bad old days in the Nineties.

The most reliable “poll” will come on 20 September, when Russia holds elections to the State Duma; some analysts predict that the ruling United Russia Party will suffer a humiliating result at the hands of the Communists to its Left and the (confusingly named) Liberal Democratic Party to its Right. But anyone hoping this might pressure Putin into ending the war will be disappointed: both parties have taken an even more hardline stance on the conflict than Putin’s United Russia party. The Ukrainian attacks are, if anything, emboldening the more hawkish voices in the Kremlin, who accuse Putin of mismanaging the conflict and are demanding a far more forceful response. After all, history suggests that when Russians feel pinned against the wall, they do not capitulate; they harden. Thus, the greater the pressure on Russia becomes, the more likely it is that Putin will find himself compelled to escalate the war.

Regardless of the short-term effects, Ukraine’s drone campaign is a textbook example of how drones are rewriting the rules of warfare in real time. Strategic deep strikes — the ability to reach the enemy’s cities, industries and leadership far behind the front — were until recently the privilege of countries with powerful air forces and missile arsenals. But low-cost, mass-produced drones have democratized it. A country losing the attritional contest on the ground — as Ukraine, on paper vastly inferior to Russia in material and manpower terms, plainly is — can now inflict vast damage deep inside the stronger power’s territory. And once the weaker side exercises that option, whatever incentive the stronger side may have had to exercise restraint collapses.

It is, after all, a matter of historical record that so far Russia has refrained from inflicting mass destruction on Kyiv and other major cities far from the front line, and throughout most of the war has conspicuously spared government decision-making centers — despite having the means to do so. For the first eight months of the conflict, Moscow also left Ukraine’s energy grid untouched; strikes began only after the Kerch Bridge attack of October 2022. In this sense, drone warfare does level the playing field, but it also invites escalation, by stripping the weaker side of the indirect protection that asymmetry itself — its inability to inflict mass damage on the enemy — once afforded it.

This is what makes the current moment so dangerous. A nuclear superpower is being subjected to a sustained campaign of strikes against its principal cities, its strategic infrastructure and, by extension, its leadership — supported by Western intelligence, executed with Western weapons and now backed by an explicit G7 commitment to “accelerate” the delivery of long-range capabilities.

As Matthew Blackburn of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs recently has warned, if Moscow decides its restraint within Ukraine is being exploited to impose humiliating damage on the Russian heartland, it may abandon strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure in favor of the European supply hubs and manufacturing sites that make Kyiv’s deep-strike campaign possible in the first place, thereby correcting the asymmetry and restoring deterrence on its own terms. Indeed, Moscow has repeatedly signaled that its patience is not unlimited; voices within the Russian establishment increasingly speak of restoring deterrence by striking targets in Europe itself. The reason Russia has so far refused to do so is obvious: such an attack could easily spiral into an all-out war that Russia has no interest in fighting — as even General Alexus Grynkewich, Nato’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe and the alliance’s top military commander, recently noted. Simply put, the cost of retaliation has thus far exceeded the cost of tolerance. But if the latter keeps increasing, Russia’s calculus could very well change.

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The essential fact is that nobody in the West knows where Russia’s red lines lie — and indeed Western policy seems to proceed on the assumption that they do not exist at all. Meanwhile, the Europeans keep arguing that there is no alternative to continuing to support Ukraine indefinitely because “Russia refuses to negotiate”. But as Anatol Lieven of the Quincy Institute recently wrote, it is the EU — not Russia — that has so far refused to negotiate. While Moscow has spent the past year in sustained talks with Washington and progressively abandoned several of its core demands, the Europeans have made negotiations conditional on an unconditional ceasefire that Russia cannot accept without surrendering its only leverage, and have wrapped this precondition in “principles” that amount to a demand for Russian capitulation.

The main victim of this posture has been Ukraine itself, condemned to a grinding war of attrition it cannot win militarily. Should exhaustion eventually produce a ceasefire without a settlement, meanwhile, it could lead to a Kashmir-style condition of permanent insecurity. It is in Ukraine’s interest — and in Europe’s interest as a whole — to negotiate a comprehensive peace settlement instead. We know in broad terms what any realistic settlement would entail: territorial concessions from Ukraine in exchange for security guarantees (short of Nato membership and Western troop deployments). Whether such an offer would suffice for Putin to claim his measure of victory and end the war, nobody can yet know. But what we do know is the cost of the status quo.

This is part of a broader offensive Trump has waged against NATO allies in recent weeks, for their refusal to send naval forces to help open the Strait of Hormuz. He told NATO members that they will “have to start learning how to fight for yourself” because “the USA won’t be there to help you anymore, just like you weren’t there for us”. Trump has also threatened to withdraw troops from Italy and Spain, and has once again raised the prospect of the US leaving NATO altogether. Asked in a recent interview whether he would reconsider US membership in the alliance, Trump replied: “Oh yes, I would say [it’s] beyond reconsideration”. 

In this context, Germany’s sweeping rearmament program is widely presented as a positive step in the right direction — Europe finally taking charge of its own security. But does this narrative hold up? And how seriously should one take the US’s threat of leaving NATO? A closer look reveals a very different picture. 

Last month, Germany published its first-ever official military strategy, presented by Boris Pistorius, the country’s defense minister. Its core ambition is to transform the Bundeswehr into “Europe’s strongest conventional army” by 2035, and a “technologically superior” force by 2039, with the Federal Republic positioned as the continent’s leading military power and the primary partner for its European allies. To achieve this, the strategy envisages massive rearmament with long-range weapons, extensive deployment of AI, automation and autonomous systems, and a total force — including reserves — of 460,000 soldiers. The reserve is explicitly framed as a bridge to civilian society, signaling an intent towards broader social militarization. 

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The strategy has drawn sharply divergent reactions. Some hail it as a long-overdue step towards freeing Germany — and by extension Europe — from American military tutelage, given the US’s apparent “disengagement” from NATO. Others view it as a dangerous revival of German military nationalism, one that evokes the darkest chapter of 20th-century European history. Both readings miss the point. Germany’s rearmament is not designed to make the country more militarily sovereign — for better or worse. It is designed to elevate Germany’s role as the “vassal-in-chief” within the US-controlled NATO command structure. In this sense, the Trump-Merz spat should be seen as little more than political theatre. 

The document itself makes this plain. One of its key sentences reads: “NATO must become more European to remain transatlantic”. Germany’s role is conceived not merely as that of a frontline military actor, but as NATO’s logistical and strategic hub — the node linking Eastern, Central and Western Europe while maintaining the transatlantic connection to North America. In other words: Germany must rearm in order to sustain American hegemony on the continent. To paraphrase a famous line from the Italian novel The Leopard: “Everything has to change so that everything can stay the same”. 

This was made explicit in a recent post on X by Elbridge Colby, the US Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. Colby welcomed Germany’s new military strategy as a vindication of Trump’s pressure on European allies to rearm, framing it as a step towards what he calls “Nato 3.0”. His core argument is that Europe, led by Germany, must now convert the Hague Commitments — where Europeans committed to a landmark defense investment pledge, aiming to spend 5% of their GDP on defense by 2035 — into concrete military capability. He quoted Nato Secretary-General Rutte approvingly: “Air defense systems, drones, ammunition, radars, space capabilities — that is what will keep us safe”. On Germany specifically, Colby presented the new military strategy as proof that Berlin was finally stepping up after “years of disarmament”, noting that rechristened Department of War was already working closely with the Germans to accelerate the transition.

The strategy itself, as Colby quoted it, acknowledges that Washington “is increasingly shifting its strategic focus towards its Western Hemisphere and the Indo-Pacific” and is demanding allies “step up their efforts to safeguard their own security”. Germany, in this framing, must become “an even stronger military ally to the United States” precisely because the US is repositioning elsewhere. 

This is simply a restatement of the “division of labor” that US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced at the very outset of the Trump administration. He made clear that the US needed to pivot elsewhere — we now know that meant Iran, and ultimately China — and that Europe would therefore have to assume responsibility for “managing its own security”, meaning the maintenance of pressure on Russia through Ukraine. Europe duly obliged: it has increased its defense spending and has doubled down on support for Kyiv, including through the recently approved €90 billion loan. We are now watching the natural progression of that logic, as Europe assumes the full financial burden for the continuation of the proxy war against Russia. 

In short, the US is not “disengaging from Europe”; it is simply demanding that Europe contribute more to Nato, while remaining firmly embedded within the Alliance’s command structure — in short, that it pays more for its own subordination. 

This requires a reassessment of Trump’s broader strategy towards Russia. Though he is routinely accused of “appeasing Putin” — with critics citing his cut-off of US funding to Ukraine and his (failed) attempts to broker a peace deal — the reality is more complicated. Washington has long sought to force Europe to decouple from Russian gas and replace it with American LNG, and the war in Ukraine has allowed them to achieve just that — so much so that one has to wonder if America’s decades-long strategy in Ukraine, from helping topple the democratically elected government in Ukraine in 2014, to drawing the country firmly into Nato’s informal orbit, wasn’t designed precisely to lure the Russians into war. The bombing of the Nord Stream pipeline should always be understood as part of this strategy. This becomes even clearer in light of the latest US National Security Strategy, published in November 2025, which designates “American energy dominance” across oil, gas, coal and nuclear power as a top strategic priority, explicitly framing the expansion of American energy exports as a means to “project power”. 

This logic illuminates not only the US’s military campaigns against Venezuela and Iran, but also why, in order to keep Europe dependent on American energy and severed from Russian supplies, Washington has a structural interest in keeping the proxy war going. It’s therefore easy to conclude that the US was never genuine about its intentions to make peace with Russia. The only difference today is that the war is now being waged not only through Ukraine, but through Europe itself. 

In this light, the ostensible US “threats” to leave Nato — and the European establishment’s rearmament program, Germany’s above all — are revealed as components of the same strategy: keeping Europe subordinated to American geopolitical priorities. The new German military strategy is nothing more than Berlin fulfilling the role Washington has assigned it: holding the line against Russia while the US turns towards the Indo-Pacific and the Western Hemisphere. This is not nationalism, military or otherwise, but its opposite: the undermining of German and European core interests at the hands of a transnational elite.

In this context, Germany should be understood as the anchor of a new Europeanized Nato core, comprising Germany, France, the UK — and Ukraine itself (even if formally outside of the alliance). This too reflects a longstanding American design. In his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard, the influential Polish-American diplomat Zbigniew Brzezinski predicted that “Franco-German-Polish-Ukrainian political collaboration… could evolve into a partnership enhancing Europe’s geostrategic depth”, adding that “America’s central geostrategic goal in Europe can be summed up quite simply: it is to consolidate through a more genuine transatlantic partnership the US bridgehead on the Eurasian continent”. 

This should dispel any remaining notion that what we are witnessing amounts to a move towards German or European strategic autonomy. It is no coincidence that Germany’s new military strategy identifies Russia as “the most serious and immediate threat” to European security — a claim that forms part of a broader European narrative warning of an inevitable war with Moscow in the coming years. At face value, this anti-Russian posturing might appear to reflect a distinctly “European” stance, one seemingly at odds with Washington’s public position. But this is largely an illusion. Not only has the European transatlantic establishment thoroughly internalized America’s strategic priorities, but the Nato command hierarchy makes the real chain of authority plain. 

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Real operational control of the proxy war against Russia remains firmly in Anglo-American hands. At the top sits the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) in Mons, Belgium, which translates political decisions into military objectives. The Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) — always an American general, dual-hatted as commander of US European Command — runs it alongside a British deputy. A German general coordinates staff work as Chief of Staff, but effective decision-making stays with the top two. 

Below SHAPE, operational command splits into two tracks: three Joint Force Commands (JFCs), the true theater commanders for large-scale operations, and three Component Commands covering air (Ramstein, Germany), land (Izmir, Turkey) and sea (Northwood, UK). MARCOM, the maritime command, has traditionally been UK-led, but the US recently took control of it, placing all three Component Commands under US command — a significant consolidation that has gone largely undiscussed. Even when a European officer commands a JFC — such as the leadership of JFC Naples, which recently passed from the US to Italy — the overall strategic direction remains under American control; JFC commanders implement objectives set by SHAPE. 

Two further structural dependencies reinforce American dominance. The first is the C4ISR concept of Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance: European allies are almost entirely dependent on US satellite, aerial and maritime platforms for real-time intelligence, surveillance and targeting — which together represent the backbone of Nato warfighting. Indeed, it has been acknowledged even by the Wall Street Journal that Ukraine’s deep-strike operations inside Russia — including, recently, against several oil production facilities — could not be conducted without American intelligence and satellite capabilities. The second dependency, less visible in public debate but potentially more consequential, is the dense presence of American staff officers embedded throughout Nato’s command structure at every level of the hierarchy, giving Washington an institutional grip that no change in command titles can easily displace. 

All of this should dispel any notion that the US is not deeply involved in the Ukraine war — or that it intends to leave Nato and truly “disengage” from Europe. Beyond the command architecture, the United States operates numerous bases and military installations across the continent, both within the Nato framework and under exclusive American control, which are indispensable to its global power projection. Ramstein Air Base in Germany — home to around 16,000 troops — functions as the hub controlling military drone traffic on a global scale, while coordinating American air operations across Europe, Africa and the Middle East. 

A recent Wall Street Journal investigation confirmed that, despite the public protestations of European leaders, US bases across the continent have functioned as the essential infrastructure for the American war on Iran. As the article put it, “Europe remains the bedrock of US force projection in the world”. Even Nato Secretary-General Rutte recently described the purpose of Nato as being a “platform of power projection for the United States”. 

Another element is what analysts call the “hidden dividends” of Nato: contracts and orders for American defense industries. This web of 1,300 agreements among the 32 member states that set standards for Nato weapons and equipment — covering everything from ammunition calibers to fuel-tank diameters — were originally imposed by Washington and overwhelmingly favor the American military-industrial complex. 

German and European rearmament, then, in the context of a supposedly more “European” Nato, is not strengthening European autonomy, but further eroding it. Not only does it make Europe complicit in Washington’s increasingly reckless military adventures, as the Iran war demonstrates, but more gravely still, it is pushing the continent towards a potentially catastrophic confrontation with Russia. Moscow is watching and responding accordingly. In a recent speech, Foreign Minister Lavrov stated openly: “A war against us has been openly declared. The Kyiv regime is being used as the tip of the spear. However, everyone is aware that this tip is unusable without Western supplies of weapons, intelligence data, satellite systems, training of military personnel and much more”. Lavrov added that Western leaders are actively preparing their publics for war with Russia — using Ukraine to buy time — and that Russia takes the threat very seriously. One cannot overstate the dangers of the path we are treading. 

A final observation is warranted. The French historian Emmanuel Todd has argued that much of what passes for nationalism in the West today — from Germany to Japan — is in fact a form of “imaginary” nationalism: vassalage towards the US dressed up as sovereignty. He contrasts this with “real” nationalism, a genuine sovereignty-oriented politics that is today largely absent. German neo-militarism, as argued here, falls squarely into the former category. But this does not mean that a “true” German nationalism — with its attendant aspirations towards continental hegemony — could not resurface. The militarization of German society and the hardening of anti-Russian sentiment are real and deepening phenomena. There is a historical precedent, after all. A century ago, the Anglo-American establishment tolerated the Nazi military build-up as an anti-Soviet bulwark — only for the German monster to eventually slip its leash. The domestic German context today is obviously very different — and of course one may argue, and hope, that a “true” German nationalism would recognize that the country’s genuine interests lie in peace rather than war. Even so, the parallels are impossible to ignore. 

The US could assure victory even if the regime survived the decapitation it had suffered on the war’s first night. Supreme Leader Khamenei was killed, along with his defense minister, his chief of staff, and the Revolutionary Guards chief, among others. Subsequently, the US launched an unimpeded bombardment of missile factories, stored missiles, missile launchers, and the Revolutionary Guard headquarters in Tehran, Mashhad and lesser cities.

Act I, therefore, ended swiftly. As for Act II, the US deployed thousands of Marines and 82nd Division Airborne troops to Qatar and nearby bases. But nothing happened. Tehran came to resemble Berlin after Hitler’s death, with the SS guards left in sole control, still able to hang anyone who wanted to stop the fighting, but with no plans at all to avert imminent defeat. In 1945, it was the arrival of Russian troops that finished off the last SS holdouts, just as the arrival of American troops mopped up the last Nazi holdouts in Bavaria.

Nobody expected an American army to advance to Tehran from the nearest port of Bandar Abbas on a single highway, across 800 miles of mountains and deserts, to venture into a city of more than ten million, to drive the Pasdaran Revolutionary Guards out of town, and scare the Basij militia into changing back into civilian clothes. It would have made for a very arid quagmire, with plenty of incidental US casualties even if there were no concerted and determined resistance.

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But the arrival of thousands of Marines and Airborne troops offered an altogether more realistic, far quicker and definitely very much safer path to victory. And when, as a defense contractor, I heard of the deployment, which occurred along with the far more publicized air campaign, I assumed that it had that rather obvious purpose, which arises from the geography of the Persian Gulf — hardly terra incognita in the Pentagon, which has been dealing with the Gulf and its recurrently threatened oil tankers for decades.

By now everyone at all interested knows that the Persian Gulf varies in width from roughly 180 miles opposite Bahrain to the 35-mile width of the Strait of Hormuz, but the navigable channels of the mostly very shallow Gulf are much narrower.

Most relevant for the US Marines and 82nd Airborne troops are the islands in the Persian Gulf, from which it is possible to secure safe passage for friendly tankers by denying them to Iranian anti-ship missile teams, by precluding minelaying attempts, and by detecting all manner of other threats with low-altitude helicopter patrols. Unlike the current American plan to give tankers military escorts, taking the islands deals with the problem closer to the root.

Some islands are closer to Iran’s mainland than others, but all can be denied to Iran’s ground forces from nearby shores. There is abundant close air support available from Al Udeid base in Qatar and elsewhere. Only one Island, Qeshm, is at all large, at 580 square miles, almost twice Manhattan’s 305 square miles. The rest are much smaller, and none could be overrun from the mainland as any coastal outpost might be.

To avert further damage to the global economy, everyone’s oil and gas exports — from Iraq and Kuwait up north down to Saudi Arabia’s Ras Tanura and Qatar’s liquefied gas — must be secured. (The Emirates have their Fujairah terminal on the Indian Ocean, out of danger.) If the islands are used as bases for highly mobile US units, it is eminently feasible for them to keep the exports secure.

As for the denial of Iran’s oil exports, it is already accomplished; its Kharg island principal oil export terminal has been disarmed, and in any case the US Navy is stopping any attempts to ship out Iran’s oil by tanker.

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Stopping Iran’s oil export revenues is enough to reduce the country’s power day by day. Iran entered the war with minuscule foreign exchange reserves for a country of ninety million, and the government receives very little hard currency from traditional exports. The merchants who sell carpets, pistachio nuts, saffron and pomegranate juice do not repatriate the foreign exchange but use it for luxury imports. Iran’s economy is now wrecked. The Rial has collapsed to 1.3 million for $1. That inflation means that many can only have plain bread with their water

The Chinese have supported Iran politically, but they are not sentimental, and will not ship missile fuel precursor chemicals, or anything else, without payment. Hezbollah’s surviving leaders might be sentimental, but their men depend on their salaries and must search for other employment if unpaid. The Houthi leaders, too, might be sentimental, but in the misery of Yemen they really need their pay to buy flour.

Russia is a very important supplier for Iran, with fast Caspian shipping routes from Astrakhan in the Volga delta to Amirabad only 750 miles away, or even less from Russia’s closest port in Makhachkala. But again, Russia is itself at war and cannot be generous. In other words, the power of the regime must diminish day by day without oil exports — which can be denied indefinitely, if all others can export their oil.

Given all this, why the inaction? Why do the fine troops remain idle? I fear that the answer is the arrival to the United States of what I have called the “post-heroic” syndrome. It is the historically unprecedented but now widespread refusal to accept the risk of casualties, even if very few, even if warranted by the most important interests. It is not a matter of ideology, for it originates in the drastic decline of female fertility. When mothers habitually had three or more children, one might be lost in combat but the family lived on. Now, few women have two children, let alone three. Average fertility in the US is only 1.6, well below the 2.1 replacement rate — and most combat losses result in the extinction of a family.

Hence the political tolerance of the casualties of war has drastically declined. On 9 November, 2022, President Macron abandoned Opération Barkhane. With just over 5,000 French troops, the operation had long protected the immense territories of five Sahel ex-colonies, but Macron feared that a small number might die. Putin fights in Ukraine with mercenaries without a single Russian conscript. The mere suggestion that Nato troops might guarantee a Ukraine ceasefire, if one were ever negotiated, was enough to trigger sheer panic in Italy, where on 1 April, 2025, Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani and Defence Minister Guido Crosetto stood side by side in front of TV cameras to rule out “any possibility whatever” that Italian soldiers might be deployed in Ukraine, even after a cease-fire. 

For the United States, the post-heroic syndrome means that if, say, a thousand US troops were killed while finally defeating Iran’s very dangerous rulers, President Trump’s reward could be a swift removal from the White House by impeachment, with the help of Republican votes. If that is why US Marines and Airborne troops remain idle, the time has arrived to turn to contractors who need not fear elections or impeachments.

Conspicuously absent, however, was any response from the EU’s institutional leadership. The same Brussels officials who routinely issue dire warnings about the alleged Russian threat to Europe declined to comment on an explicit US threat against European territory. And only hours earlier, most European leaders had offered either tepid or implicitly supportive responses to Trump’s unambiguous aggression against Venezuela. If there was a logic, it was to avoid confrontation with Washington at all costs. And yet ironically those same leaders quickly found themselves facing the prospect of similar US action directed against a European country.

A direct US military seizure of Greenland remains unlikely, though not unthinkable. A more probable scenario is an “association agreement” modeled on Washington’s arrangements with Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Palau. Under these agreements, the US exercises sweeping authority over defense and security in exchange for financial assistance. The states involved remain formally sovereign, but in practice are tightly bound to US strategic priorities. An analogous arrangement with Greenland would offer Washington the advantage of consolidating control while formally respecting Greenlandic self-rule, all while weakening Denmark’s position. A 1951 agreement already allows the US to station unlimited numbers of troops on the island; today, only one active base remains, but the legal framework for expansion is firmly in place.

The ambiguity is intentional. Earlier this week, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt stated that the use of the US military was “always an option” as Trump and his advisers reviewed different annexation scenarios. Whatever path the administration chooses, it is determined to resolve the matter swiftly. And European leaders, judging by their response so far, are likely to acquiesce. How can one account for the seemingly irrational, and indeed outright suicidal, posture of Europe’s political leadership? By acknowledging a simple fact: European elites are deeply embedded in the transatlantic system from which they derive their power and legitimacy. They perceive that system as under threat and are prepared to defend it at almost any cost, even if that cost includes European sovereignty or territory.

After all, Europe has already sacrificed its core economic and security interests to US imperial diktats. It has joined a proxy war against Russia that has devastated Ukraine and hollowed out European industrial competitiveness. It has imposed sanctions that inflicted far greater damage on European economies than on Russia. It has remained conspicuously silent following the destruction of Nord Stream, a critical piece of European energy infrastructure — an act probably carried out with at least indirect US involvement and likely foreknowledge by some European governments themselves. If European leaders were willing to accept all of this, acquiescing to US control over Greenland — whether through military pressure or pseudo-legal arrangements — would not represent a radical departure.

So much for Europe’s much-vaunted “strategic autonomy”. The reality is that beneath the rhetoric of independence, European governments have systematically appeased Trump — from increased Nato military spending, much of which will flow directly into US defense contractors, to punitive trade conditions to accepting financial responsibility for sustaining the war in Ukraine.

From the perspective of Europe’s governing classes, Nato and the proxy war in Ukraine are less about security or prosperity than about preserving an imperial architecture in which they can play a subordinate but privileged role. This is why Nato would likely survive even a US move against Greenland, albeit stripped of any remaining illusions of sovereign equality among its members.

This dynamic also helps explain a seeming paradox. Globalist European leaders openly despised by Trump — figures such as Emmanuel Macron or Friedrich Merz — have been more supportive of US aggression against Venezuela than Right-populist forces openly favored by Trump, such as Marine Le Pen or Viktor Orbán, who have adopted more cautious or critical positions. EU institutions, in particular, have been notably supportive of Washington’s actions — the bloc is not a counterweight to US power, rather one of its central pillars.

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It is therefore plausible that elements of the EU establishment are coordinating closely with factions of the US national security apparatus — or even with the Trump administration itself. After all, while it is true that Trump has abandoned any pretense of transatlantic unity and increasingly treats Europe in openly transactional, even neo-colonial terms, Europe’s political class has demonstrated its willingness to comply. Once one understands that Europe’s current leaders long ago ceased to think in terms of national or even “European” interests, and have instead become beholden to a single objective — the preservation of a dying system of Western hegemony, or the so-called “rules-based order”, and the benefits they derive from it in their sub-imperial role — their seemingly irrational behavior begins to make sense.

What should alarm Europeans is not the prospect of US “abandonment” or Nato’s collapse — developments that could, in principle, create space for genuine autonomy. In fact, it’s the opposite: the likelihood that Europe remains locked into a subordinate role precisely as Washington adopts an increasingly aggressive and lawless posture.

This is the broader context in which Trump’s attack on Venezuela and threats against Greenland must be understood. The events are revealing about the evolving nature of US foreign policy. While some analysts interpreted the latest National Security Strategy (NSS), along with Trump’s attempts to negotiate a settlement in Ukraine and his calls to scale down commitments in Europe, as evidence of a sober acceptance of multipolarity, Venezuela suggests a very different conclusion. Far from abandoning hegemony, the US is attempting to preserve it through new means, by globalizing a proxy-war strategy that targets weaker links in the rival system. While avoiding direct military containment of China or Russia, confrontation is displaced onto peripheral theaters and sustained through permanent destabilization. In this model, even the most elementary rules of international coexistence are discarded.

This shift is a reaction to a deep crisis of US hegemony. Its economic dimensions are well known: ballooning public debt, unsustainable private leverage, a financial system increasingly detached from productive activity, extensive deindustrialization and the gradual erosion, however partial, of the dollar-centric system. In short, this is a specific crisis of both US capitalism and the broader post-1945 imperial order.

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The US response to this is not to accept Washington’s role within a new global arrangement — one in which America could continue to prosper as a powerful but “normal” state — but to aggressively reassert its dominance. This reassertion increasingly takes the form of naked imperialism or neo-colonialism: not merely economic coercion, but the direct seizure of resources, the control of shipping lanes and supply chains, and even the open claim to foreign territory. Trump’s declaration that Venezuela will be “run” by the United States, coupled with the threat of further “kinetic” action should a future government resist, is thus emblematic.

This orientation is stated openly in the National Security Strategy. The document declares that the US will deny non-hemispheric competitors control over strategically vital assets, condition aid and trade on political alignment, discourage governments from cooperating with rival powers such as China or Russia, and use financial, technological and security — including military — means to ensure compliance. In practice, this strategy is already being implemented, well beyond the Western Hemisphere. Over the past year, the US has conducted bombing operations in seven countries — as varied as Iran, Nigeria and Somalia — none authorized by the UN Security Council and none credibly justified as acts of self-defense under the UN Charter. In parallel, Trump has issued direct threats against a growing list of other states.

In purely empirical terms, there is nothing new about the US resorting to violence to defend its economic and strategic interests; this has been a constant feature of US policy, even and especially under the so-called rules-based order. Across Latin America in particular, Washington has repeatedly intervened, covertly and overtly, whenever governments pursued land reform, resource nationalism or independent development paths that challenged US interests. What is new is the abandonment of even the pretense of legality or humanitarian concern. This is what domination looks like without hegemony: power exercised openly and coercively.

And it is precisely this nakedness that makes the current moment so dangerous. By signaling that no rules remain, not even rhetorically — Washington is effectively legitimizing a world of unrestrained power politics — one that is arguably already a reality, but which the West, until recently, at least claimed to oppose. This is particularly destabilizing given that US actions against Venezuela and Greenland should not be understood solely in economic terms; they are also strategic moves directed against China, and to a lesser extent Russia. Contrary to the idea that Washington is willing to divide the world into stable spheres of influence, the goal appears instead to create platforms from which US power can be projected more aggressively, ultimately to confront China before the balance of technological and economic power shifts irreversibly.

This is a gamble rooted in the assumption that sustained military and economic attrition can at least delay a tectonic shift in the global order. It is a position inherited from an older colonial worldview which saw non-Western development itself as an existential threat. In this sense, as one commentator insightfully put it, time itself is being weaponized. American elites are engaged in what might be called governance by delay: prolonging conflict and maintaining instability in the hope that some external shock — let’s say a technological breakthrough, an internal crisis among rivals — will restore lost leverage.

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The irony is that this strategy is profoundly self-defeating. The more openly coercive US behavior becomes, the faster it erodes the very structures that once underpinned American hegemony. After 1945, US dominance was not built through territorial annexation, or pure military power, but through administrative architecture: a dense web of alliances; the dollar-backed financial system; global trade regimes; standards bodies; technological ecosystems. This networked hegemony made integration with US-led systems the path of least resistance for most states — though, of course, the threat of violent reprisal was always there and often used.

Instead, when a hegemon instead behaves like a caricature of imperial power, it encourages states to seek alternatives — which now, unlike even just a decade ago, actually exist. To rephrase, Trump is incentivizing other nations to further diversify reserves, reduce dollar exposure, explore new payment systems and forge new security partnerships. Indeed, many countries, from South Africa to Brazil to India, are already pushing back against Trump’s bullish tactics. Thus, the primary beneficiaries of Trumpian aggression are precisely those Washington seeks to contain. China, and Russia too, have spent years advocating for an alternative framework for global cooperation based on sovereign equality and multipolarity. Each act of US lawlessness strengthens their appeal. After the illegal assault on Venezuela, expect the queue of countries seeking closer association with BRICS (and similar groupings) to grow longer, even as the US responds by escalating threats against those who do.

Europe, meanwhile, risks guaranteeing its own decline. By clinging to a subordinate role in America’s fraying imperial system, European elites are sacrificing the continent’s long-term autonomy for the prospect of their continued access to power. Yet this also means aligning themselves with a hegemon that governs through naked violence and coercion, at precisely the moment when adaptability and restraint are most needed. In doing so, they expose their own societies to escalating risks — economic, political and military — without any increase in security or influence. While the future of the global order remains uncertain, Europe’s own fate seems sealed.

But one factor remains underplayed. The United States is currently engaged in a fiercely contested space race with China, and, to a lesser extent, Russia. Space offers unlimited energy, unlimited resources, and unlimited internet connectivity — and the High North is crucial. This is because satellites that orbit from pole to pole must pass each pole with every orbit, which means that they fly over a given point in the High North far more often than a given point toward the Equator. As such, places like Svalbard are ideal locations for ground stations that keep in touch with constellations of satellites, be they commercial or military.

Those ground stations are where data transmitted by the satellites, from UberEats orders to key Ukrainian intelligence, are funneled into high-speed subsea internet cables. It’s little wonder, therefore, that Svalbard is always mobbed by Nato ships, and little wonder that those subsea cables have, in recent history, been attacked. Previously, space was about scientific discovery, but now, as the newly appointed Nasa administrator Jared Isaacman has acknowledged, it is also about strategic security dominance — it is the most important war-fighting domain. Whoever controls the highest altitudes in space, controls the battle domains on earth. And the world’s first space war is already well underway: Kyiv would have very limited offensive or defensive capability if it were unable to use Elon Musk’s Starlink service. China has therefore designated Starlink as a military entity rather than a private company, and is building satellite networks that have the ability to damage or destroy Starlink satellites.

Given this security situation, the US doesn’t want to rely solely on Svalbard. So it maintains another space base, Pituffik, on the northwest coast of Greenland. As the second most important space base after Svalbard, it is of immense strategic importance — not least because, being closer to the US, it is much more easily defended.

Given that Denmark already allows the US to maintain Pituffik and other bases, one might ask why the White House wants sovereignty over the territory. The answer is that the White House does not trust Europe to be a reliable partner. Remember Russiagate? Back in 2016, Trump, then Republican nominee for the presidency, was smeared by a dossier that was written by a former British intelligence official. The Democrats used this information against Trump, whose administration takes a dim view of European interference with American elections — especially when that interference is targeted against the MAGA movement. Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, has been declassifying material that the White House views as incriminating evidence of “weaponization and politicization of intelligence”, going so far as to refer to a “treasonous conspiracy” to prevent Trump from winning in 2016. It is an extraordinary political moment in American history, one where Trump is on the brink of bringing legal charges against the former heads of the intelligence agencies and former presidents.

It’s not just the Steele “Russiagate” dossier that embroils Europe in these high-stakes domestic politics. The White House also blames Europe, and Europeans such as George Soros, for funding Antifa, and other movements and organizations that oppose Trump. Combined, all this dirty laundry has been disastrous for Transatlantic relations, and it has come at a time when there has already been tension between Europe and Trump. In his first term, Trump loudly chastised Europe for sponging off the American defense budget. In his second, he has been trying to end the war in Ukraine. Europe’s leaders have, in the White House view, been nothing but obstructive to the goal of bringing peace to Europe. Trump thinks of himself as trying to prevent World War Three from breaking out, even as the Europeans oppose peace deals and call for more aggressive action against Russia and Putin.

And the White House believes that Europe is only going to become even more difficult to deal with. In 2024, JD Vance suggested that the “first truly Islamist country to get a nuclear weapon” might be the UK, which had just elected a Labour government. At the end of last year, the US National Security Strategy (NSS) struck a similar note, arguing that mass migration has created the “stark prospect of civilizational erasure” for Europe as we know it. “Should present trends continue,” the NSS had it, “the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less. As such, it is far from obvious whether certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies.” JD Vance spelled it out, expressing concern about who is going to be in control of the nuclear arsenals in Western Europe, given the rise of “Islamist aligned” parties. Europeans might strongly disagree with this, but it is the White House’s interpretation; seen in this light, the purchase of Greenland would represent the transfer of a crucial security asset from an unreliable partner to the direct ownership of the US.

And there is specific dissatisfaction with Denmark as well as with the EU. The administration’s view is that Denmark has been at the forefront of not only supporting Ukraine in the war with Russia, but blocking any possibility of a peace negotiation going forward. Denmark, in short, is a troublesome vassal — and a vassal that happens to own an immensely valuable defense asset within the hemisphere that the “Donroe Doctrine” posits as America’s to dominate.

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Nor has the administration ruled out the use of force to take the island. One of Trump’s key advisers, Stephen Miller, was singularly belligerent, telling CNN that “we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower”, and that “nobody is going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland”. The pugnacity has shocked European leaders, who have issued a joint statement to say they are willing to defend the island. But the shock is all part of Trump’s plan. In every one of his negotiations, from property deals to international treaties, he first throws a negotiating grenade to create chaos. Then in he walks, and offers to talk. In this case, the seizing Greenland rhetoric is the grenade. Trump, who cares little about the norms of international relations, is probably hoping that this detonation will encourage Denmark and its allies to accept a deal.

Meanwhile, the White House is deploying a charm offensive towards the Greenlanders — fundamentally an Inuit population rather than a Danish one. The history between the Greenlanders and the Danes is a troubled one, which is partly why Denmark, over recent years, has devolved political authority to Greenland — and also because it is a terrifically costly territory to support. Trump, then, is reaching out to the Greenlanders and offering them the opportunity of no longer having to answer to the Danes, and instead gaining a privileged status within the United States. In financial terms, the Greenlanders have much to gain from being folded into the American economy: they could, for example, cut deals for the extraction of minerals. Denmark is vehemently objecting to these American overtures, but the fact is that it has devolved enough power for Greenland to be able to make its own decision about whether to be incorporated into the United States.

Europeans are now obviously hoping that Trump will get distracted and that the matter of a Greenland purchase will go away. But the game is already in play, and the White House knows it probably has limited time. Trump wants an expanded US, within a more secure hemisphere, to be the legacy he hands on at the end of his second term. Woe betide the Europeans who stand in his way.

During the Cold War of my youth, there was always potential for accidental conflict. But America and the Soviet Union were both run by people who were working hard to prevent that from happening. Even in the tensest of crises, diplomacy prevailed.

Things are totally different now. On both sides of the Atlantic, in Russia and across Western Europe, I see a rhetorical readiness for armed conflict on a never before seen scale. “Russia has brought war back to Europe,” said Mark Rutte, the Nato secretary general recently, adding that “ we must be prepared for the scale of war our grandparents and great-grandparents endured.” Meanwhile, the UK’s Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton said the situation was more dangerous than at any time during his career: “Sons and daughters. Colleagues. Veterans… will all have a role to play, to build, to serve, and if necessary, to fight,” he said. For his part, the head of Germany’s Federal Intelligence Agency has warned that Russia could attack Europe before the end of the decade.

If this war with Russia were to happen, it won’t only be because Trump has motivated Putin, it will also be because we have allowed the situation in Ukraine to spiral out of control. Our support has been a catalog of misjudgments. When everybody draped themselves in the Ukrainian flag in 2022, so-called experts were spectacularly gung-ho about Kyiv’s eventual victory. Retired generals competed with predictions of how fast Ukraine would get the job done — two weeks, speculated one. Well, we are now nearly four years into the conflict and as members of the so-called “coalition of the willing”, we Europeans encouraged Ukraine to fight to the bitter end — without a chance of victory.

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It is perfectly plausible now that Russia will end up occupying more than the four oblasts it seeks, and that Ukraine loses its independence. Encouraged by victory, Russia might eventually seek more. Exacerbating matters on the other side, some Europeans now seek regime change in Russia. To quote Kaja Kallas, the EU’s High Representative for foreign and security policy: “it is not a bad thing if the big power is actually made much smaller.”

We’ve been here before. Ahead of the First World War, young Germans and Austrians were also hungry for battle, as many Europeans seem today. The Germans envied their grandparents who fought the glorious battles of the Franco-Prussian War 44 years earlier. Then, as now, the political and military establishment underestimated how difficult war would be.

Yet there is one big difference. Back in 1914, Europe’s armies were in a position to fight. A victory by the Germans and Austrians was at the very least a plausible outcome. Today, it is no longer possible that Ukraine can win the war, nor that Western Europe, without US help, could defeat Russia.

This broader European conflict won’t necessarily be a classic land war. I don’t think Putin has plans to invade Western Europe, as security officials claim. My main fear, rather, is hybrid warfare: airplanes blowing up over Heathrow airport, say; an explosion in a busy German railway station; or perhaps even an underwater nuclear explosion that sparks a tsunami. Brussels, as the home of Nato and the EU, would be particularly vulnerable. And any counter to such a provocation would swiftly escalate.

This is the type of warfare for which we Europeans are least prepared. Western security experts see hybrid warfare as a lower genre for lesser people, like Russians. But it is lethal, and we Europeans are ideal victims. We live in tight spaces. We are dependent on critical infrastructure and technology. And, from the Russian perspective, such attacks would helpfully not trigger Nato’s mutual defense clause. Why invade Estonia if you can create utter chaos in European capitals, all while maintaining plausible deniability?

The UK isn’t unaware of this. In November, the Defence Select Committee warned that the UK Government was moving “at glacial pace” to adopt the “Home Defence Programme”, a new national resilience and security strategy to secure the country against serious risks: including unconventional attacks. But the programme has been delayed for over a year, even as Britain’s leaders are desperate to ramp up the war rhetoric.

It is clearer than ever, though, that our political systems are far from ready for a fight. The UK, Germany and France are all unwilling to pay for the support of Ukraine from their own budget, or indeed raise taxes. This is why they were so keen to use the Russian assets that lie frozen in European banks. Now that Belgium, the country where most of the assets are held, has blocked the heist, European politicians will have to put their money where their mouth is.

The trouble is, their electorates won’t let them. European voters won’t give up their welfare payments to fund a war and polls consistently show a marked lack of support for further financial aid for Ukraine. And please don’t ask them to put on their boots and actually fight for their country.

The irony here is that, whatever their problems, Europe’s leaders see war as a way of distracting from even deeper crises. If peace broke out, for instance, the EU would have to reform its absurd Common Agricultural Policy, redirecting funds away from French farmers towards Ukraine. Continued profligacy would become tougher to defend in other ways. The EU ditched its fiscal rules to make room for more defense spending. Without a war, deficit spending is hard to justify. War is the ultimate excuse for failing policies, keeping dysfunctional governments in power and delaying the moment of reckoning.

Like so many of my generation, I always thought that Europeans had learned from the mistakes of the past — including the oldest mistake of all. As Sun Tzu, the legendary Chinese strategist of war, warned some 2,500 years ago: if you “know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” Unfortunately, we keep on overestimating ourselves and underestimating our enemies. Putin initially underestimated his enemy with an amateurish attack on Kyiv. But he recovered and the Russians are now fighting a well-organized, fully-funded, focused war. And perhaps his strategists would conclude that now is the right time to launch an extended hybrid war against Europe. What has Putin to lose?

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Meanwhile, our misjudgments continue. Just as Napoleon and Hitler underestimated the sheer scale of Russia and its freezing winter temperatures, contemporary European politicians continue to discount the economic resilience of modern Russia. The first mistake happened right at the beginning of the war, when we thought we could exhaust Russia economically through sanctions. We fooled ourselves with deeply misleading statistics, according to which Russia’s GDP was approximately the size of Spain’s. But what matters in a war is purchasing power — literally bang for buck. On that metric, Moscow spends more than twice as much as Germany on defense, and far more efficiently. While experts insist that the Russian economy is on the verge of collapsing. there’s no sign of that happening. Similarly, certain international lawyers continue to claim that the sequestration of Russian assets is risk-free. There is a pattern here — one that could yet prove catastrophic in both treasure and blood.

In contrast, the geopolitical realists of earlier generations, such as Henry Kissinger or George Kennan, the legendary US diplomat of the post-war era, had a much deeper understanding of superpower politics. Nobody would have accused Kissinger of being soft on the Soviet Union. But nor was he a trigger-happy war monger.

Back then, the Americans maintained diplomatic channels with Russia. And they didn’t indulge in ritualized virtue-signaling about the rule of law. Their job was risk-management — and they performed it admirably. What is becoming increasingly clear is that the Trump Administration is not in the business of managing risk, but of pursuing short-term commercial advantage.

Greenland may well be next. Its vast, largely unexplored deposits of rare earth elements, combined with its strategic position make it an obvious target. Indeed, Trump has already laid the groundwork both with the National Security Strategy and with the appointment of an envoy tasked with its acquisition. Ownership would dramatically strengthen the US position in the Arctic Sea, a region of growing strategic importance that Europe has largely ignored.

Nor is Canada immune: Trump has already identified it as a security threat. It also happens to sit on 163 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, ranking 4th globally according to the US Energy Information Administration, after Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. As the US becomes more dependent on oil for its energy needs, the acquisition of Venezuela and Canada would certainly follow a commercial logic, if not strategic reason.

It’s completely mad, I know. But it reflects a geopolitical reality in which risk is no longer managed and diplomacy discounted. The Cold War world was a safer one, not because the situation was safe, but because adults were in charge.

Italy’s prime minister may have started as an anti-European, but she governs today as a pro-European moderate — or, as she would say, a “euro-realist”. And the received wisdom in Europe is that the French far-Right will do the same. But this is to fundamentally misunderstand Le Pen’s National Rally. Her party could not be more different from Meloni’s Brothers of Italy. For one thing, the two have occupied opposing positions on the political spectrum — particularly on Nato and Europe. To expect the French far-Right to ape Meloni’s softening stance, then, is to fall prey to the fallacy of composition.

Meloni has been on quite a political journey. She entered politics in the Nineties as a youth activist for Italian Social Movement: the postwar neo-fascists. In 1995, its leader, Gianfranco Fini, reconstituted the party as the National Alliance — a new iteration which embraced liberal democracy, membership of Nato, and European integration. It was Fini, not Meloni, who turned Italy’s far-Right into a pro-European, pro-Establishment movement. He later became one of Silvio Berlusconi’s most senior ministers and one of the most pro-European voices in his cabinet.

In 2009, Fini merged his National Alliance into Berlusconi’s party, and then, in 2012, Meloni left the group to become leader of a new party: the Brothers of Italy. Her party was further to the Right than Fini, but still rejected fascism. And Meloni was a euroskeptic, very much in the mold of Britain’s British Conservatives pre-Brexit. But she has played the bloc to her advantage, and Italy is increasingly seen as a credible and stable partner.

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Things couldn’t be more different in France, where the towering figure of the far-Right is Marine Le Pen, president of National Rally. Though she is currently banned from standing for political office for five years, this has not affected her party’s ratings. Her 30-year-old protégé, Jordan Bardella, has assumed leadership and is currently polling between 35 and 37.5% of voting intentions in the first round of the next presidential elections. The second-placed candidate is the former prime minister Édouard Philippe, who is at 15-19.5%. While it is hard to translate these numbers into second-round votes, for the first time it does look like the far-Right has a real crack at winning the French presidency.

The party has come some way since it was founded by Marine’s father, the late Jean-Marie Le Pen, in 1972 as the National Front. It took a hard line on membership of the European Economic Community — as it was then called — on the grounds that it constituted a threat to French sovereignty. Le Pen Snr later rejected the single market, the euro, and Schengen. But he never got close to power.

His clan, though, still rules. And its ideology still holds. Under Marine’s leadership, the party’s position on Europe did seem to soften a little. She still wanted to exit the euro and Schengen, but not the EU itself. Instead, she wanted to renegotiate treaties. In practice, of course, this would not have been possible, so her position was never fundamentally different from Frexit — except in tone.

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Le Pen doubled down on her euro exit theme in the elections of 2017, and lost to Emmanuel Macron — the extremism of her narrative clearly contributing to her defeat. So, in 2018, she renamed the party National Rally and changed its message from exiting the EU altogether, to reforming it from within. Superficially this might sound like a Meloni shift. But in reality, it means something different, which became brutally clear in last year’s parliamentary elections.

After National Rally scored won a landslide victory — its biggest yet — in the 2024 European elections, Macron called a snap election for the French National Assembly. Bardella assumed charge of the party and, at one point during the campaign, it did look on the verge of achieving a political majority. This was only thwarted at the last minute when, panic-stricken, the opposition parties formed an alliance to force the far-Right into third place.

But over the course of those two elections, the party’s position on European integration hardened significantly. With Bardella as leader, he called for a referendum to reaffirm the primacy of the French constitution over European law and during the European campaign he came up with the idea of a stratégie tricolore: a menu of European integration dishes from which France would order as it saw fit.

The green category represents the European integration the party approves of — so, industrial policies, and scientific exchanges. The orange category contains those policy fields France would want to renegotiate — such as Schengen and the single market. And the red category holds the hard no-go areas — migration, energy, defense, borders. Bardella wants to prioritize French citizens for jobs, and reverse free movement. Tell me that you want to leave the EU, without telling me that you want to leave the EU. That’s Bardella.

His agenda is clearly incompatible with EU membership. In the past, the EU has displayed a good deal of forbearance when confronted with French rule-breaking — for example on fiscal deficits. But this goes too far. The EU could never accept a French proposal to change freedom of movement unilaterally. So while the National Rally might not campaign on a leaving the EU platform, it will end up breaking so many of its rules that a Frexit would be the only way to deliver on its campaign promises.

If you were left in any doubt, here’s more. In an interview with The Economist last week, Bardella said he wants the ECB to buy French debt. France is Europe’s largest debtor — and the debtor with the greatest exposure to investors from outside Europe. Technically, the ECB could do this. It has a tool it calls the “transmission protection instrument”, which would allow it to buy French bonds during a financial crisis. The argument in favor of a central bank bailout is that France is simply too big to fail. As president or prime minister, Bardella could threaten the ECB with a unilateral default.

It is easy to dismiss his comments as utter nonsense, as one French economist did in a conversation with me last week. I take it seriously, though, because a French government under Le Pen or Bardella could take Europe to the brink. France is a powerful agent. It is not Greece. Or Italy. Bardella also wants an EU budget rebate, like Margaret Thatcher once did. This would push an under-resourced EU that has over-committed itself on Ukraine into an existential crisis.

Such a scenario could not be more different from what happened in Italy under Meloni. Italy has constitutional safeguards in place against a unilateral withdrawal from the euro and international treaties. Meloni’s pragmatism makes perfect sense. She is attempting to make the bloc work in Italy’s interests. It is quite a different scenario in France where the constitution gives the President powers that are without parallel in west European democracies. The EU would not break up the moment the National Rally got into power. But there would be cardiac arrest soon afterwards.

It’s tempting to blame these disruptions on Trump’s famously capricious style — but that would be a mistake. For the real shift of recent times came not from the Commander in Chief himself, but from a phone call between US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, which finally led White House officials to realize that Russia’s position on Ukraine remains as unyielding and uncompromising as ever. First in Alaska, and now ahead of Budapest, Trump has twice learned a truth that Ukrainians have always known — that Putin is not interested in concessions so long as the price of continuing the war is lower than the cost of ending it.

As a result, the Trump administration duly announced sanctions against Russian oil firms Lukoil and Rosneft, the first against Russia during his second term in office. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to see this face-saving move as the end of his efforts to force a solution to the conflict that he can put his name on. After all, the energy giants have already been under American sanctions since 2014, and though some key buyers have started to back off from Russian oil and gas, the long-term efficacy of such sanctions largely depends on how aggressively the Trump administration enforces them.

That’s especially true when it comes to taking robust measures against secondary countries. And certainly, Trump’s record of upholding Biden-era sanctions against Russia leaves a lot to be desired. What all this means is that Trump’s latest moves won’t be nearly enough to sway Putin — and unless he is willing to go all-in on support for Ukraine, which is unlikely, the White House will eventually join forces with Putin to end the war on his terms, leaving Ukraine with only the hapless Europeans for solace.

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Despite his on-off embrace of Ukraine, what is easily and repeatedly observable is that, sooner or later, Trump always comes crawling back to Putin’s kennel, and after years of habit, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Though he understands that he has once again been played by his Russian counterpart, Trump also knows that he may be reaching the end of his window to bag his long-coveted peace deal — his ninth, apparently — which would open the door to the trade deals and investments he has discussed with Putin almost since his inauguration.

He may levy sanctions today, in short, but as his bile-filled meeting with Zelensky implies, Trump is ultimately likely to return to his default approach and force the Ukrainians to abandon the last battlefield advantages they have. Jaded by his own peace process, yet still driven by his ego, Trump’s move against Russia is best understood as a façade, a reaction that belies a much deeper, more cynical awareness: that only by forcing Ukraine to capitulate will Trump get what he wants.

What exactly is that? Beyond the prospect of a long-term economic bargain with Moscow, Trump stressed after his meeting with Zelensky that the best-case scenario would be a quick deal to end the fighting. That would allow him to parade a personal triumph, while leaving it to Putin, Zelensky, and the Europeans to figure out the details of a proper lasting peace. “Let it be cut the way it is,” he said aboard Air Force One, referring to Donetsk Oblast and other parts of Ukraine that Russia currently occupies. “They can negotiate something later on down the line.” Now that Putin has made it clear this isn’t an option, Trump has found himself trapped — unable to secure a quick ceasefire, but still determined to secure Russian wealth.

In hindsight, Trump’s entire Russia-Ukraine saga has been leading up to this moment. Following the dud that was the Alaska summit in August, Trump tried on an all-in-for-Ukraine approach for size, offering Kyiv perhaps the most valuable asset in his toolkit — American intelligence support for long-range drone strikes against Russian energy sites. Though Trump’s threats to send Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine garnered much of the headlines, it was these strikes, which reduced Russia’s oil refining capabilities by 20% by September and slashed its oil export revenues, that ultimately played a larger role in pushing Putin to indulge the Budapest summit. For all its bluster, Russia would have likely weathered the limited Tomahawk strikes that Ukraine could have sent its way — but another few months of near-daily drone strikes might have been economically fatal.

Trump’s pro-Ukraine gambit was enough to bring Putin back to the negotiating table, but not enough to get him to actually negotiate. For that reason alone, the Commander-in-Chief is unlikely to “waste” more time on trying to meaningfully change Putin’s calculus in the long run. It may take another cycle of fruitlessly trying to get Putin to negotiate, but Trump will eventually return to what was always in his eyes a much more effective method for securing his goals: strong-arming Ukraine. Zelensky already got a taste of this during his meeting with Trump on Friday, when the US President told him that he should give in to Putin’s demands or get “destroyed”.

While Trump settled on advocating for a ceasefire along the current frontlines, there’s no guarantee he still sees this as a viable position, especially following the collapse of the Budapest summit. If he truly believes he can get Zelensky to surrender the Donbas, which could well be the case with Steve Witkoff constantly in his ear, the President may let his impulses get the better of him and embrace it as the fastest path to victory. Once he does, he will almost certainly cut off the intelligence support that has been so instrumental in Ukraine’s success against Russia’s energy sector, and possibly cancel Ukraine-destined arms shipments to Nato allies, leaving the country fully at the mercy of Putin’s war machine.

With a shaken Europe at his back, Nato chief Mark Rutte jetted off to Washington to meet with Trump this week, and though he downplayed concerns about the US President’s position on Ukraine, it’s clear the trip was an attempt at damage control. Europe, Kyiv, and Nato are now trying their best to band together and leverage the Trump-whispering techniques they’ve honed over the last eight months. Moving forward, they may try to sway Trump with economic and trade incentives of their own. Yet having already handed much of their bargaining power over to America during previous charm offensives, in the form of mineral deals, trade agreements, and security investment kickbacks, they will have few bones left for him to gnaw on.

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Moreover, European Nato leaders are aware that they must pick their battles carefully — and with a new era of gray-zone Russian drone incursions, provocations, and acts of sabotage already upon them, they may well choose to cut their losses and place their bets on American support for Europe rather than continuing to stick their necks out for Ukraine. And with Russia increasingly casting Europe as the spoilers of Trump’s grand plans, including the Budapest summit, they may soon find their influence in an increasingly pro-Russian White House dropping precipitously.

What of the future? The prospect of bilateral trade with Russia in rare earths and oil would certainly make Trump happy. But the price of such a deal would involve more than dollars: what Putin wants most from America is not just a free hand to impose his will on Ukraine, but an opportunity to halt and even roll back Nato’s expansion in Eastern Europe, refashion Russia’s old neo-imperial sphere of influence, and reach a new compact with the US on what our looming multipolar world might look like.

Whether Trump goes along with this plan remains to be seen, but imposing a dubious peace now opens the door for a whole range of geopolitical scenarios that at present seem unthinkable. As for Europe, which has spent an enormous amount of energy flattering Trump to get him onside, the President’s eventual turn to the Kremlin will force them into their own generational reckoning. And while they may initially redouble their efforts to support Ukraine, and win Trump back once more, it’s likely that, caught between Russia and the US, Europe may just cast Ukraine aside, as they scramble to find a place in this new, Machiavellian world order.

In the meantime, Zelensky is hoping that Trump’s ego won’t let him fall back into Putin’s lap. Ukraine has just conducted several successful strikes against a Russian gas processing plant, likely with American support, and he and the Europeans are doing their best to project calm, buoyed by the sanctions announcement. But as this chaotic week draws to a close, he and the Europeans will be dreading what comes next. Trumpology is an art, not a science, and a move in one direction is hardly ever a sure-fire bet for what comes next. Though the President may feel his self-worth bruised by Putin today, it is only a matter of time before his deeper self-interest wins out once more. Despite the wishful thinking of Europe and Ukraine’s supporters, The Art of the Deal has no chapter on righteous empathy.

The questions for the British Defense Secretary, on a visit during Labour Party conference which began yesterday just across the Mersey, ranged from “What will this mean for local jobs?” to “Is Russia about to attack?” This just about sums up the dilemma facing UK defense policy: are we in a period of incrementally raised threat, demanding incrementally higher defense spending; or should the severity of the global situation demand the urgent expansion of investment into Britain’s historic military hardware production sites, to the necessary detriment of spending on everything else?

Amid its polling slump, Labour is desperate to demonstrate delivery on its domestic agenda, and is conscious that no matter how statesman-like Keir Starmer and Healey look on global stage, there are — as yet — few votes in national security and defense. But the prospect of conflict with Russia, given the recent doubling of Russian incursions into Nato airspace, rightly haunts the British government. If the worst happened, according to one senior military officer I spoke to, here’s what it would look like. In Phase One, all the expensive kit is destroyed, the stockpiles of complex weapons are expended; the long-practiced maneuvers end in stalemate; and trench warfare begins.

In Phase Two, both sides are lobbing drones and missiles at each other’s industrial base. Their armed forces consist mainly of raw recruits, and their cities look like London during the Blitz. In Phase Three, one side’s scientific and technological base begins to innovate faster, using AI, robotics, space and lasers to make itself unbeatable, and their opponent loses the will and the means to fight.

Any of these phases can be circumvented either by a strategic nuclear attack or a devastating act of economic warfare. And the preparatory phase looks much like the present: unexplained cyberattacks on major infrastructure, “protest” movements driven by disinformation and — as is currently happening in Moldova — outright interference against elected governments.

Nobody in their right mind would want to begin such a conflict. But the fragmented state of the Western alliance, and the irrationalism of the man in the Kremlin, mean that our surest way of avoiding it is deterrence — nuclear, conventional and economic — and by strengthening our alliances. If you want to understand how pivotal those alliances are, look at this map, produced by my colleagues at the Council on Geostrategy. It shows that, though Nato’s frontline with Russia is on land, stretching from the Black Sea to the Arctic, the alliance itself is essentially maritime. Its flanks are seas; its supply lines are oceans; its communication networks rest on seabeds.

Though few British citizens are prepared to accept it, and few politicians are prepared to lay it on the line in these terms, that is the stark background to Britain’s rearmament program. Since February this year, when US Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth told his counterparts that the USA was handing the conventional defense of Europe to European states themselves, the British government has scheduled a hike in defense spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2027, promised 3% in the next Parliament and signed up to the new Nato target of 5% in 10 years’ time.

In UK defense circles, the concept of “fight tonight” has evolved from an edgy thought experiment to a concrete criterion for readiness. Britain has committed, in short order and without any debate in Parliament, to fielding a “sub-strategic” — tactical — nuclear weapon, to be carried on F-35A combat aircraft and deployed under Nato command.

In the new National Security Strategy, the UK has also pledged to embrace higher risks when it takes action and accepted that, in pursuit of enhanced security, its “interests” may have to override its “values”. And, in the upcoming Defense Investment Plan, the Ministry of Defense will decide how to match its weapons systems, forces and deployments to the threat, given the size of its budget.

The outstanding problems are: how to pay for rearmament; how to secure consent for it, from a civil society that is atomized and fractured by disputes over identity; and how to ready political and military leaderships for the possibility of having to manage Russian escalation.

The money problem is acute. In the Thirties, once it accepted the possibility of war within a decade, the Treasury understood it would have to be financed by borrowing. Though it rationed the spending increase, and forced hard choices on the military — prioritizing the RAF over both other services — between 1932 and 1939 the Treasury raised defense spending from 2.3% to 9% of GDP.

That would be hard to repeat today. First, because the UK’s public debt is 96% of GDP. Though that is lower than it was at the start of rearmament, today the government borrows from investors free to move their money across borders, not from a middle class whose savings are constrained by capital controls as in the Thirties. Second, because of the welfare state. On the eve of rearmament, when defense spending stood at 2.5% of GDP, the rest of the public sector accounted for just 17%. During wartime, when defense spending ballooned to 50% of GDP, state spending on civilian services shrank below 7%. Today the non-military public spending accounts for around 42% of GDP, much of which is unshrinkable.

“Total war”, of the kind we fought twice in the 20th century, is unthinkable for states with public health, welfare and pension commitments. As a result, the fiscal debates and the rearmament debate in British politics are misaligned: the 5% Nato commitment remains aspirational, while the Treasury and the OBR have yet to agree a methodology that could measure the upsides of this investment in terms of growth.

The British government is engaged in discussions over a proposal to put cash into a multilateral fund, with allies who have better credit ratings, and to borrow against it on the capital markets. That could delay the cost of some defense spending, effectively moving it off balance sheet for the medium term. But the UK has distanced itself from a City-led project to finance such borrowing, known as the Defense Security and Resilience Bank, and is making slow progress in its own negotiations.

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In the meantime, selling rearmament to the electorate has barely begun. Keir Starmer was warmly received when he told the London Defense Conference that security and defense were no longer “one priority amongst many others” but “the central organizing principle of government; the first thought in the morning — the last at night.” But that is not yet a priority shared by the electorate, nor even most MPs. When the first thought in the morning for millions of people is how are they going to meet their food and energy bills, rearmament is a hard sell.

Labour got a taste of just how hard last month when, by a narrow margin, the TUC Congress voted to stop supporting increased defense spending. Despite pleas from the two big Labour-affiliated manufacturing unions — GMB and Unite — white-collar workers from the teachers, lecturers and health unions voted for “welfare not warfare”.

So those of us who want to make the case for defense spending need to do so in a much more convincing way. “Welfare not warfare” is a compelling slogan only if you believe warfare can be avoided through disarmament and multilateralism. Ukraine found out the hard way that, when dealing with an insane ethnonationalism, these don’t work.

One of our strongest arguments is the economic multiplier effect of defense investment. The economy of Barrow-in-Furness, whose submarine order books are guaranteed for decades, is now booming to the point of overheating. With the government committed to building similar clusters, in Plymouth, Clydeside and Belfast for example, new defense manufacturing jobs should become available, each paying 40% above the average factory wage.

But at some point, the national conversation has to move from the opportunity to the threat. My father’s generation of Labour-voting miners didn’t switch from pacifism to rearmament simply because they thought it would raise wages; they did so because they didn’t want to live in the Third Reich.

Today, many young people are rightly appalled by the wars going on — in Gaza and in Ukraine — but their attention seems fixed on the injustices only of the former. It does not seem to occur to the British public that, when Russian-paid saboteurs torch warehouses in London, or take down airports and hospitals in cyber attacks, that might be in preparation for something worse.

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Yet those who study the Russian state media know that the UK is constantly portrayed as the main enemy, and the fantasy peddled is that Putin will one day drown Liverpool, Glasgow and Belfast with a giant nuclear-detonated tidal wave, followed by our abject surrender.

The key to change lies beyond the confines of electoral politics. There is, in Britain, a military-industrial-academic “complex” that has become used to conducting its business in conditions of quiet and opacity. The armed forces don’t look or sound like the country they are defending. Our defense giants tiptoe around the issue of their presence on campuses.

Banks hike lending costs to defense SMEs over “reputational risks”. Our two major Christian churches refuse to let their trustees invest in defense. Students pursuing careers in defense related science and technology face peer pressure to opt for something softer — and, for the most talented, that is often a more lucrative job in finance.

Yet China has seven of its elite universities signed up to top-secret military research, and leads the USA in 57 out of 64 defense-related categories of science, while the whole of Russian society is geared for war. So before the population moves, it is this ill-defined but critical community of bankers, vice-chancellors, civil servants, religious leaders and opinion formers who will have to move first.

Their assumptions accumulated since 1991 — towards reliance on international law and institutions, towards improvisation in a crisis, and towards incremental change — will need to be abandoned. So will the tradition of conducting all discussions about threat, strategy and deterrence out of earshot of the public. So will pension funds’ reluctance to invest in defense, and universities’ reluctance to shout about the defense-related research they do.

In the Thrties, the air of unreality lasted from Hitler’s march to power right through to the Battle of Jarama in February 1937, when — mobilized by the Communist Party — the first British and Irish troops went into action against a fascist army in Spain. After that, something snapped in the British psyche. Labour, which had voted against every defense budget since 1919, became the most ardent supporter of rearmament.

Today, though politicians like Starmer and Healey are already there, the wider electorate — both Left and Right — has yet to make the leap. When they look at the half-finished ships in places like Birkenhead, and its sister yards in Govan and Rosyth, the public sees, if anything, jobs and apprenticeships. When military planners look at these same chunks of metal, they see vital deterrent weapons systems whose deployment cannot come soon enough.

Dutch F-35 fighters bagged four of the drones, and the others went down by themselves: they were not bombardment drones, just plastic decoys without explosive warheads. Debris aside, in fact, the only damage was the destruction of a house near Lublin, caused not by the Russians, but by a sophisticated $1.9 million US air-to-air missile. It had been launched by a Polish F-16 fighter at a drone — and missed.

Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, was quick to use the Russian incursion to call for more defense spending, urging Nato members to spend 5% of their GDPs on defense. This week’s latest apparent drone incursion, this time over Denmark, has raised the pressure even further: especially now that Scott Bessant, the US Secretary of the Treasury, is warning that Trump has no plans to send more troops to help out his European allies.

But simply raising defense spending will not turn Europe’s states into genuinely effective military powers. For one thing, the GDP criterion is much too vague to mean much. Finland, for instance, spends only 2.4% of its GDP on defense and yet can mobilize some 250,000 determined soldiers. Other Nato members, which spend much more than the Finns, obtain far less for their money.

Moreover, focusing on GDP instead of force requirements — so many battalions, artillery regiments, fighter squadrons — is nothing but an invitation to cheat, an opportunity lustily taken up across the continent. The latest Spanish submarine, for instance, is not imported for €1 billion or so from Thyssen-Krupp, which supplies navies around the world with competent, well-proven submarines. Instead, it was proudly designed and built at the Navantia state-owned Spanish shipyard: for €3.8 billion, roughly the cost of a much bigger French nuclear-powered submarine. As a feeble justification for that absurdly high cost, Spain’s defense minister cited a supposedly advanced air-recirculation system — so greatly advanced, in fact, that it is not actually ready, and will not be installed even in the submarine’s next iteration.

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Soon, though, Italy will outdo Spain’s platinum submarine: by including a new bridge to Sicily, set to cost some €13.5 billion, into its 2% of GDP Nato spending quota. The government’s excuse is that some 3,000 Italian troops may need to cross the Strait of Messina were the Italian army ever to be fully mobilized. But it would be much cheaper to fly them individually, each trooper in his own luxurious private jet. Even without the bridge, meanwhile, Italy’s cheating on the 2% target is bad enough. Most notably, much of the Italian Navy’s spending goes towards warships made by Italy’s state-owned Fincantieri shipyard. But there is not enough money for the fuel and maintenance expenses to operate more than half of them, meaning another industrial subsidy is camouflaged as defense spending. All the while, Italy refuses to increase its defense budget beyond the very modest target of 2% — which it has yet to meet.

As for Germany, three and half years since the start of the Ukraine war, with ever more ambitious rearmament plans loudly promised, the total number of personnel in uniform has actually slightly decreased. And, aside from beginning a multi-billion euro purchase on an Israeli missile-defense system, nothing much has happened. Despite its high demand in Ukraine, even the battle tank, that German specialty, is being produced in very, very small numbers: so low that the annual output could be lost in a morning of combat. In May 2023, indeed, a meager 18 Leopard tanks were ordered to replace older models lost in Ukraine. The expected delivery date? Between 2025 and 2026! Then, in July, Germany purchased a further 105 advanced Leopard 2A8s. That is the number needed to equip a single brigade, the German force stationed in Lithuania — and they are expected to arrive in 2030!

The sad truth, then, is that Germany has yet to start working in earnest to correct the extreme neglect inflicted on its armed forces during the long Merkel premiership, when she kept saying that “even if we had the money we would not know how to spend it”. All the while, German helicopters lacked rotors and tanks lacked engines. The exceedingly slow recovery of the German army is especially frustrating because Nato is not actually short of air or naval forces. What it lacks are ground forces, soldiers more simply, or rather soldiers actually willing to fight. Having added Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to the alliance, tiny countries with outsized defense needs, the alliance faces a severe troop deficit across the entire Baltic sector. The troops so far sent by Nato allies, such as visiting Alpini battalions from Italy, cannot improve the maths.

With its 38 million inhabitants, Poland could certainly raise an adequate army to defend its two borders with Russian Kaliningrad and Russian-dominated Belarus. But its governments have persistently chosen not to do so, rejecting conscription followed by reserve service along Finnish or Israeli lines. In November 2021, just four months before Ukraine’s invasion but with every sign that Russia was on the move, Poland had just 42,000 combat-ready soldiers. That is more or less the right number for a country of 38 million — if, that is, Poland were located somewhere between Fiji and Tonga.

And now, even after the drone attack, Prime Minister Tusk still refuses conscription, the only way to generate the large forces Poland needs to defend two fronts. The official explanation is that conscription under communism subjected 18-year-old recruits to humiliation rituals, which all too often slid into torture and even rape. Those are practices which the Poles like to explain are caused by the infiltration of the Red Army’s notorious “dedovshchina” (“reign of old-timers”) system of abuse by older soldiers. But the reputation of Poland’s pre-communist army was no better here, and indeed for Belorussian, Jewish and Ukrainian conscripts things could be much worse.

The truth, then, is simpler: Polish youth are just as post-heroic as their peers across Europe. Unlike their predecessors, they do not feel the urge to prove themselves in combat, let alone to serve as long as it takes to defend their countries. The many young Ukrainians in Poland, who fled their own country to avoid being conscripted to defend it, do nothing to induce patriotic attitudes. Nor does it help that Warsaw constantly talks up the few thousand US combat soldiers foolishly deployed in Poland. As Bessant’s latest comments imply, this is a force that will be evacuated rather than reinforced if there is a major Russian offensive, but which now induces young Poles to say that if “Nato” wants more troops, let them send more Americans.

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In Britain, for its part, the post-heroic refusal is irrelevant. His Majesty has only 73,847 full-time soldiers at his disposal, most of whom are recruited from the small subset of British families with strong military traditions. Foreign recruits with similar backgrounds make up the remainder, most notably the 4,127 Gurkhas, but also some from Fiji. The French Foreign Legion has fewer than 9,000 soldiers — self-selected aspiring warriors from everywhere, and whose French officers are just as atypical. But the rest of the French Army is so far gone that even among the 11,000 supposedly elite Troupes de Marine, less than half are willing and able to fight.

As for the other European armies, the less said the better. The Danes and Swedes announced with great fanfare that they were joining Finland in introducing conscription: only to accommodate so many demands for exemptions that in 2024 they enrolled some 10,000 troops between them, as compared to 77,000 Finns 18 year olds drawn from a far smaller population. The Belgians and Dutch, who used to provide three armored divisions to Nato, might now field a tenth of that: a mere three battalions. The Italian, Spanish, Portuguese armies do not even train in earnest anymore. Their exercises are bored drills, their maneuvers theatrical displays scripted to look good, instead of being deliberately disrupted by supervisors to test the mental and physical agility of officers and men as in real maneuvers. As total numbers shrink, moreover, those armies did not reduce the number of officers anywhere near proportionately, meaning many Nato armies have plenty of generals but very few combat-ready troops for them to lead.

All of the above explains why Putin’s motley army — home-grown mercenaries from Russia’s poorest backwaters, convicted criminals and North Korean slave soldiers — can nevertheless frighten European governments into rearming at great expense. As for Donald Tusk and his Poles — they would do well to learn the lessons of another Russian incursion in September. Not in 2025, but in 1939, when the French army did not move, and the Royal Air Force did not bomb. The difference now, of course, is that Poland really could defend itself, if it emulated the Finns across the Baltic and conscripted 18-year-olds, while continuing to add trained soldiers to its reserve units. Fail, however, and Putin will only keep pushing.

A repeat of 1939, this time between Nato and Russia, is far from imminent. But the battleground for their undeclared shadow conflict has now dramatically shifted westward to eastern Poland and the Baltic states — very likely to Ukraine’s detriment. While Ukraine remains Nato’s forward beachhead against Russian expansionism, the alliance’s eastern flank is now its frontline, and not only figuratively: Putin’s incursion was clearly a test of the alliance’s ability to respond to a breach of its frontiers, and an effort to determine the upper threshold of its tolerance for such actions.

Now that Nato has held Article IV consultations, and declared that the incident does not meet the formal definition of an “armed attack” under Article V, Moscow has established a new set of clear contours for what it can get away with. That, in turn, sets the stage for a new phase in the Nato-Russia shadow war, one where on-and-off, aerial confrontations between the West and Moscow are not only possible, but may well become the norm.

While Western leaders were quick to promise additional support for Ukraine following Putin’s drone wave — with no less than Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte himself entering the fray — frontline Nato states are likely to hunker down and protect their own territories, just as they’ve been signaling for the better part of a year.

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“We are absolutely unprepared for this conflict. Our contemporary military is not prepared for the war that is actively taking place beyond our eastern border, a war where right now millions of drones are now being produced yearly.” These are not the words of a pro-Ukraine Polish politician, like Prime Minister Donald Tusk, but rather an exasperated Sławomir Mentzen, the Right-wing, Ukraine-skeptic presidential candidate who came in third in June’s election, and who’s emerged as the country’s kingmaker.

Mentzen was speaking on national TV following the drone attack, and for a nationalist like him to make such a statement underscores just how much the conversation around Polish national defense has shifted over the last year — especially when it comes to decoupling from Ukraine. To be sure, at first glance the opposite seems true. On Wednesday, after all, Volodymyr Zelensky himself offered to help Poland build robust early-warning and air-defense systems, similar to those that Ukraine uses to counter such incursions.

That’s unsurprising: Poland’s success rate in shooting down its own Russian interlopers was shockingly low compared to Ukraine’s. For a country that has cultivated a reputation as Europe’s most promising military power, this is not only disappointing, but also geopolitically dangerous. While Poland has invested heavily in heavy weaponry like tanks, helicopters, aircraft, and missiles, the Russian assault has exposed a strategic blind spot in a piece of Warsaw’s defense architecture that, given the drone-heavy nature of the combat in Ukraine, could yet prove its Achilles Heel. For Russia, probing this space may have been exactly the point.

Nor are drones the only instance where Warsaw may soon need to learn from Kyiv. Teams of Moscow-backed assassins; covert bombings of strategic infrastructure; and maritime attacks originating offshore are all threats Ukraine has had to deal with, and which Poland must now be prepared to face too.

The timelines, too, will need to be expedited. Learning from Kyiv’s experience will no longer be a luxury that Nato states can push back for years — now that Russia has established new rules of engagement with the alliance, incursions of this sort may well occur with increasing regularity. Indeed, the timeline is likely much shorter than most observers in the West realize: Russia and Belarus are set to hold their first joint military exercises, called Zapad-2025, on Belarusian territory since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in a few days’ time.

With the boots on the ground have come provocations: the last time the exercises took place in 2021 coincided with the start of the migrant crisis along the Polish-Belarusian border, a geopolitical headache that persists until today. In fact, and contrary to the claims of Kremlin apologists that some of Russia’s drones were meant for Ukrainian targets and merely veered off course, Tusk has warned that several arrived from Belarusian airspace, indicating that this wave may have been a prelude of things to come.

Yet if lessons from Ukraine will be instrumental in the ability of its western neighbors to adapt to this new reality, Kyiv may ironically find itself sidelined. For if Poland needs Ukraine’s help today — not least in countering drone incursions sustainably, either via its own drone forces or tactical teams on the ground — tomorrow it will likely turn its attention to its own skies. Poland, of course, has never directly played a role in defending Ukrainian airspace, but it has given Ukraine €4.5 billion in military aid since the war began, much of it coming from its own weapons stocks. Yet increasingly facing its own equipment shortfalls, future generosity may be harder. Last month, for instance, Ukraine asked Warsaw for a loan to purchase Polish-made weapons, and it remains unclear if the deal will go through.

Supporting Ukraine in its fight continues to make sense for countries like Poland in the long-term — after all, they are fighting the same enemy, and it benefits them both if their approaches are interoperable. Nevertheless, given the cold realities of the region’s security politics, decoupling its doctrines from Kyiv’s probably does make a brutal kind of strategic sense. But there’s more to it than that. Moscow has unsurprisingly already denied the drones in Poland were even of Russian origin and, according to an analysis by a Polish NGO, has fired up its online disinformation machine to blame Ukraine for the incursion. So long as future provocations continue to fall short of Nato’s Article V threshold, and the Kremlin can publicly deny responsibility for them, harassing the alliance directly will serve Russia in several clear ways.

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The most obvious is that it’ll pile additional pressure on the alliance to give in to Putin’s maximalist demands for an end to the war, which include surrendering the Donbas to Russia without any post-war security guarantees for Kyiv. Yet there is a more insidious motivation at play here too, and it’s one that many Poles, including politicians like Mentzen, are already embracing. By increasing the material, diplomatic, and psychological costs of supporting Kyiv, Putin is hoping to drive home the idea that supporting Ukraine’s defense is unsustainable in the face of more pressing security demands closer to home. New polls out last week show that for the first time since 2022, a slim majority of Poles oppose Ukraine joining Nato, a sharp increase from just 14% at the start of Russia’s invasion. That’s even as fewer than one-in-10 Poles think that their country is ready for a war with Russia.

Yet even if Poland moves towards self-reliance, it is unlikely that Russia will stop flexing its muscles in Nato border states. Indeed, what Ukraine-skeptics continually fail to understand is that even if Putin isn’t interested in conquering the territory of Nato states outright, despite his frequent suggestions to the contrary, what he seeks, at best, is their pliability. Seen from this perspective, disengaging Poland from Ukraine would only be the start from the Kremlin, which would use its successes in Eastern Europe as an invitation to press further. One demand might involve the removal of Nato military equipment and American forces from frontline states, whatever the wishes of the countries themselves. That could potentially even be part of an eventual peace deal in Ukraine. If history has taught Eastern Europe anything, it’s that when given an inch, Russia will take a mile.

Whether it continues to treat Ukraine as a part of its own defense or not, then, Poland’s fate after this dramatic escalation seems tragically clear — it and its neighbors will be the targets of “grey-zone” military actions by Russia for years to come. Despite their militarization, societies in Poland, Estonia, and beyond have largely been insulated from the direct impacts of their frontline position in Nato, but now that is changing. Residents of several eastern Polish regions, including Warsaw itself, received ominous text message alerts on Wednesday to watch out for drone activity overhead. That’s depressingly normal for Ukrainians, but a shock for their western neighbors.

And while this first drone incursion didn’t cause any casualties, it will only be a matter of time before actions like it lead to fatalities, and then, perhaps, to unwanted escalations — up to and including open war. Either way, a Rubicon has been crossed.

Thousands took to the streets to denounce a controversial law that, according to Zelensky, was designed to “curtail Russian influence” — but which would, in reality, compromise the independence of the country’s two leading anti-corruption agencies at a time when both were reportedly closing in on senior members of Zelensky’s own administration.

The law’s passage sparked not only mass protests within Ukraine but also widespread condemnation in Western capitals. Ursula von der Leyen was quick to issue a sharp rebuke: the legislation conflicted with Europe’s “respect for the rule of law”, and could jeopardize Ukraine’s EU accession prospects. The US government even went so far as to order Zelensky to withdraw the legislation. Meanwhile, Western media gave the protests ample coverage. For the first time since the Russian invasion, Zelensky’s domestic policies were openly criticized by outlets that had previously lionised him as a heroic defender of democracy.

Reeling from the backlash, Zelensky has sought to calm the storm by introducing a new anti-corruption bill that would re-establish the agencies’ independence. But several questions remain. Why did Ukrainians, who have tolerated far more unpopular government actions since the start of the war, choose to protest now? Why did the Western establishment so energetically back the demonstrations? And why did Zelensky even move against the agencies in the first place?

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The scale and intensity of the protests were surprising in many respects. Since February 2022, Zelensky’s government has implemented deeply unpopular measures — from extending martial law to shuttering opposition parties and media outlets — without triggering comparable public unrest. These measures have been used not only to centralize power but also to neutralize any dissenting voices that might challenge his government’s “war‑at‑all‑costs” policy, by framing any questioning of the latter as unpatriotic or even treasonous. In this way, measures initially justified as temporary wartime necessities have been instrumentalized to entrench executive authority and suppress alternative perspectives on Ukraine’s future.

Corruption, long endemic in Ukraine, has only worsened during the war. Senior judges, politicians and officials have all faced corruption charges, with the Ministry of Defence repeatedly at the center of major scandals. These have included the purchase of vastly overpriced eggs and winter jackets, the payment for 100,000 mortar shells that were never delivered, and bribes accepted from men seeking to evade conscription. Perhaps most worryingly, the Ukrainian company Opendatabot reported last year that more than 270,000 weapons had been lost or stolen since the beginning of the war.

Transparency International has ranked Ukraine 105th out of 180 countries in its 2024 Corruption Perceptions Index; extreme corruption is an “open secret”, as Almut Rochowanski, a researcher at the Quincy Institute, wrote. Yet so far, this had not sparked significant protests, doubtless because over the past three and a half years, demonstrating against government policies or even voicing dissenting opinions has become deeply risky Opposition media and parties have been banned, government critics jailed or driven into exile, and “problematic” political figures — such as Kyiv’s former chief peace negotiator — have been assassinated under murky circumstances.

The testimony of Ukrainian dissident journalist Vasyl Muravytskyi, now living in exile, underscores this climate of fear. “There is no freedom of speech whatsoever in Ukraine. Everything is being censored… The situation in [the country] is far, far worse than people in the West might think,” he said in an interview last year. Consider, too, historian Dr Marta Havryshko, who has long warned about the rise of ultra-nationalism and neo-Nazism in Ukraine. For this, she has sustained antisemitic abuse, death and rape threats directed at her and her child by neo-Nazi paramilitary groups. Recently, she was dismissed from the Krypiakevych Institute of Ukrainian Studies under the pretext of “absence from the workplace”, despite being on approved unpaid leave in the United States.

Another troubling case is that of Gonzalo Lira, an American citizen who had lived in Ukraine for several years and was a prolific blogger. Following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Lira began criticizing the policies of the Ukrainian government. In 2023, he was arrested by Ukrainian authorities for allegedly spreading propaganda and he died in custody soon thereafter — amid the deafening silence of Western governments, including that of Lira’s own country.

These stories reflect a broader pattern. The Council of Europe has recently condemned Ukraine for “reported instances of alleged intimidation and other forms of harassment of Ukrainian journalists, lawyers, civil society, political and opinion leaders critical of the government”. In several cases, the Ukrainian authorities have imposed so-called “personal sanctions” on over 80 individuals — including Oleksiy Arestovych, Zelensky’s former advisor — severely restricting their freedom of movement, expression and property rights.

Forced mobilization, or gang-pressing, has also become widespread. Every day, Ukrainian social media is flooded with videos showing men being violently seized by recruitment officers on the streets — often bundled into unmarked vans and in some cases even threatened at gunpoint. These scenes suggest a state struggling to meet its mobilization targets and resorting to increasingly coercive measures. This reality stands in sharp contrast to the official narrative of a nation united behind the war effort. Instead, it suggests mounting resistance among Ukrainians who see conscription not as a patriotic duty but as a potential death sentence.

Given such widespread repression, it is hardly surprising that Ukrainians have refrained from protesting until now. The anti-corruption issue, however, was different. It could not easily be framed as unpatriotic or “pro-Russian” because, if anything, the agencies are the antithesis of Russian influence. The National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) were established in 2015 as part of Ukraine’s post-Maidan reform commitments. Western governments tied financial aid, debt relief and EU visa liberalization to the creation of these “independent” anti-corruption bodies insulated from Ukraine’s notoriously politicized Prosecutor General’s Office.

NABU’s creation was heavily financed by Western donors, particularly USAID and the EU, while Western advisers provided training and infrastructure. SAPO prosecutors were selected with significant input from Western-backed “civil society” groups and international experts, in a clear sidelining of Ukrainian sovereignty. Former Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin even went so far as to assert that NABU was effectively created at the behest of then-US Vice President Joe Biden in order to “steal the investigation powers from the State Bureau of Investigation to NABU and put there emissaries who listen to the United States”.

In short, NABU and SAPO are widely perceived as Western-aligned institutions. By rallying behind them, protesters likely believed they were shielded from accusations of disloyalty. As Rochowanski noted, the bill arguably served as a “strawman”: a safe justification for Ukrainians to express “pent-up anger at Zelensky, his team and daily grotesque, in-your-face corruption”, and broader frustration with the government and its handling of the war, without fear of reprisal.

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This also helps explain the vehemence of the Western response. The issue was arguably less about concern for Ukraine’s endemic corruption — which has long been tolerated — than about Zelensky’s attack on institutions of Western influence.

Could there be more at play? Zelensky’s move against NABU and SAPO came hard on the heels of several attacks, launched via various Western mainstream media outlets that had previously lauded him. But, until recently, anyone who dared to speak openly in the West about Ukraine’s appalling human rights situation and growing public resentment was ignored, smeared, threatened or silenced. So why is the Zelensky narrative changing?

One possible explanation is that Western governments, or at the very least the US administration, have decided it is time to throw Zelensky under the bus, and they are preparing the ground. The delegitimizing of Zelensky is something that Donald Trump was very vocal about after their falling out in the White House. Certainly, US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh recently reported that government officials were already discussing potential successors, possibly General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the former commander-in-chief ousted by Zelensky in 2023.

Aware of Washington’s increasing mistrust, Zelensky’s instinct for political survival has the potential to drive him toward increasingly heavy-handed measures — such as further repression of dissent — which could undermine US strategic flexibility. From a realpolitik perspective, the US might have concluded that a new leader would better manage the optics of a frozen conflict or eventual negotiated settlement, however unlikely those scenarios may seem at the moment.

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Could this explain Zelensky’s pre-emptive strike against NABU and SAPO, for fear that these Western-backed agencies could be used to undermine him? Some Ukrainian sources have reported that NABU and SAPO tapped conversations involving Zelensky’s close friend and business partner, Timur Mindich — conversations in which Zelensky himself allegedly participated. In that case, this would suggest that the anti-corruption bodies were already circling dangerously close to the President.

Whether or not Zelensky’s fears were justified, the attempt to bring NABU and SAPO under his control has clearly backfired. Instead of consolidating power, he has triggered the first major wave of domestic opposition since the war began and drawn unprecedented criticism from his Western backers. Even if he survives this crisis, the president’s political position appears weaker than at any time since February 2022. The protests have exposed rising public discontent with his government, and they have revealed the limits of his previously unquestioned Western support.

Western governments face their own dilemma. Having invested heavily in portraying Zelensky as a Churchillian figure, openly moving to replace him could undermine public support for the war effort at home. For ordinary Ukrainians, however, these elite power struggles offer little hope: their political leadership remains forever bound to the competing agendas of its foreign patrons — agendas that bear little relation to the interests of Ukrainians.

France and Britain have to work hard to make sense of each another, because in the manner of quarrelsome siblings, they are so different and yet so similar. They inherit roughly the same strategic cards — a modest nuclear arsenal; highly professional military forces, globally deployed, which are small in relation to the emerging Asian powers; and a Security Council seat which reflects the strategic realities of yesteryear. Sometimes these assets have been used for a common purpose, but often (as in the Gulf War of 2003) the strategic choices have been utterly different. Anyway, behind this week’s glitter and repartee, there is a quiet, anxious conviction shared by Downing Street and the Élysée. The ability to understand one another — which is the literal meaning of Entente — could once again, in the near future, become a matter of life and death for both countries. At least since the fall of communism, the probability of France and Britain fighting together in a hot war has never looked so high — so both governments have said. And even in scenarios well short of Armageddon, the two countries — as Western Europe’s principal military players — could well find themselves co-policing a fragile ceasefire on the eastern edge of Europe. 

As in 1904, France and Britain see an imperative to transcend their many differences because of the emergence in Europe of an expansionist power whose appetite for territory and strategic might seems to be growing by the month. In the early 20th century, the pair were often in competition over far-flung colonies. Since 1945, the biggest single irritant has been contrasting attitudes to the United States, with Britain eagerly cultivating its special American friendship, and France striking a pose, at least, of championing European independence. In recent months, Donald Trump’s behavior has removed that problem; like teenagers abandoned by a once-generous parent, officials in London and Paris are now united in their horror at possibly having to guard Europe’s peace without an American guarantee. 

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How, then, could France and Britain — and in particular their militaries — learn to understand each other better? Perhaps the first thing French and British defense chiefs might do is have a hard look at the most recent occasion when their forces found themselves side-by-side in the heart of a bloody European war. That was not in 1944 or in 1914 — but in the Bosnian conflict of 1992-95. The need for a solemn exercise in self-examination is particularly acute on this day, the 30th anniversary of the most horrific act of mass slaughter perpetrated on European soil since the war against Hitler. The massacre of 8,000 or more Muslim men and boys from the enclave of Srebrenica began on 11 July 1995 and unfolded over the following four of five days. This orgy of killing by Bosnian Serb forces has been recognized judicially as an act of genocide. It also marked the end — morally and strategically — of a UN peacekeeping effort of which Britain and France were the joint leaders. 

There are complacent and self-congratulatory stories that British and French officials, along with American counterparts, can tell one another about Srebrenica and its aftermath. They go something like this. Shocked and surprised by the brutal actions of the Bosnian Serbs, the leaders of all Western countries concluded that it was time for an abrupt change of policy. Instead of pig-in-the-middle peacekeeping, the powers involved in Bosnia should wage a short, sharp war against the Serb forces which (apart from their misdeeds in Srebrenica) had occupied and ethnically cleansed two-thirds of Bosnia and were keeping its capital, Sarajevo, in a cruel stranglehold. This duly happened; the multinational contingent in the war zone, led by the British and French, reconfigured itself as a rapid reaction force which turned its guns on Serb positions in Sarajevo and elsewhere, while Nato (led by American bombers, but with plenty of help from the British, French and other Europeans) strafed Serb military assets from the air. There was an upsurge of fighting and battle-lines were redrawn — with the result that the Serb-controlled share of Bosnian territory was cut to barely half, and a realistic basis existed for a peace settlement which Nato’s forces could police. All that unfolded over the final months of 1995 until the Bosnians found themselves under international tutelage and at peace; people in Sarajevo could go about their lives without fear of snipers or shells. 

This happy version of the Srebrenica story — stressing what happened afterwards, not what went before — will be rehearsed in Western countries today — especially in Britain which has stood out in its determination to have the massacre remembered and recognized as genocide.

Yet, even 30 years on, there are pressing questions about what led up to the Srebrenica massacre — questions for all the countries that were involved in Bosnia over the preceding three years, Britain and France in particular. If there is one country which has taken a hard look at its responsibilities in Srebrenica, it is the Netherlands, whose lightly armed contingent of less than 400 blue-helmets were tasked with protecting the enclave and manifestly failed. Judicial proceedings and government-sponsored investigations have pored over every detail of the Dutch contingent’s activities, and its failure to understand, in time, that the Serb forces were bent not only on seizing the enclave but on slaughtering its male population.

But excessive preoccupation with the Dutch responsibility only serves to obscure the role played by more powerful countries — above all, America, Britain and France. It is a story whose origins predate the massacre by more than two years. In March 1993, it was a French general and UN commander, Philippe Morillon, who took a personal initiative and promised the 40,000 people, mostly Muslim, who were holed up in Srebrenica that they would be safe from the Serb forces which dominated the surrounding territory. “You are now under the protection of the UN forces… I will never abandon you,” he declared, in one of the war’s most famous sound-bites.

Dutch officials insist that they accepted responsibility for guarding the enclave after receiving an absolute guarantee from the United Nations that in the event of a major Serb attack, air power would be called in to stem the advance. On 10 July 1995, Dutch commanders did call in air power — even though its use might have cost the lives of their soldiers who were being held as hostages. After a complex and still-murky set of international deliberations, it was decided not to use air power. Who exercised that veto is still not clear, but an important place in the decision-making chain was held by General Bernard Janvier, a Frenchman who was commander of UN forces in the region.

Over the preceding months, tension had been building between General Janvier and Britain’s General Rupert Smith, who had taken command of UN forces in Bosnia. Janvier generally hewed to the cautious, peace-keeping line which had been common currency between Britain and France as of the previous year. But Smith came to the view that the UN contingent’s mission of guarding a ceasefire line was untenable and destined to fail; Western forces, if they had any role to play at all, should go onto a war footing and be prepared to confront the Serbs.

One of the reasons why Smith was so convinced that war, rather than sputtering peace, lay ahead was that the Serbs themselves were telling him so. Their commander Ratko Mladic — later convicted of genocide in Srebrenica — had made clear his determination to overrun the UN-protected enclaves; in particular Srebrenica, where local Bosnian fighters were — so he grumbled — taking advantage of UN protection to make hit-and-run attacks on the surrounding Serbs.

As events in late May 1995 would demonstrate, both Janvier and Smith were right in their different ways. Janvier was right to say that the blue-helmets could not change their military posture (from peacekeeping to war) without putting themselves in deadly danger. Smith was right to see that renewed war was probably coming anyway. He called in air strikes against the Serbs to punish some egregious acts of misbehavior; the Serbs retaliated by taking hundreds of UN peacekeepers hostage and sharing pictures of them shackled to posts. The clear message was: bomb us any more, and your peacekeepers will be killed.

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What happened then is still a shady business. The documentary evidence suggests that the Americans, British and French cut an informal agreement to “pause” air strikes in return for the release of the hostages. American officials leaked to the press that General Janvier had played a leading role in parleying with Ratko Mladic and assuring him that air strikes would cease. Whoever gave those assurances, the three leading powers in Bosnia were clearly co-responsible for them; the one party which was not informed was the Dutch, who were still in the hapless role of defending an indefensible haven for tens of thousands of human beings. That bargain, whatever its precise terms, paved the way for the Srebrenica tragedy.

Questions about the Srebrenica massacre fall into at least three categories. Was it generally known that the Serbs were planning an attack on the eastern enclaves which were under notional UN protection — and were the Serbs given some encouragement to think such an attack could proceed with impunity? Second, could more have been done to stop the Serb advance immediately after its forces crossed the boundary of the enclave on 6 July? Thirdly, during the crucial days of 11-15 July, when the Serb forces machine-gunned almost all the men and boys under their control, could something have been done, even at that late stage, to interrupt the massacre? It is fair to assume that the two countries which were best informed, in real time, about what was happening were the United States and Britain — given the former’s uniquely powerful satellite and human intelligence and Britain’s privileged access to that information. So it might be said that France bears a particular responsibility because of Janvier’s doveish line; while Britain faces hard questions about what it knew and when.

Hundreds of documents relating to the Srebrenica massacre have been released, but many remain classified. Some of those documents — especially pertaining to the question of when exactly full details of the horror emerged — are to be found in very secret places in London and Paris, as well as Washington DC.

It would have been rude to raise this matter at a glittering banquet in Windsor Castle, but as part of their general rapprochement, shouldn’t British and French officials be making a renewed effort to understand why their cooperation in Bosnia initially went rather well — and then failed so tragically?

Yesterday, in the final hours of Macron’s visit, he and Starmer held a video conference at a British military base with other possible participants in a “coalition of the willing”, led by Britain and France, whose job would be to shore up a Ukrainian ceasefire. London and Paris have been talking about this project since last November, and they believe at least 30 countries could take part. But in a throwback to the Franco-British force in Bosnia, there are many unanswered questions about the new mission’s exact mission and rules of engagement. As of now, its very existence is hypothetical. Whatever happens, the French and British commanders will, in the end, be answerable to their national capitals, not to any multinational structure. Huge potential exists for tragic misunderstanding. That’s why a refresher course in Balkan history is well overdue.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the American strikes on Iran on Israel’s behalf were stunningly successful. None of the many things gravely warned about by the “restrainer” voices in the MAGA coalition materialized: no American fatalities; no Iranian attacks on American ships; no attempt to close the Strait of Hormuz; no oil war.

Trump has managed to square a circle, pleasing both his administration’s hawks and doves. He returned home from the NATO summit with extra spending commitments and “Daddy” ringing in his ears, thanks to NATO’s secretary general. He will surely sleep soundly in Mar-a-Lago this weekend.

I put this version of events to Fiona Hill, a British-American academic who was Trump’s security advisor during his first term, and an advisor to George W. Bush and Obama before that. Now she’s back in Britain, advising the Ministry of Defense and serving as Chancellor of Durham University. Unlike many in the European establishment, Hill doesn’t agitate against her former boss, although she is critical. But what does she make of this slam-dunk war narrative?

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“It certainly seems like a win for Trump,” she starts — an initial concession, before a lengthy list of caveats. “He seems to have actually bullied both Israel and Iran into a ceasefire at the moment. But it’s also clear that he thinks of a ceasefire as peace. Rather than a long, negotiated agreement — and he’s even saying now that he doesn’t really care if there is an agreement with Iran.” The idea that the President has a knack for short, sharp, dramatic action is a theme that crops up often during our conversation. He has, she says, a short attention span and is unwilling to follow up with the long slog of careful diplomacy. Hill is quick to reference Trump’s efforts for a peace deal in Ukraine, which after an initial push were discarded as too difficult. But without putting in an effort, Hill suspects, the truce in the Middle East will not endure either.

For one thing, she says, it’s not clear how much damage the raids have done to Iran’s nuclear facilities: intelligence reports differ, and now that Iran has suspended cooperation with the IAEA we may not know any time soon. Israel may well conclude that further military action is needed. For another, the Iranian regime is intact, and very likely to renew efforts on its nuclear program and extinguish any domestic unrest. “Look at what happened in Russia after the insurgency by Prigozhin,” she says. “We were all wondering what it meant for Putin and the stability of the Russian regime. Of course it just meant that Putin doubled down and took down Prigozhin in a rather dramatic fashion by exploding his plane. It led to the strengthening of the regime’s defenses and Putin tightening up his inner circle. That’s the kind of thing you could see in Iran.”

As a demonstration of American power, does she think it was also meant to sound a warning to other governments in the region? “Yes it might have a sobering effect on others.” But there could be unintended consequences. “He may have inspired other authoritarian leaders to contemplate what they could do… particularly as Trump keeps referencing Hiroshima and Nagasaki and saying this will end the war. Whether those bombs really ended the war in the Pacific is itself debatable, but his framing also suggests to others — Russia, Ukraine, China and Taiwan — that taking that kind of dramatic military action is the way they might want to proceed in their own conflicts.” So there’s a second-order effect of taking unilateral military action in this way. It sets a precedent.

But it is on the question of nuclear proliferation that Hill is most persuasive — and prepared to say the quiet part out loud. The aggregate lesson to middle-tier powers is that, in this new world, you’d better have a nuclear bomb. “We are in a phase now where a lot of countries are thinking long and hard about acquiring nuclear capability because frankly they see what Russia did to Ukraine. And Ukraine gave up their nuclear arsenal… We pushed them to give them up in 1993-94 along with Belarus and Kazakhstan, and the message now is that as a result of that they were invaded. You can take the same message from Libya, what happened to Muammar Gaddafi after giving up nuclear weapons.”

So it was a mistake for Ukraine to give up its nuclear weapons? “I thought it was a mistake at the time, to be frank. In terms of giving up their leverage — I’m on the record for saying that, which wasn’t very popular at the time… That’s the message to everyone else, the would-be nuclear powers in the world. You have guarantees from having nuclear weapons of not being attacked. We saw from India and Pakistan that there was a quick move to quickly calm down that conflict because both of them are nuclear powers.”

The extension of this principle is sobering. If Iran acquires a nuclear weapon, Saudi Arabia will follow. And Hill believes that the proliferation will go far beyond the Middle East. “The Turks, seeing themselves as a regional power with global aspirations, would certainly like to have a nuclear weapon; South Korea has had to be talked out of developing one for the obvious reason of what North Korea might do; Japan, the country that actually had nuclear weapons used against it during the Second World War, has often fretted about its own security and the reliability of the US nuclear umbrella. And of course in Europe there’s been a lot of discussion about developing a European nuclear umbrella if the United States is no longer a reliable ally.” This week’s announcement by Keir Starmer, she says, of a fleet of UK nuclear-capable planes should be seen in this context. “This is a new world that we’re in. It’s no longer the United States and the Soviet Union dominating the nuclear discussion.”

To extrapolate, then, might we find ourselves, in 20 years’ time, in a world with 20 nuclear powers? Hill’s answer is unsettling. “That’s highly likely at this particular moment,” she responds. “We’ve got this breakdown of the global order that was established by the United States after the Second World War. We’ve had 80 years of the US playing that very important role… Trump is basically saying, sorry, this system no longer works for us, we don’t want any part of it. And that leads to others thinking: how do we establish other orders that we find beneficial?” And meanwhile, China is rapidly headed towards becoming a nuclear superpower on a level with Russia. If they decided to act together, then, she says it would be “very troubling”. Quite the understatement.

Meanwhile, easily lost amid the maelstrom of the past week’s news, there was a Nato summit. It went off without calamity, culminated in a communique that re-affirmed Article 5, and even set an ambitious new target of 5% of GDP to be spent on defense. Surely that’s another success, I suggest. Isn’t it more proof that the old security architecture is still standing?

“Nato absolutely still is a useful organization but it’s only reliable if we have built up the European pillar. That requires real dedication and political will among European powers. We already had Spain basically saying, sorry, we can’t afford to build up our spending, and we’ve had a lot of fudging on this issue of 5%. I jokingly call it ‘article 5%’ — unless you pay 5% of GDP, there’ll be no opportunity of collective defense. That’s certainly how Trump sees it… He really does believe that the United States is providing a service to European allies in terms of security, and one way or another they need to be remunerating the US for that service. He’s going to take out the payments through trade.”

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Even if these promises are swiftly forgotten, one thing the world will remember about the summit was secretary general Mark Rutte referring to Trump as “Daddy”. Hill laughingly refers to it. “After 80 years of relying on Daddy, or living in Daddy’s basement,” she says, “it’s long past time for Europe to step up.”

And yet, when you drill down, Europe can’t possibly match Putin’s enormous nuclear arsenal. Without America’s help here, then, Russia would inevitably be the dominant military power in Europe. This, then, would leave us incapable of defending ourselves as the outside threat grows. What is Europe’s next move?

What we can do, we should do, is Hill’s message — one that she took into the UK’s Strategic Defense Review. We improve our intelligence networks, invest in public-private partnerships for new war technology and massively speed up our pace of innovation in defense. “We’ve been operating at a snail’s pace. One of the biggest shocks from my experience of the UK SDR was just how long it took from putting out a request for projects to delivery — it’s a minimum of six years. I said that to an American counterpart just the other day who had been in charge of procurement at the Pentagon. And he laughed and said: ‘that’s what it’s like here too’.”

But to get to that “war footing”, according to Hill, means a lot more than military hardware. “You can be attacked in so many different fashions,” she says. “Cyber attacks. Influence attacks. Poisonings. Acts of sabotage. Undersea cables. GPS blocking… We have to admit that we’re very vulnerable. The biggest risk to the UK is the disabling of our critical national infrastructure.”

Such is the threat, she suggests, that each of us should have a plan for our families, including a “preparedness kit” for possible disasters. “We don’t need to gather big arsenals in our bunkers, but we do need to work out how we are going to help each other out in any eventuality.”

The war, according to Fiona Hill, is far from over.

Britain is no exception. Here, Labour MPs are agitating over their government’s plan to cut disability benefits — mere days after Kier Starmer, announced in Brussels that the UK will acquire 12 nuclear-capable fighter jets for the RAF at a cost of around £1bn. These jets are the Lockheed Martin F-35A Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) aircraft, which can be armed with nuclear bombs. The purchase is incongruous for a party of the Left, and its announcement is of a piece with the existing Starmer narrative that the UK is under threat. The new jets, then, are the latest of a long list of populist signals that wrap Labour in the Union Jack. Starmer continues to paint himself as a politician with little to nothing in common with his party-leader predecessor.

No doubt there was also inter-service lobbying behind this announcement. The RAF has always lamented the decision to acquire another heavier, more expensive and less capable variant, the F-35B, to share with the Navy. The F-35B can take off and land vertically, rather than via a runway, thus making it an appropriate fit for the relatively small size of the UK’s two aircraft carriers. These aircraft were to be flexibly shared with the Navy, meaning that the RAF could lose precious squadrons on naval deployments for months at time. The purchase of the F-35A jets means that the RAF gets a dozen devoted aircraft as well as upgrades to its base upgrades at Marham. So the Airforce will be happy — up to a point.

The intriguing angle is the not-so-welcome nuclear mission these aircraft will be given. They have been bought with a single purpose in mind: to deliver American B61-12 free-fall nuclear bombs under Nato’s nuclear sharing arrangements — an understanding that already operates in Germany, the Netherlands, Italy and Belgium. Accordingly, the host state buys the American aircraft and provides a base, support, and a crew. A wider set of Nato states provide support operations, including essential refuelling and force protection under the so-called SNOCAT missions.

But the bombs remain under the control and protection of the United States until they are released to allied nations. This can happen only after an order, issued in wartime, from the American Nato Supreme Allied Commander, and such an order would presumably enable strikes against Russian targets. Given that the UK is a nuclear weapons power with its own, ostensibly independent, Trident deterrent, the logic of the procurement is unclear.

As well as being redundant in these terms, their deployment is a risk. Aircraft can be shot down far more easily than a submarine can be sunk. With this in mind, the MoD, when considering alternatives to Trident in 2013, rejected the far cheaper air-delivered option on the grounds that this method risks the planes being destroyed before they can deploy their bombs. Were the President to decide to use nuclear weapons, it seems far more likely that the United States would use its submarine-launched ballistic missiles, fired from the sea, or land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, fired from a silo. Missiles are far quicker and more reliable. They do not require complicated international arrangements whose durability has rightly been questioned.

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It is true that these arrangements are diplomatically fragile. They are regularly criticized for violating the ban on Non-Proliferation Treaty member states transferring or receiving nuclear weapons. Nato argues that these transfers would only occur in wartime, when — in Nato’s view — the Treaty would no longer apply. But this disagreement exacerbates the already festering resentment felt by rival or smaller countries that have surrendered any ambition to deploy nuclear weapons. To them, it smacks of discrimination and double-standards.

Nato nuclear-sharing, then, is essentially symbolic and political. It ensures that non-nuclear members “dip their hands in the blood”, as some reports put it, of nuclear deterrence, while expecting that the heavy lifting of nuclear deterrence will rest on the nuclear-armed strategic ballistic missiles of the United States, Britain and France.

So why is Starmer doing this — buying planes that amount to little more than a diplomatic signal — when this particular consideration clearly does not apply to the UK? Is this announcement really just another Starmer expression of flattery and subservience to Donald Trump?

Or could it be that MoD has finally lost confidence in its Trident system?

Technical problems over the renewal of Trident, through which the Vanguard class of submarines will be replaced by Dreadnoughts, have been widely predicted for many years. Dominic Cummings has warned darkly of “rotting infrastructure” draped in state secrecy. Now, in public, the Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA) has warned of severe problems with Rolls Royce’s production of the nuclear propulsion system, the PWR3. All other major elements of the renewed submarine system are under review, and present a cause of serious concern over delivery. These assessments are likely to be harbingers of further delays and costs. This is a major problem, because there were already concerns that there would be a break in the availability of the submarines to patrol in the transition period. The Royal Navy places great value on its claim to have achieved a “Continuous At Sea Deterrence” posture since the first Polaris submarines were launched on 15 June, 1968. Could the F-35A procurement be an expensive insurance policy to cover that gap?

But the problems may go even deeper. The submarine system itself suffers a number of vulnerabilities that will only worsen as technology advances. Because the vessels are large, complex and singular, and because their production took an extraordinary 25 years, much of their design is inflexible, and will be outdated by the time they enter into service. In contrast, more modular, networked anti-submarine warfare assets can be produced far more quickly. They benefit from continuous tech development and renewal, and units are far cheaper, more expendable and replaceable. In the well-established and unending game of cat-and-mouse, the submarine has significant weaknesses.

The rapid development of autonomous drones above and below the water, as well as communication systems, sensors, and fully networked interception capabilities, together mean that the new Dreadnought submarines could be redundant before their first patrol, scheduled to be around seven years from now (unless there are significant delays).

If an adversary has the ability to track and destroy a submarine on patrol, this would not only neutralize the submarine’s deterrent effect. It would also lead to a highly destabilizing dynamic at the worst possible time. Faced with the risk of imminent loss of Britain’s nuclear submarines in a crisis, would a prime minister be tempted to preemptively launch an all-out attack? It could feel like a use-it-or-lose-it situation. Within a few years, it could be the case that the very worst place for one’s nuclear arsenal would be in international waters.

We should pay close attention, then, to the little-reported corner of the Strategic Defense Review in which we are told that the Government should “define the requirement for the post-Dreadnought nuclear deterrent within this Parliament”, 30 years before the submarines’ planned retirement. 

Remember for a moment the UK’s international legal obligation as a member of the Non-Proliferation Treaty: “To pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament.” The failure of the nuclear weapon states to make progress on their disarmament commitment is the core reason why the nuclear non-proliferation regime is in a continuous crisis, and why states resist stronger non-proliferation arrangements. Signaling an inflexible commitment in this Parliament to new a nuclear weapon system planned for deployment between 2060 and 2085 hardly sits comfortably with that legal obligation.

In any case, committing to and nailing them down this far ahead is strategic and technological madness. Such an inflexible commitment to particular platforms and delivery systems is extraordinarily reckless at a time of rapid technological change and likely redundancy. 

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Unless, that is, MoD is anticipating an earlier requirement for a new strategic deterrent system. The new submarines’ planned lives run to at least the late 2050s, but if there is concern that they could be compromised well before then, this alone might justify a relatively modest additional capital investment of a couple of billion on this additional F-35 system.

But the F-35A free-fall bomb system currently proposed is no substitute for Trident, for it surrenders sovereign decisions on warhead control and nuclear release to the Americans. If the Trident submarines come to be judged a liability and the UK’s nuclear capability then came to depend upon the aircraft, the UK would need to buy more F-35As and either join the ranks of the other NATO non-nuclear weapon states or instruct Aldermaston, the British nuclear weapons facility, to develop the UK’s own free-fall nuclear weapon.

Not counting the cost of warhead modernization, the Government has so far spent in the region of £25 billion on the Trident renewal program. Whatever the challenges, it seems highly unlikely that officials would contemplate abandoning the project. But if there is a significant possibility that confidence in the system would be in doubt, we could be witnessing the start of an investment in a limited and unsatisfactory plan B. 

Kier Starmer may talk tough and make big announcements, but the underlying reality could be very different. His announcement of a sustained increase in the UK defense budget has captured the headlines. But even were these plans to survive contact with the enemy — that is, competing public spending priorities and the state of the economy — the top-line budget dimension may be less critical than the need to ensure that taxpayers’ money is spent well and that waste is tackled head-on.

Britain’s submarine-based nuclear deterrent system is at high risk of becoming another example of an expensive failed infrastructure project that is not fit for purpose, a legacy of a past strategic context, and an reflective of an obsession with symbolism over substance. As competitors race ahead with accelerated technology developments and the world becomes more volatile, we need to reassess our priorities.

The idea of rearming the German military dates back to Olaf Scholz’s 2022 Zeitenwende speech — the so-called “turning point” announced in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Scholz promised a €100 billion fund for the military and pledged to meet Nato’s then 2% spending target. Yet that “turning point” largely failed to materialize. Two years later, the German Council on Foreign Relations bluntly concluded that little had changed.

Now, Merz is determined to deliver what Scholz only gestured towards. He has made defense and security the cornerstone of his chancellorship, launching the most ambitious rearmament campaign since the Second World War. The scale is staggering: a proposed €400 billion in defense and security investments, including a plan to raise annual defense spending to 5% of GDP — as demanded by Nato. That would represent nearly half of the federal budget — around €225 billion — a transformation with sweeping political and social consequences. On Monday, Berlin confirmed that its military spending will reach 3.5% of GDP by 2029, with the 5% target to be reached in the years to come.

To achieve this, Merz rammed through a constitutional amendment to reform the “debt brake”, a fiscal mechanism that has been enshrined in Germany’s Basic Law since 2009 and has since capped the federal structural deficit. Despite pledging during the campaign that the debt brake would remain untouched — and failing to mention his rearmament plans — Merz reversed course immediately after his election. His government exploited the final session of the outgoing parliament — even though a new Bundestag had already been elected — to approve the change. The aim was explicitly stated: to unlock vast new funding for military expansion.

On 19 May, Germany’s top-ranking military official, Inspector General Carsten Breuer, issued a directive laying out a sweeping vision for the Bundeswehr. The goal: to achieve “full operational readiness” by 2029. The list of priorities is extensive and ambitious. It includes fully equipping and digitalizing all troop formations, reviving conscription, building up anti-drone and missile defense, expanding offensive cyber and electronic warfare capabilities, and even developing space-based defense systems. Plans also include strengthening Germany’s role in Nato nuclear-sharing arrangements and enhancing the country’s long-range strike capacity — a major symbolic and strategic departure.

These changes are not just about military doctrine: they reflect a deeper transformation in Germany’s foreign policy posture. Merz has rapidly embraced a confrontational approach toward Russia, echoing some of the most hawkish voices in Nato. He has warned that Russia is “waging an aggressive hybrid war every day”, and declared that “there is a threat to us all from Russia”. Ahead of the Nato summit, he said that “we have to fear that Russia will continue the war beyond Ukraine”, implying that Russia represents a direct military threat to Europe in the near-to-medium term.

Meanwhile, just the other day, Reuters reported on a leaked Bundeswehr strategy document describing Russia as an “existential risk” and outlining Kremlin preparations for large-scale conflict with Nato “by the decade’s end”. The notion that Russia could launch a full-scale attack on Europe within a few years has become an official talking point among EU and Nato leaders — despite the fact that Moscow has neither the capacity nor strategic interest in such a move.

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Immediately upon taking office, Merz launched an active foreign policy campaign. He toured European capitals to coordinate policy toward Moscow and Kyiv. One of his first acts was to travel to Kyiv alongside the leaders of France, Britain and Poland — a symbolic show of unity with Ukraine and a signal of defiance toward Trump, who had publicly advocated for a negotiated settlement with Russia. In Berlin, Merz hosted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and floated the delivery of German-made Taurus missiles, which have a range of more than 500 kilometers. Although domestic opposition forced him to partially retreat, he quickly pivoted to a new strategy: a €5 billion agreement to co-produce long-range missiles on Ukrainian territory using German technology.

Even more provocatively, Merz announced that Western-supplied weapons are no longer subject to range restrictions. “Ukraine can now also defend itself by attacking military positions in Russia,” he declared — effectively giving the green light for strikes deep into Russian territory with Western equipment. For the first time since 1945, Germany is now not only rearming at scale but actively encouraging direct military engagement with Russia, a nuclear-armed power. To underline this shift, Merz also confirmed that new German air defense systems would be delivered to Ukraine under a long-term, multi-year plan.

But what makes this rearmament campaign especially significant is that it is not limited to the military sphere. Merz’s vision is one of total mobilization — a “whole-of-society” approach that seeks to prepare not just the armed forces, but the entire German economy and civil infrastructure for confrontation with Russia. Media, education, industrial policy and civil defense are all being aligned to support this new war footing. Dissent — whether political, journalistic, or academic — is increasingly stigmatized as subversive or even a threat to national security. Renowned journalists and intellectuals such as Ulrike Guérot, Gabriele Krone-Schmalz and Patrik Baab have been attacked and professionally marginalized for urging diplomatic solutions to the Ukraine conflict.

This is a profound rupture. For most of the postwar period, Germany deliberately defined itself in opposition to its militaristic past. It wielded influence not through tanks or missiles, but through trade, diplomacy and its leadership within the EU. The doctrine of Zivilmacht — civilian power — was not only a policy orientation, but a moral commitment forged in the ashes of Nazi militarism. Germany saw itself as a peacekeeper, not a power-broker. The Bundeswehr was a “parliamentary army”, structured to prevent misuse by the executive and embedded in multilateral institutions designed to constrain sovereign adventurism.

Merz’s aggressive anti-Russian rhetoric — and broader strategic posture — also marks a radical departure from Germany’s postwar tradition. Even his predecessor, Olaf Scholz, though a firm supporter of Ukraine, stopped short of authorizing the use of Western-supplied weapons for strikes inside Russian territory — a red line that Merz has now crossed. Moscow has warned that such actions could trigger retaliatory strikes against NATO targets. Not long ago, this would have been unthinkable for a German chancellor.

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Indeed, throughout most of the postwar period, despite the Cold War, German policy was aimed at improving relations with Russia, then the Soviet Union — a policy known as Ostpolitik (East politics). At its core, Ostpolitik was built on the conviction that political stability and peace in Europe could be achieved through closer economic ties and sustained dialogue with the Soviet Union. Rather than confrontation, it pursued détente — a strategy of engagement grounded in the idea that interdependence would foster trust, reduce tensions and gradually open space for political reconciliation.

This was the German consensus for over 50 years — essentially up until the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 — though over time the country’s political leadership, most notably Merkel, found it increasingly difficult to balance Germany’s strategic interests with its transatlantic ties, amid growing US pressure to destabilize Russia via Ukraine. In her memoir, for example, Merkel recounts her commitment to getting Ukraine to implement the Minsk agreements, which were intended to bring an end to the civil war in eastern Ukraine. As Merkel recalls, talks ultimately collapsed due to powerful forces in the US and elsewhere who were advocating for a military resolution to the conflict. This was in no small part designed to drive a wedge between Russia and Europe, and Germany in particular.

Since 2022, however, the postwar consensus started being dismantled — and is now being radically overturned. But how did we go, in the span of just a few years, from Ostpolitik to Merz vowing to do “everything” to ensure the Nord Stream pipeline never reopens, embarking on a massive rearmament program and even flippantly talking about helping Ukraine bomb Russia? Is this simply a “natural” reaction to Russia’s invasion and the new post-Ukraine geopolitical reality, further exacerbated by Trump’s decision to disengage from Europe?

According to some observers, this shift signals a dangerous resurgence of German nationalism and chauvinism — long simmering beneath the surface among segments of the elite, and even within broader society. For decades, this narrative goes, this latent impulse was restrained by the postwar consensus and contained within the framework of the US-led security order.

Now, with Washington increasingly preoccupied elsewhere and hinting at strategic disengagement from Europe, that restraint is eroding. According to this narrative, Germany is seizing the moment to reassert its dominance on the continent, using the vacuum left by American retrenchment to reclaim a hegemonic role — this time not through economic leverage alone, but through an assertive military posture, and doing so with a confidence that recalls far darker chapters of the 20th century.

But this interpretation is, in my view, mistaken. What we are witnessing is not a return of German nationalism, but its opposite. The policies now being implemented — from massive rearmament to the escalation of conflict with Russia — are not rooted in a cold pursuit of German national interests, but in their negation. They are the expression of a political class that has internalized the Atlantic ideology so thoroughly that it can no longer distinguish between national strategy and transatlantic loyalty.

This is the long-term consequence of how the German question was “resolved” after the Second World War: not through the restoration of sovereignty, but through the absorption of Germany into the “collective West” under US strategic guardianship. As noted, throughout most of the postwar period, German leadership attempted to balance this with the pursuit of the national interest, but in the years following the coup in Ukraine, the “American” wing of the German establishment began taking over — and with Merz, a former BlackRock representative, it is firmly in the driving seat.

Now the leadership thinks only in terms of alignment with a Western project whose priorities are often defined elsewhere. In an op-ed published yesterday in the Financial Times, for example, Merz and Macron once again reaffirmed their commitment to the transatlantic relationship and NATO — which has always entailed Europe’s strategic subordination to Washington — despite their recent rhetorical gestures toward a more autonomous European policy.

It is telling in this sense that Merz, while publicly critical of Trump, is in fact executing Trump’s vision: pressuring Germany to drastically increase defense spending, take over leadership in the Ukraine war and sever energy ties with Russia. And yet they are presented as expressions of German and European sovereignty. Contrary to Merkel’s courageous stance against the US invasion of Iraq 20 years ago, Merz has also offered a full-throated endorsement of Trump’s recent attack on Iran.

The problem today then, is not German ambition, but German submission. And the tragedy is that this submission is being dressed up as strategic autonomy — a grim parody of sovereignty in an age of ideological dependency. If German leaders once understood that peace with Russia was in Germany’s fundamental interest, today’s leaders act as if permanent conflict is a condition of responsible statecraft. That reversal is not only dangerous for Germany, but for Europe as a whole.

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The good news is that Germany’s militaristic ambitions collide with an unyielding reality: the Bundeswehr can’t find enough people to fight its wars. The military is short of 30,000 personnel, and one in four recruits quits within six months. NATO has asked Berlin to raise seven new brigades — requiring 60,000 more soldiers — a goal even Defense Minister Boris Pistorius calls unrealistic.

Pistorius says that for now conscription is “off the table”, not for lack of will but because it’s logistically impossible. “We don’t have the capacity — not in barracks, not in training,” he told Parliament. Still, he hinted that this might only be a transitory phase, subject to the military finding enough volunteers.

But the real barrier may be cultural, not logistical. A YouGov poll found that 63% of Germans aged 18-29 oppose conscription; just 19% would fight if Germany were attacked. Among those over 60 — long past draft age — support is strongest. As the researchers Chris Reiter and Will Wilkes put it: “This generational divergence is more than just an attitudinal shift. It reflects two vastly different lived realities. Postwar Germans came of age in a Cold War world with a shared civic mission: defend democracy against Soviet expansionism. In return, the state offered stable jobs, affordable housing, and a sense of national purpose.”

But this social contract has broken down, amid deteriorating social and economic prospects for young people. “For many, the call to serve in uniform doesn’t feel like patriotism — it feels like one more extraction by a system that hasn’t given back,” Reiter and Wilkes wrote.

“When you ignore our concerns and then ask us to die for the state — that’s absurd,” said influencer Simon David Dressler in a televised forum. This feeling was probably best articulated by 27-year-old German journalist Ole Nymoen in a book titled Why I Would Never Fight for My Country, in which the author addresses his generation’s widespread opposition to militarization, conscription and rearmament. That disillusionment is also reshaping politics. In recent elections, nearly half of young voters rejected establishment parties, turning to Die Linke or the AfD — not necessarily out of ideological alignment, but as a rejection of NATO’s agenda and skepticism towards the rearmament push.

Ultimately, this may be the greatest obstacle to rearmament, in Germany and beyond: that a growing number of people are beginning to realize that their real enemies are not in Moscow, but within their own political and economic elites.

The United States is no different. Ever since it became (in functional terms) an empire following the Second World War, it has had its own vision of a universal world state built on the ideals of liberal internationalism. Liberal internationalism was not only for liberal Democrats, but for Republicans, too, even if they have since abjured the term. Both major parties believed in spreading democracy, or at least paid lip service to it, even if they differed when it came to the pace and methods. American diplomats often dealt with dictators not because they preferred to, but because they knew they had no choice. Of course, that universal world state of democracies was a distant and unrealistic goal: not an immediate objective. But it was, nevertheless, a goal. And that goal made all the difference to the way that America saw itself and the world saw America. The fact that the world was frequently disappointed with America was precisely because it expected better of it. For better and for worse, the American imperial experiment had values at its heart: whether it was “a city on a hill” that would mind its own business and yet shine as an example to other nations, or aggressively seek to implant democracy abroad.

This was true of even our most flawed post-Second World War presidents. Take Richard Nixon, whose opening to China was not a case of naked, cynical transactionalism. Far from it. Higher principles were involved. They were rooted in an essay Nixon published in Foreign Affairs in October 1967, “Asia After Vietnam”, in which the future president argued that global stability required inviting Communist China into the family of nations. In fact, there was relatively little transacted in Nixon’s historic February 1972 trip to China. Basically, both sides stuck to their principles while the Taiwan circle was virtually squared, with the United States essentially recognizing only one China, while Beijing’s rulers essentially accepted that they could not conquer Taiwan by force. The point of Nixon’s trip was less to negotiate than to make it clear to the world, through a series of ceremonial meetings, that the United States now had a civil relationship with Communist China and sought an understanding with it. This gave Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger the leverage they needed to achieve détente with the Soviet Union and stabilize the Cold War.

Nixon’s ideals were masked behind a complicated and at times sordid reputation, which would be forever tarnished by Watergate. But America’s yearning for a more democratic world was more obvious in the Carter and Reagan administrations, where openly expressed ideals were a vital element of national power. Kissinger and President Gerald Ford negotiated the Helsinki Accords with the Soviets, which subsequently provided a vehicle for Jimmy Carter to hold the Eastern Bloc to account on human rights. Ronald Reagan’s stark rhetorical differentiation between the American and Soviet systems gave hope to tens of millions in Communist Eastern Europe, as I can attest from being a reporter there at the time.

American power mixed with idealism held fast, even when it least seemed to. In July 1989, a few weeks after the Tiananmen Square massacre, with the media and intellectual community outraged at China and demanding tough action, President George H. W. Bush sent his national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft, and deputy secretary of state, Lawrence Eagleburger, on a secret visit to Beijing to reassure Chinese officials that relations would not be broken. This laid the groundwork for stable relations as the Chinese regime proceeded to further liberalize the economy in the aftermath of Tiananmen, as well as sending more and more students to the West to be educated, creating untold prosperity for its people. It also helped stabilize the Asia-Pacific region. Bush’s action, though it seemed cynical, actually wasn’t. It was built on a realistic interpretation of American ideals.

The three Democratic presidents of the post-Cold War era — Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden — may have made mistakes in office, as all presidents do, but they were consistent in their support for democracy, human rights, and compassion for refugees. It infused their foreign policies, perhaps to a fault, as critics allege. But what stands out is the prominence given to the human rights, refugee, and international development bureaus in the State Department under their watch. Those bureaus were legacies of both the Cold War and its aftermath. They were legacies of the Cold War in the sense that such bureaus were meant to telegraph the humanitarian concerns that differentiated the ideals of the United States from those of the Soviet Union. They were legacies of the post-1991 age because of the way they addressed what came to be called global concerns: those beyond great power politics. Those bureaus may have lost their way to an extent since, and were certainly in need of reform and belt tightening. But their decimation by the Trump administration does violence not just to the tradition of Democratic presidents, but to Republican ones, too. Some of the greatest work done by those bureaus was under the Reagan presidency, as I detailed in my 2021 book.

Obviously, there was Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. But all these wars were, in addition to much else, about idealism run amok. They began as quixotic struggles and ended up destroying presidencies. Poignantly, in painting portraits of military veterans, George W. Bush may have found a way to psychologically deal with the foreign policy disaster he unleashed. Though a requirement for American greatness, idealism can also be dangerous, since it can lead one into unnecessary fights.

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That leads us to Donald Trump, who says his policy is to avoid leading the United States into more wars. That is an admirable goal. But shorn of any vision for a better world, it can be interpreted as mere weakness or isolationism. After all, the United States is not Sweden or Canada. It is a great power. And great powers project force in defense of principles. Those principles may involve cynicism and self-delusion, but the very fact of having to morally justify one’s actions can be disciplinary. Russia does not even bother to defend or justify its mass killing of civilians in Ukraine. In America’s case, a certain amount of idealism has led to great periodic miscalculations throughout the decades, in which presidential reputations have been held to account, but idealism remains the basis on which power is employed in the first place.

This is because without ideals or principles there is no trust, and therefore no reliable allies. What has held NATO together for three quarters of a century has been a large dose of idealism. When the United States, led by Trump, stopped believing in NATO and the ideals that sustain it, the Western Alliance was undermined.

In a claustrophobic world, where geography has been shrunk by technology, a weakened Western alliance in Europe will only make America’s Asian allies nervous. This is because in terms of geography, population, and economics, China is the natural organizing principle of the Asia-Pacific region. The United States, situated on the other side of the globe, is present in the Asia-Pacific only because it wants to be. And it wants to be because of a vision of free societies — call it liberal internationalism, if you will — which works in tandem with economic and strategic interests, strengthening them rather than conflicting with them. It is all of a piece. Were America to remove values from its relationships with Japan, South Korea, and its other Pacific allies, it could force them to seek greater accommodation with China, their biggest trading partner. This is how transactionalism turns on itself. A nakedly transactional world is a world of no rules, and, therefore, no order.

Actually, none of this conflicts with realism. True realists, like Nixon, Kissinger, and the elder Bush, had a sense of history that provided them with a mature sense of the tragic. They knew that things could go horribly wrong if they were not extremely careful. In foreign affairs, they worshipped truth because the truth of a situation is often unpleasant. Trump is no realist because he has a disregard for the basic facts. He believes in nothing beyond a mechanical exercise in dealmaking. Whereas true realism is not merely a technique but something more, which is ultimately not in conflict with America’s idealistic mission.

Trump may succeed here and there, in making this deal with the Saudis or that deal with the Qataris. But because there is no higher purpose to anything he does, American power itself — a blend of material interests and moral values — is undermined. The presidencies from Franklin D. Roosevelt through Joe Biden, including both Democrat and Republican, with all of their mistakes and disappointments over 80 years, manifested the apex of American power because of the higher purpose they aspired to. That era is over and has been replaced by something consciously amoral and therefore decadent. This is what decline looks like.

When the drone reached its target, however, it dropped not a bomb but a bottle of water. The men were not soldiers but civilians, part of a national effort to prepare for a Russian invasion they hope will never come.

As America attempts to enforce a ceasefire and eventual peace in Ukraine, leaders in the Baltics are worried about where Vladimir Putin’s battle-hardened forces might turn next. When the Russian army has no war left to fight to their south and no grinding battles slowing down the rate at which their manpower can be replenished, these small nations, so they warn, will become Europe’s new frontline.

Lithuania — nestled snugly between Kaliningrad, a Russian outpost, and Belarus, a vassal — is preparing rapidly to defend against its eastern neighbor. Last month, Vilnius authorities published wartime evacuation plans. The government is building “dragon’s teeth” anti-tank fortifications along its borders. Speaking last year, then defense minister Laurynas Kasčiūnas said he hoped his country might become a “Lithuanian hedgehog” that could deter the “much stronger Russian bear.”

Increasingly central to these efforts is the Lithuanian Riflemen’s Union, a state-backed paramilitary that has seen its numbers double to 17,000 since 2022. Around 11,000 members are adults, with the remainder composed of teenagers who go hiking, help the elderly and study warfare in preparation for future service in either the armed forces or the militia. Lithuania, with a population of just under three million, does not have a professional army capable of effective defense on its own. So, as they did in the Forties against the Soviets, its civilians are preparing to fight.

In the event of a war, the Riflemen will be called on to secure the nation’s critical infrastructure and defend its interior while the military battles Russian troops. If Lithuania is occupied, they will remain as stay-behind forces and conduct armed resistance.

Over several bright spring days earlier this month, teams of Riflemen gathered from across the country in Telšiai, a picturesque town that slopes down to the shores of a lake. There they competed against each other in a series of tasks designed to prove their readiness for combat: shooting drills, crossing a fake minefield, and crawling through rotting animal carcasses to simulate the sensory horrors of war.

Small groups of young men and a few women could be spotted taking a break — with painted faces, listening to heavy metal on portable speakers, cigarettes between their teeth.

Watching an inexperienced team as they attempted to steer a first-person view (FPV) drone, 41-year-old Andrius struggled to contain his disappointment. “These drones are not hard to fly,” he said. “There are clips on YouTube where a chimpanzee flies one.” Spending most of his time administering Linux servers in Vilnius, he had the distinct look of a man more comfortable in an office than on the battlefield.

Long a hobbyist who lived for drone racing “from dusk till dawn,” Andrius first realized the military significance of his passion when he saw FPV footage from Ukraine in late 2022. “I remember only Ukrainian shouting like, ‘that target is behind the blue door’,” he said. “They were looking from the drone and flying trying to catch the enemy around the building.” Now, he said, nobody can hide.

As a part-time volunteer force, the Union’s great advantage is that it can draw from the expertise of professionals across Lithuanian society. Members have been called on to teach the army how to hide from, deploy and fight drones. Other Riflemen are using their expertise in tactical combat casualty care to help hospitals practice wartime treatment. “When I joined the Riflemen it was an organization for children and pensioners,” one 20-year veteran told me. “Now we are a real military force.”

Since he signed up with the militia following the invasion of Ukraine, Andrius has traveled to Kyiv to learn how his counterparts are holding the line against the odds. In 2022, civilian volunteers proved essential to defending the Ukrainian capital from advancing columns of Russian tanks. Lithuanian military planners believe the same will likely prove the case for them.

Overseeing the Telšiai exercise was Lieutenant Colonel Linas Idzelis, a former military officer elected to lead the Riflemen in 2023. When we met in a field outside the city, he told me he had been reading The Home Guard Companion, a training manual given to British civilians during the Second World War.

Discussing Russia he began to fizz with anger. They are Asian, not European, he insisted: the Mongol Yoke turned them into savages; in the 17th century they cut one third of Lithuanians into pieces. “If they go into Europe,” he argued, “there will be no civilians anymore.” For Idzelis, there is no debate as to whether Russia will attack the Baltics. “If you read all the assessments which are provided now by the intelligence organizations, this is just a matter of time,” he said.

When the Soviet Union began to fall apart at the end of the Eighties, Idzelis was a long-haired teenage metalhead attending school in Vilnius. Once protests began against Moscow’s rule, he attended with his parents, brandishing a Lithuanian flag and helping to construct barricades.

In 1990, the country became the first member state of the Soviet Union to declare its independence. Gorbachev responded by declaring an economic blockade and then, when Vilnius refused to back down, sending forces from the army and the KGB to launch a coup. When civilians rushed to the capital to defend their newfound independence, 14 were killed as soldiers began firing on the crowd.

“When one of the buildings was assaulted, I was standing like five meters away from the colonel who was shooting into our guys who had defended the building,” Idzelis remembered. Ignas Šimulionis and Darius Gerbutavičius, two fellow heavy metal fans who had studied with him before joining the Riflemen, were killed.

Over 30 years later, the lieutenant colonel is clear about the threat facing his country. “The understanding is that for us no one really wants to go to Siberia,” he said. “It’s better to die in a trench than to chop trees somewhere in Siberia.”

The torture of Ukrainian civilians by Russian soldiers was not a shock to Lithuanians, he said. “Maybe for you this is, ‘Oh, fuck, shit’. But we experienced it many times. We know what we can expect. In the United Kingdom you cannot expect such kinds of things.”

Europe will never reach a war footing until its citizens witness Russia attacking a NATO power, Idzelis believes. The continent’s latent military industrial capacity has handicapped his preparations for combat. “In the Western world, I think in the future we’ll be lacking manpower,” he said. “Here, we have manpower but no equipment.”

The Riflemen’s Union has paid a Swedish defense firm for a shipment of grenade launchers but will not see them for another three years. An order of tanks will not be ready for between five and eight. In response, the militia is building its own FPV drones, ready to follow the Ukrainian lead and inflict mass casualties at little cost.

Until relatively recently, NATO military planners believed there was little chance that the Baltics could hold off a Russian invasion. They also feared that expanding into eastern Europe might antagonize Putin. In 2017, however, their mindset shifted in response to the invasion of Crimea and battle groups were sent east.

The numbers involved have been largely symbolic, however. These forces were intended to act as tripwires rather than to fight a real war. Under a defense-in-depth model, the alliance expected to throw reinforcements forward following an attack and only retake territory from Russia after it had been occupied. Since 2022, with the horrors of Bucha and the resilience of Putin’s forces in holding territory, thinking has changed.

Four months after the invasion of Ukraine, NATO leaders meeting in Madrid declared that they would now defend “every inch” of allied territory. Last month, Germany formally launched the deployment of a 5,000 strong armored brigade to Lithuania — its first permanent foreign troop deployment since the Second World War.

In the wake of Donald Trump’s reelection, however, some have grown jittery at the thought that America’s commitment to the alliance is waning. Speaking anonymously, one military commander told me that if the US were to quit NATO then, “the first step, we will shit ourselves, and then think of the next step.”

So far, American troops remain stationed in Lithuania. Trump has recently dubbed Putin “CRAZY” and threatened fresh sanctions on Russia. Vilnius, which is slashing budgets elsewhere to spend 5.5% of GDP on defense while boosting purchases of American liquid national gas, is bullish about its chances of convincing his administration it is pulling its weight.

According to Linas Kojala, who runs the Geopolitics and Security Studies Center, a Vilnius think tank, it is unlikely in any case that Russia would launch a full-scale invasion of the country. “What we also want to create is a feeling in the Kremlin that they would never be able to take Lithuania over,” he said. “They might control us militarily but they would not take Lithuania over in terms of having society obliging to the occupational forces.”

It is more likely that Putin would either launch a limited invasion of the Baltics and dare NATO to respond, or simply place large troop numbers on the border and attempt to restrict their independence. “This is not an all-out attack on us, but still a very threatening scenario to consider,” Kojala said.

Over several days across several cities in Lithuania, not one person told me they feared war. Conflict with Russia is the natural state of affairs in this corner of Europe. Concerns that NATO might buckle under Trump’s influence are rising, however. As he watched the Riflemen complete their exercise in Telšiai’s town square on an unseasonably warm morning, Henrikas, who grew up under Soviet occupation, told me he believed it was “impossible” to defend Lithuania without the alliance.

Romena, a curator in the town’s Jewish museum, knows the cost of defeat better than most. Until the Soviet and then Nazi occupations, Telšiai was a center of Torah study. Then, in 1941, German troops and local collaborators eradicated its Jewish population forever over the course of a few short months.

The historian, who works to educate locals about the area’s history of mass killing, previously considered the threat of war to be “absurd”. Now, she said, she knows people gathering cash and documents to flee an invasion. “I am preparing too but I am not going crazy,” she said with a half smile.

Others are getting ready to fight. “Lots of people are going to self-defense courses to get their gun licenses,” Lorenas, a young man hawking semi-automatic weapons to Riflemen on behalf of Vollit, a Lithuanian arms dealer, claimed. “Not specifically because of Russia but they are a bit more conscious of the need to defend their families.” After getting started a few years ago, he now owns eight guns himself.

For Idzelis, how to deter Russia is clear. “Plan maximum is to kill them all, the minimum is [what is] within our means and capabilities,” he said. Having outsourced its defense to America for decades, however, it is not clear when the continent will be ready to fight. Putin could launch a regional war in the Baltics within two years, Danish intelligence predicted in February. They claim he could wage a fresh local conflict within six months.

Darius, a 19-year-old Rifleman, exhausted and giddy after completing the training exercise, told me his friends are split between those who just want to get on with their lives and those who are preparing for war. “I do still trust NATO,” Darius added, “but it won’t do well on its own. We need to be strong to be ready.” As western Europe slowly begins to emerge from its post-war stasis, some along the continent’s eastern borderlands are steely-eyed.

It is obvious that there was no such equilibrium on 23 February 2022, when Russian columns started rolling towards Kyiv, and Russian President Vladimir Putin had just described Ukraine not merely as Russian, but as the homeland of the very first Russian state: Kievan Rus’.

That warning of an imminent invasion was quickly confirmed by satellite photographs of long columns of Russian armored vehicles preparing to advance. It was then that the US President, the French President and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, together with every other active European ally, had an opportunity to arrange an emergency meeting and issue a categorical warning to Russia, dovetailed with a convincing promise of maximum support to Ukraine.

There had been plenty of time to prepare for that moment — in fact eight years, given thinly disguised Russian soldiers had first infiltrated and then invaded the two Russian-speaking regions of Donetsk and Luhansk in April 2014, when Crimea was also seized.

But when the moment came, and Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, there was no cohesive and determined power ready to respond quickly and effectively. NATO had done just that several times during the Cold War, by promptly reinforcing threatened allies with thousands of air-lifted troops from the so-called “Allied Command Europe Mobile Force”.

That, however, was the old, pre-enlargement NATO, which was still a veritable military alliance of countries capable of defending themselves, and help weaker allies in trouble, and whose chronically weak Mediterranean member states, with the most resplendent uniforms and least combat strength, had no Russian troops on their borders.

But once very deserving yet utterly indefensible countries such as Estonia were included in NATO — along with Poland, which mustered just 42,000 combat soldiers out of its population of 33 million a mere three months before Putin’s full-scale invasion began — it stopped being an effective military alliance.

Instead, it became a kind of social club. The NATO calendar is full of meetings at the “Supreme Allied Headquarters” in Mons in Belgium, where all manner of military and related issues are addressed often very professionally and quite freely — except that nobody is allowed to mention, however politely, even the most glaring military shortcomings of fellow allies, which undermine important war plans.

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The highpoint of the NATO calendar is the splendid summits with all flags flying, in which the arrival of new countries is greatly celebrated, regardless of their ability to actually defend themselves. Both heads of state and heads of government are invited to those gatherings on the premise that there is strength in numbers, with no concerns about the inherent difficulty of reaching any agreements in such a vast crowd.

In the last summit, held in Washington DC in July 2024, Biden’s confusion of President Zelensky with Putin added a touch of humor to otherwise gloomy proceedings: nobody in attendance offered any suggestions on how to end the war in Ukraine.

What proves that NATO is no longer a genuine military alliance was that nothing was done in the last pre-war days before Putin’s invasion finally began. The satellite intelligence that revealed Russian forces on the move also showed that they were already in assault formations. But even then, five days remained to fly fighter-bomber squadrons to forward bases.

Yet even inaction would have been better than what actually happened. Instead of ordering the rapid deployment of tactical airpower to bases in Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom, the Biden administration instead evacuated US diplomats from Kyiv, starting a panic that induced the evacuation of some 20 other diplomatic missions.

For its part, the German government made clear that the Nordstream II pipeline project, further increasing Berlin’s dependence on Russian gas, would not be stopped even if Ukraine were invaded.

Only the courageous determination of Zelensky, together with his Defense Minister Resnikov and Kyiv’s stalwart mayor, prevented a collapse — starting the resistance that continues until today.

It is enough, then, to review the sequence of events to understand why Putin was not deterred back in February 2022: there was no watchful Great Power in Europe to do the deterring alongside the United States, thereby replacing the loss of NATO’s operational capacity and deterrent credibility caused by its expansion into indefensible territory.

But a recent and seemingly uneventful meeting between the leaders of Britain, France and Germany clearly suggests where that missing Great Power may be found: in a solid strategic compact, carefully negotiated between the three countries to jointly support the US response to an imminent crisis — or, if necessary, to induce a US response they jointly favor.

Whatever the differences between the three governments, they could certainly act with much greater agility than NATO as a whole ever could. Tripartite agreement is clearly easier than contending with dozens of European NATO members, from Estonia to Norway to Spain.

Except for Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, no NATO member deliberately obstructs alliance decisions. But each has its own objections to joint action against particular countries. For example, the populations of Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro and North Macedonia are predominantly Christian Orthodox, and their governments are typically unwilling to act against Orthodox Serbia — or indeed against Russia itself.

As Islamic countries, Turkey and Albania are very likely to object to any action against a Muslim antagonist, while the government of the day of any member state may object to any use of force if the ruling coalition at that time happens to include a pacifist party.

Even if none of those specific obstacles to prompt action appear in any given crisis, the civil and military representatives of each member state will still want to be heard when the use of force is imminent, and that alone could fatally delay responding to a sudden threat.

Against all those impediments to quick action, the alternative of a permanent three-country compact — in effect a synthetic Great Power — is very promising.

There are, of course, obvious challenges. For one thing, even a synthetic Great Power must have formidable capabilities, and these days neither the UK, France nor Germany is a veritable Great Power.

That category is defined by the ability to wage war independently, without needing any significant support from allies. To be sure, Britain did exactly that in reconquering the Falklands from Argentina, sending an expeditionary fleet over an unprecedented 8,000 miles in a display of strategic courage, which almost failed because of the bravery of a handful of Argentinian pilots — and which would have been suicidal against a more competent adversary.

If, however, the limitations of the three powers are well known, the magnitude of their combined capabilities should not be underestimated.

When it comes to ground forces, the British Army these days has some 70,000 soldiers all told, while its French counterpart is under 100,000. Yet both contain a high proportion of units that are actually capable of fighting, in contrast to most other NATO armies.

As for the German army, it had shrunk to less than a tenth of its Cold War strength under Angela Merkel, who ridiculed Trump’s call for more spending in 2018 as totally unnecessary in peaceful Europe — even though Russian forces had already infiltrated southeast Ukraine.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine caused as much confusion as alarm in Germany, as in most of Europe, because under various labels pacifist parties constrained both thinking and defense budgets. It is only now, under its newly installed Chancellor Friedrich Merz, that a serious rearmament effort is finally underway. It is set to focus on armored forces — still the German specialty — which would complement British and French light infantry and commando units.

The synthetic Great Power proposed here would be much better off at sea, where the British and French fleets each operate aircraft carriers. Both fleets also have nuclear-powered submarines, much less vulnerable than surface vessels and armed to attack enemy ships and subs alike. The latter also do not need large numbers to control vast ocean areas: if just half of the 10 now operated by the British and French navies were deployed, they could interdict any Russian naval operations in Atlantic and Arctic waters.

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As with the ground forces, the size of the British and French air forces is less important than the fact that they “are for real”. Thus while the Royal Air Force, the Italians and the Spanish all operate Eurofighters with a significant bombload, only the RAF has actually used them to attack the Houthis from its sovereign base in Cyprus (another overlooked British asset): even though they were inflicting a great deal of damage on the Italian and Spanish economies and almost none on the British.

In theory, this gap is just a matter of politics, but there is also a fixed cultural difference: Royal Air Force pilots are ready and even eager for action, a sentiment shared by French pilots who until recently flew many distant missions into Africa.

A simple decision by the British, French and German governments to operate a joint foreign and defense policy coordination office would be quite sufficient to announce the arrival of the Great Power missing from the European scene.

There would be no need to burden this office with any duties except a timely response to active or imminent threats of war, meaning it would only require the designation of very few senior diplomats and military officers of each country, seconded from their ordinary duties to serve as joint “crisis managers”.

The one thing necessary to make it work is that these individuals would each need immediate access to their respective leaders in the event of a crisis, overcoming the inevitable resistance of all others who must be left out.

The mere announcement that Britain, France and Germany had decided to coordinate conflict policies from a single joint office would no doubt trigger outrage, protests and even nervous breakdowns in the left-out European capitals that still pretend to matter — even as they refuse to help with the Houthis let alone Putin. Brussels, too, would be outraged, where for all her charms President Ursula von der Leyen cannot conceal the inability of the European Commission to help assure Europe’s safety from threats large or small.

Having fought with and against each other in two world wars, France, Germany and the United Kingdom now have a new opportunity to combine forces and endow Europe with the Great Power it urgently needs. If they do not act, more wars are likely.

Last week, the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) assessed that Russia could pose “a significant military challenge to NATO allies, particularly the Baltic states, as early as 2027”. If there is a ceasefire in Ukraine by mid-2025, Russia may have long-term confrontation in mind. According to the German security services, it has been rebuilding its military capacity and could quickly redeploy units to imperil NATO’s eastern flank. But while we can all agree that Russian leader Vladimir Putin would prefer NATO not to exist, would he truly be willing to wage war to make that happen?

It is easy to dismiss talk of Russia-NATO war as fearmongering or Cold War era thinking. Yet, the UK government is updating its contingency plans. Meanwhile, those who have engaged in military planning admit taking the prospect seriously. Gabrielius Landsbergis has first-hand experience of gauging Putin’s military goals. As Foreign Minister of Lithuania during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he was forced to confront the possibility that his country might be next on Putin’s list. “It was on many people’s minds that if Ukraine really does fall in a couple of days, it was obvious that Putin’s ambition would not stop with Kyiv. If he can go, he will continue,” he tells me.

Attacking a NATO member would have brought Putin into direct confrontation with the whole of the Alliance. But, according to Landsbergis, that wouldn’t stop him. “I think that his ultimate goal is dismantling the Western-run global system and some of the targets are very close to him.” It is a view shared by General Sir Richard Shirreff, former NATO Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe, who tells me that “the challenge that NATO faces is to prevent it [the conflict] turning into a shooting war because if Putin were to get his way I’m absolutely convinced it could”.

Landsbergis and Shirreff are in agreement about the most likely scenario in which Putin would attack. A false flag operation in the Baltics, followed by local Russian minorities demanding protection. In Shirreff’s book 2017: War with Russia, he envisaged that, after an invasion of Ukraine, Moscow’s agents would foment unrest in Latvia by murdering pro-Kremlin activists and carving insignia on their corpses to pin the blame on Latvian nationalists. Moscow’s snipers then execute Russian speakers at a Riga protest. All this lays the pretext for Moscow to invade the Baltics, ostensibly on a mission to protect Russian minorities in those countries.

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Landsbergis sees two possible options for such an incident. Firstly, the Suwałki Gap — “there is a trainline going from Russia through Belarus all the way through to Kaliningrad and it brings Russian non-military passengers”. Secondly, Narva in Estonia — “it’s right on the border, it’s a town mostly inhabited by Russians and fits the Russian ‘save the Russians everywhere in the world’ narrative quite well”.

The “how” seems established, but the “when” is trickier to assess. The Russian Defense Minister has indicated that there could be war within a decade, Danish intelligence has said within five years, and now the IISS is claiming it could potentially be two. Sir Richard estimates that Putin may be ready in three to five years, depending upon the impact of casualties in Ukraine and how the Russian economy fares. What is clear is that Putin is not ready yet. He is “completely fixed on Ukraine and has no capacity for anything else” for the time being.

Yet, if Trump successfully negotiates a ceasefire in Ukraine, that could free Putin’s hand. The US President is also encouraging Putin’s ambitions in other ways. Danish intelligence assessed that Russia would be more likely to use force against NATO allies if it felt the Alliance was “militarily weakened” or “politically divided”. This is “particularly true if Russia assesses that the US cannot or will not support the European NATO countries”.

Landsbergis agrees with this assessment. The messaging from the US over the last couple of months “definitely reassures” Putin that “he can expect changes in European security to a point where it would be feasible for him to consider this option (of war)”. Two main factors would influence his decision: “the United States no longer being present in Europe and Ukraine not being able to defend its front”.

Trump’s actions now may be eroding Alliance unity enough to be laying the foundations for a Russian invasion. Sir Richard tells me that the US President’s tariffs and threats to annex Canada and Greenland are “hitting right at the heart of Alliance cohesion”. “The basis of the post-Cold War order, of the unity of purpose and Alliance cohesion and America being unshakably in support of the West, is starting to be undermined,” he says. “Give it a few more years of the major European economies failing to step up to the mark on defense spending, of Trump economics and tariffs, and all that begins to make Nato quite conceivably look like the busted flush which Putin thought it was in 2021 (with the fall of Afghanistan). Putin reckons that Nato is bluffing with Article 5 because Trump has said ‘I’m giving up on you’”. The Russian leader may decide that any invasion would have to take place during Trump’s term of office, so as to benefit from the White House being occupied by a man who might not rush in to save Europe.

So if the Russian leader does order his troops into Nato territory, what would happen then? Military historian Dr Peter Caddick-Adams believes that the initial stages would not go well for Russia. “Nato would close the Baltic Sea to Russia which means that it couldn’t get anything out of St Petersburg or Kaliningrad which would ground its entire navy. Turkey would do the same thing in the Black Sea. Russia would be left with a conventional force which is largely dissipated.” However, Sir Richard is more pessimistic, telling me that “the traditional Russian way of war is mass firepower, total destruction, brutality, onslaught and all the terrible things they’ve done to the Ukrainian civilian population. We’re talking about massive conventional operations, conventional fighting, tank battles, destruction of cities in Eastern Europe.” The ruthlessness would not only serve Putin’s war aims but also satisfy a desire for personal vengeance after years of the West supplying Ukraine with weaponry and thereby frustrating his ambitions.

There is also the risk of nuclear blackmail, as we saw during Russia’s war in Ukraine. Sir Richard says that Russia’s Zapad exercises have envisaged the occupation of a Baltic nation followed by blackmailing of the West: “If Nato threatens to come back at you, all you do is threaten the Nato capitals within range of Kaliningrad. You then present decision makers in London or Washington with a choice — accept it or risk nuclear escalation. The Russians would gamble that nobody is going to risk the destruction of Western civilization and all the cities of Western Europe for the sake of the population of a Baltic state.” Such a strategy may prove effective, the West having already judged Moscow’s nuclear warnings as no idle threats. In October 2022, then US President Joe Biden said that Putin “was not joking when he talks about the potential use of tactical nuclear weapons.”

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For any Brits reassuring themselves that a conflict would be restricted to a Russian occupation on the other side of Europe or tank battles in the Polish countryside, Sir Richard has a rude awakening. “If it turned into a shooting war, you could expect hypersonic missiles which are within range of London to be taking out key buildings as well as key sites across the United Kingdom.” Lacking an Iron Dome, Britain is “completely defenseless against that sort of threat”. “I cannot see how the army could generate the force levels required without conscription. The army would not have time to recruit and train anyway because this would very quickly become a war of national survival. Sabotage? Absolutely. Assassinations? Absolutely.”

And what would be Putin’s goals in warring against Nato? When would he be satisfied? “I would specify his objectives as decoupling America from European security, seeing the destruction or at least the neutralization of Nato and the achievement of what he described as the most appropriate security settlement for Europe, being a new Yalta — in other words, a Russian empire in Eastern Europe on the bones of the old Warsaw Pact,” says Sir Richard. Putin once characterised the break-up of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century”. If he goes to war, he may not be finished until that has been reversed.

So what can the West do now to discourage Putin? Effective deterrence, including Nato membership for Ukraine, and strong defense spending are key, according to the ex-general. “It should be at 4-5%”, he says, even though “this is a really unpopular thing for a Labour government that’s committed to growth and that faces the prospect of having to make some really tough decisions about tax and cuts to public services”. However, while Labour has pledged to raise UK defense spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2027, the promise came shortly before a meeting between Prime Minister Keir Starmer and President Trump, suggesting that it may have been more to appease the White House than from any real commitment to fending off Russia long-term.

Besides, it is not as though Moscow has shied away from aggression towards the West already. “The war goes on against NATO by hybrid asymmetric means”, explains Sir Richard, listing allegations of Russian interference in Western elections and the 2018 Salisbury Novichok attack. He says that some activity may even be conducted with an eye to preparing for a larger battle, such as reports of drones near RAF airbases. “All that kind of stuff is in the Russian playbook.” In Putin’s mind, Ukraine is merely the frontline. NATO and Russia are already at war.

Meanwhile, in an interview with NBC, Trump struck an even more pessimistic tone, stating that “maybe it won’t be possible” to reach a peace agreement. Indeed, the conflict seems to be escalating once again — and with the White House’s approval. On 4 May, The New York Times reported that a US-supplied Patriot air defense system currently stationed in Israel is being redirected to Ukraine. Since all Patriot exports require formal US approval under American arms transfer laws, the move indicates direct White House authorization. Just days earlier, Washington approved a possible $300-million deal for F-16 training and support. The package includes aircraft upgrades, spare parts, software, hardware and training for Ukrainian personnel. In addition, Ukrainian media reported that the White House had green-lit $50 million in new arms exports to Ukraine. The deal reportedly includes unspecified military hardware and defense-related services. 

On Tuesday, Ukrainian drones targeted Moscow for the second night in a row, forcing temporary flight suspensions at four airports in the Russian capital and nine more in surrounding regions. The strikes came just days before Russia’s annual Victory Day military parade, an event expected to host international dignitaries including Chinese President Xi Jinping. In the lead-up to the celebrations, Putin announced a unilateral three-day ceasefire in Ukraine, citing “humanitarian considerations”. Zelensky, however, rejected the truce as insufficient, stating that Kyiv would only consider a ceasefire lasting at least 30 days. In a pointed message to leaders traveling to Moscow for the 9 May festivities, Zelensky warned that Ukraine “cannot be responsible for what happens on the territory of the Russian Federation” while hostilities continue. 

Trump places the blame for the collapse of peace talks on Zelensky and Putin, yet he himself bears a significant share of responsibility. Upon taking office, he began the negotiations on the right footing — acknowledging that the conflict was fundamentally a proxy war between the United States and Russia, and that it could only be resolved through a direct agreement between the two powers. This is why the Europeans and Ukrainians were initially excluded from the talks. This approach, though controversial, had a certain logic: a durable settlement required engagement between the actual power brokers. 

But it didn’t last. Within weeks, the administration reversed course. The US repositioned itself as a neutral mediator rather than a direct party to the conflict — despite continuing its military and intelligence support to Ukraine (following a brief pause). That contradiction was always bound to undermine the negotiation process. One cannot be both a participant and an honest broker. Following the recent arms deals, the pretense of neutrality has become even more untenable.  

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In a broader sense, Trump’s diplomatic efforts faltered for several reasons. First, he underestimated the unwillingness of Europe and Ukraine to accept any compromise that might be politically toxic. Both had powerful incentives to maintain the status quo. For European leaders, a peace deal that acknowledged Russian gains would be politically ruinous. The war has become a legitimizing narrative, justifying economic hardship, technocratic centralization and even authoritarian tendencies. Admitting defeat would expose their failures and embolden political opposition.

Zelensky faces even higher stakes. For him, ending the war could mean not only the end of his political career but possibly his personal safety, as he would be far more vulnerable to reprisals from his numerous political adversaries. These domestic political constraints made a negotiated peace deeply improbable without overwhelming external pressure — which the US has proven unwilling to apply.

Had the United States fully withdrawn military support for Ukraine, and acquiesced to Russia’s core demands, there arguably would have been little the Europeans could have done to sustain the war for any meaningful length of time. So why didn’t Washington take that path?

The answer lies less with Europe or Ukraine than with the internal dynamics of the United States itself. For Trump, negotiating such a deal with Moscow was always going to be politically fraught. The American national security establishment — and Trump’s own administration — is filled with hardliners committed to prolonging the conflict. While Trump and a small circle of close advisers may have been serious about reaching a deal, the internal resistance was overwhelming. Faced with this pressure, Trump appeared unwilling to take the political risk necessary to follow through.

Compounding the challenge was a critical miscalculation: Trump likely underestimated the firmness of Russia’s position. He seems to have believed that offering a framework that included recognition of Russia’s territorial gains in Ukraine would be enough to secure a breakthrough. He likely expected Moscow to respond with significant concessions in return.

But from the outset, Russia made it clear that any deal had to address far more than the status of annexed Ukrainian territories. For Moscow, the war is about redrawing the global security order. Its demands have always included a new European security architecture on the model of the Helsinki Accords, with limits on NATO expansion and a broader restructuring of the international system — a restructuring that reflects the rise of new centers of power, particularly Beijing and Moscow. In this view, global governance should be based on sovereign equality, regional balances of power and negotiated spheres of influence, not on the universalization of Western norms or the expansion of Western-led military alliances. In short, Russia is not seeking a truce on narrow terms, but the formalization of a multipolar world order in which Western hegemony is replaced by a balance among great powers.

Given that, Trump’s insistence on an immediate ceasefire as a precondition for negotiations was never viable. Moscow has long insisted that a truce can only follow agreement on the broad contours of a settlement — not precede it. Trump also misstepped in entertaining a European proposal to deploy “peacekeeping” troops to Ukraine as a stabilizing force. For Russia, such a move was unacceptable and would have been seen as a direct provocation rather than a confidence-building measure. Equally unacceptable from Russia’s standpoint was the Kellogg Plan, which envisioned a frozen conflict and deferred NATO membership.

On the Ukrainian side, moreover, the US made another strategic error by pushing Kyiv to formally accept Russian control over Crimea. That demand — which, notably, Russia never actually issued — was politically untenable for Ukraine and predictably rejected.

Achieving a settlement would have required a phased approach: a gradual normalization of diplomatic and economic ties with Russia, a slow drawdown of support for Ukraine and carefully managed, trust-building negotiations over a prolonged period — potentially years. But Trump, in his characteristically impatient fashion, sought to force a comprehensive deal within an arbitrary 100-day window. The result was not a breakthrough, but a breakdown.

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Overall, the US approach to the negotiations amounted to a textbook case of strategic and diplomatic incompetence. This is in part due to the inclusion on Trump’s team of figures like Steve Witkoff and Marco Rubio, who lack diplomatic experience and underestimated the complexity of the conflict.

However, the failure of Trump’s peace initiative also reflects deeper realities within American foreign policy thinking. While his rhetoric may appear to break with the bipartisan interventionist orthodoxy of the past, his “America First” doctrine remains grounded in a belief in US global supremacy — as evidenced by his aggressive trade tactics. This is why Washington could not engage seriously with Russia’s broader demands. As noted, Moscow does not merely want recognition of territorial changes; it seeks an acceptance of the multipolar reality of the international landscape. For the US foreign policy establishment — even under Trump — that remains an unacceptable proposition.

Thus, even though Trump may have been genuinely committed, on a rational level, to ending the war in Ukraine, the institutional culture that helped initiate and sustain the conflict remains deeply entrenched. As a result, Trump has not only failed to end the war — he has, to some extent, deepened US entanglement. This leaves him politically exposed. He cannot claim the mantle of peacemaker, yet he clearly has no appetite to serve as Biden 2.0. Walking away entirely might have preserved some consistency. But by staying in, he has made the war his own. Paradoxically, the much-criticized mineral deal may turn out to be more advantageous for Ukraine than the US. It ensures continued American involvement and shields Kyiv from complete abandonment, even if the mineral wealth in question ultimately proves illusory.

But lukewarm US military support will not reverse Ukraine’s battlefield fortunes. A Russian breakthrough remains likely, and with it, a potential Ukrainian collapse. Whether this outcome would force the West back to the negotiating table, or else drive further escalation, is uncertain. In either case, a fundamental problem remains: all parties understand that whatever is agreed on today could be overturned tomorrow. This mutual distrust means that Russia, Ukraine — and by extension, the West — are likely to remain locked in embittered relations for years to come, even if a formal deal is eventually reached.

At the same time, Russia is likely to maintain a robust military posture in the region for the foreseeable future — especially in the context of Europe’s rearmament plans and aggressive rhetoric. This, in turn, will provoke a response from Europe, prompting yet another round of Russian countermeasures. All this will unfold within a deeply toxic political environment, where distrust runs deep and the cycle of escalation remains difficult to break.

For now, then, the most likely scenario remains prolonged conflict, rising costs and deepening divisions — not only between Russia and the West, but within the West itself. The war will not end until Washington and its allies are willing to confront the core issue: the persistence of a hegemonic doctrine that brooks no rivals. Until that happens, peace will remain elusive and the bloodletting will continue. And Donald Trump, whether he likes it or not, risks being remembered not as the man who ended the war — but as the one who inherited it and let it burn.

Yet this confidence is misplaced. Years of underinvestment have left Germany’s military and defense industry depleted, while a deeper failure to reckon with the past has drained societal will. The common thread running through the country’s economic, political and social struggles is a lack of cohesion — an underdeveloped sense of togetherness that saps Germany’s ability to act with resolve. Money alone won’t fix what is broken.

The Bundeswehr, once a formidable force, is now a shadow of its former self. At its Cold War peak, the Federal Republic’s armed forces boasted more than 500,000 soldiers, sailors and aviators. Today, that number has shrunk to barely 180,000, with one-in-four new sign-ups quitting within six months. Despite Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Zeitenwende pledge following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, battle-readiness has deteriorated. Just half of brigades are deployable, down from nearly two-thirds in 2022, while soldiers on Nato’s eastern flank lack basic communications gear. A parliamentary oversight report exposed critical deficiencies in weapons, equipment and infrastructure. The head of Germany’s armed forces association put it bluntly: the Bundeswehr is “blanker than blank”.

Part of the blame lies in what Germany is supposed to be so good at: making stuff. But the inconvenient truth is that the country’s defense industry is fragmented. Thyssenkrupp Marine Systems, a maker of non-nuclear submarines and surface vessels, can’t match the scale or capabilities of Britain’s BAE Systems, much less giants such as America’s General Dynamics, Russia’s United Shipbuilding Corporation or the China State Shipbuilding Corporation. Rheinmetall, a manufacturer of land weapons systems and Germany’s largest defense contractor, took two years to open a new munitions factory after the outbreak of the war in Ukraine. So, while Moscow has long since shifted to a war economy, Germany is struggling with logistical and industrial shortcomings.

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Beyond military weakness, Germany’s economic entanglement with China presents another grave vulnerability. Volkswagen, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, BASF, along with a host of smaller manufacturers, derive a substantial share of their revenues from the Chinese market. And given that China maintains its strategic alliance with Russia, Germany might struggle to stand its ground with regard to Ukraine. Any diplomatic pressure from China might lead to more Scholzing.

We have already seen Germany’s reluctance to challenge China. The 2022 purchase of the Tollerort shipping terminal in Hamburg, by China’s state-backed COSCO shipping company sparked alarm, but it went through all the same — albeit for a reduced stake — after Scholz intervened, wary of China’s reaction if it were blocked. Duisburg, home to Europe’s largest inland port at the confluence of the Rhine and the Ruhr rivers, is a crucial node in China’s Belt and Road Initiative and over 100 firms from the country have set up offices there. Leipzig-Halle Airport has seen Chinese investment in cargo operations. China’s Huawei has been a major supplier of telecommunications infrastructure to Germany, despite warnings from allies of espionage risk.

Germany’s Western loyalties are also undercut by a rogue’s gallery of Kremlin and Beijing sympathisers. That’s especially true for the Alternative für Deutschland, which doubled support to become the second-strongest party in the February election. The far-Right nationalists want to reestablish normal relations with Russia, including restarting gas imports, and would unwind Germany’s integration with Europe. It’s not just the political fringe though. The Social Democrats have had an ambivalent relationship to Moscow, even after Gerhard Schröder left the chancellery for well-paid roles in Russian boardrooms.

And compounding these political shortcomings is Germany’s fragmented counterintelligence system, a byproduct of the country’s federalist mindset. Unlike the British or American centralised services, Germany’s apparatus is divided across multiple agencies with overlapping jurisdictions. The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) monitors domestic threats, the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) handles foreign spying, and the Military Counterintelligence Service (MAD) focuses on defense-related espionage. Complicating matters, Germany has 16 regional intelligence services, charged with roles from counterespionage through to monitoring extremists. The result is bureaucratic inefficiencies and inter-agency rivalries that have left Germany vulnerable to foreign infiltration.

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These weaknesses were laid bare last year, when a German general inadvertently provided intelligence on the Taurus missile system on an unsecured Webex call. The information was swiftly leaked by Russian media. Former UK Defense Secretary Ben Wallace has warned that German intelligence and political networks are deeply infiltrated by Russian operatives. Carsten Breuer, inspector general of the German armed forces, called the division between internal and external security a “gateway” for hybrid Russian attacks.

Germany’s inability to take clear positions stems from decades of failing to create a cohesive national identity. As we have detailed, only a thin fabric holds the country together: a shared economic prosperity — known as Wohlstand für Alle — and the uninspiring concept of not being Nazis. As the economy sputters, and ethnic nationalism reemerges, the country is left with little consensus. This fragility was evident in Merz having to push his spending reforms through the parliament that was voted out of office in the February election. That’s because in the new Bundestag, the AfD and other fringe parties had enough votes to block constitutional changes. So even if he has the authorization to raise money, it’s based on a frail foundation that’s ill-suited for long-term military revival.

And the internal divisions run deep. The trauma of reunification left parts of the East with lingering affinities for Russia. The growing ranks of the poor see no reason to fight for a system that has left them behind. The wealthy are comfortable and detached with little interest in the suffering of the broader populace. Immigrants are often treated as outsiders, and show little loyalty to a nation that doesn’t fully embrace them. A broader societal reckoning is needed, and Germany is far from having it.

While Germany has been one of the prime beneficiaries of the postwar order, there is scant support for defending it. Despite rising concern about Russia, only about 15% of Germans support a significant increase in military spending or troop numbers, according to a recent study from the Center for Military History and Social Sciences of the Bundeswehr. While Germans strongly back NATO, they are less supportive of aiding the Baltics or taking a leadership role in the alliance, and most Germans under 50 say they wouldn’t take up arms to defend their country.

Young Germans, in particular, are opposed to the build-up, and are already more polarized than the rest of the population. In the latest election, the two strongest parties among voters under 25 were the Left-wing Die Linke, which is against Germany’s rearmament, and the Russia-friendly AfD. Both parties opposed Merz’s spending plan when it was pushed through the old Bundestag, driving a deeper wedge in society. The entire process of securing the billions for defense creates an existential risk for Merz.

So, at a time when young people face dwindling prospects from Germany’s sputtering economy and are being tasked with paying pensions for a growing number of retirees, a 69-year-old conservative is laying the groundwork for them to fight and potentially die for their country or some vague notion of Western ideals. That was already a foreign concept for a country that embraced demilitarization after reunification and deepened that post-security attitude after compulsory service was suspended in 2011.

Just how difficult it will be to win over the younger generation is evident in Ole Nymoen’s new book called Why I Would Never Fight for My Country. “Yes, I’d rather live less freely than be dead,” the young German writer told Berlin’s Tagesspiegel, summing up the apathy of his generation. For a country where militarism has brought only pain and suffering, there is no tradition of heroism. No “Greatest Generation” to invoke. No parades celebrating national pride. War memory is dominated by images of gas chambers and collective shame, not the societal effort that’s remembered in Britain.

That means when Merz says, “Germany is back,” he doesn’t mean it’s ready to fight. At best, he means it’s ready to spend, and he seems to be slowly coming to terms with the risks. “We are aware of people’s many concerns,” the conservative leader said recently as he battles to retain support. “A lot is at stake these days. It is about the future of Germany and Europe.”

Merz is right. There is a lot at stake. But without a drastic shift in the country’s culture and debate, Germany will simply be blowing hot air.

Mark Carney, however, understands the need for action. The new Canadian Prime Minister made two important observations last week. The first was to recognize that his nation’s mutual relationship with the US, based on trade, investment and defense, is over. It’s that straightforward. Then he went on to say something with a clarity I have yet to hear from any European leader: “We will need to dramatically reduce our reliance on the United States. We will need to pivot our trade relationships elsewhere. And we will need to do things previously thought impossible at speeds we haven’t seen in generations.”

The UK did attempt such a dramatic change with Brexit. It severed a similarly, deeply interwoven relationship. Britain had failed to make the right policy decisions to allow its membership of the EU work to its advantage. But it has subsequently failed to make the right policy choices in order to prosper outside the EU. Contrary to certain predictions, the economy has not collapsed. But it does continue to disappoint. Neither the UK, nor Europe, seems to have learned the lessons of Brexit.

Imagine if it had happened on a larger scale – imagine if the biggest country had left the club. If Germany had made the decision to leave, the entire EU would have had no choice but to reboot their model. The US disengagement from European security and economic cooperation is on even a bigger scale and there’s no sign of a reboot.

America has occupied a role in the world’s economic and financial architecture that nobody else wanted to fill. But Trump is determined to undo this. He has imposed trade tariffs on steel and aluminum; on cars; on China; and even on Mexico and Canada. No longer willing to be the lender of last resort to the global economy, he is already calling Wednesday “Liberation Day”, when an announcement on his so-called reciprocal tariffs is expected. These are already higher and more comprehensive than what the President promised during his election campaign.

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Not content with disrupting the global economy, Trump has also upended the transatlantic security relationship. NATO will remain formally operational. But the unconditional nature of NATO’s security guarantee, as enshrined in Article 5 of the treaty, is unrecognizably different from Trump’s transactional version. He has repeatedly said he would only supply protection to NATO members who are willing to meet agreed defense spending targets.

This was borne out in the leaked Signal messages, in which administration officials discussed classified military operations. The most worrying aspect of this for us is not the security breach. It is the absolute disdain they expressed for the Europeans. I, too, have criticized Europe’s failure to meet agreed defense spending targets. I have also characterized the European beggar-thy-neighbor mentality. But when Pete Hegseth, the US secretary of defense, calls Europeans “free-loaders”, and JD Vance says that he hates “bailing out Europe again”, then it isn’t a comment, it is now policy. The conversation may have ostensibly been about the US attack against the Houthis — but it was the Europeans who were really shot down.

So where do we go from here? First, Europe needs to stop reacting, and start acting. Reaction is for losers. The EU is gearing up to retaliate, but just look at what happened when Trump imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum. Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, immediately announced retaliatory EU tariffs. Trump shot back the next day with a tweet, in which he threatened 200% tariffs on European wines and champagne. Under pressure from France and Italy, Europe’s largest wine exporters, the Commission immediately went into retreat and postponed the retaliatory tariffs. This is the problem when you run large and persistent trade surpluses. You think you are strong and successful, but in reality, you are weak and dependent, and vulnerable to protectionist trade policies. A trade surplus means that there are a lot more European goods in the US than US goods in Europe. We are going to run out of things to tariff long before Trump does.

Europe is talking about placing tariffs on services. It has some leverage here. The US runs a surplus in services against Europe. So here, the tables are turned. But Europe’s goods surplus is twice as large as its services deficit. And we should remember that it is consumers who pay the tariffs. The US public might be less upset about a tariff on a German car because alternatives exist in the US market; meanwhile European consumers are completely invested in Apple’s franchise of services, for which there are no alternatives.

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It is not just the trade imbalances that favor the US. In extremis, America could pull the plug on Europe’s access to the US financial markets. The European economy would collapse overnight. They might talk about “strength and self-confidence” and insist, as Robert Habeck did, that they will not back down, but there is no scenario in which Europe, or Canada, can win a trade war against the US, not even aim for a draw.

But they could take action. They could do what Carney is suggesting and change their economic models. If the US is going to stop buying European goods, then Europe will have to buy its own. This means a calculated expansion of investment and demand. Most of this would have to come from the private sector — but the public sector would need to support this actively. It would require a complete recalibration of the bloc’s economy: lower taxes, possibly a temporary overshoot of public borrowing, but primarily a lot of deregulation to free up the entrepreneurial spirit. It is what the UK should have done after Brexit —and didn’t.

The EU, perhaps with Canada’s help, should start to promote the euro as a rival to the dollar. This would not be a marketing exercise. Again, it would require a reboot of how Europe conducts economic policy. Rather than running trade a surplus against the rest of the world, Europe should attempt to fill the role the US is vacating under Trump and start to import more than it exports.

All this is possible in theory. But, alas, I don’t see it happening. Just look at the backlash in the UK after the Labour government imposed a few minor welfare cuts, mostly to disability pay. Europeans enjoy comprehensive welfare systems, like Universal Credit in the UK, or the Citizens’ Income in Germany. The US spends far less on these sorts of social transfers than the Europeans do. Where the Europeans have housing benefits, the Americans have shelters and food stamps. Carney is right that the economic transformation required is beyond anything we have seen in generations.

I doubt that Europe’s coalition governments and fragmented parliaments have the political will and the majorities to deliver such change. The Europe I know is comfortable but divided — a combination not conducive to change. I think it is more likely that the Europeans will once again fail to rise to the occasion. They may find it more expedient to pay Trump the protection money he is asking for, as a quid pro quo for security guarantees. The Europeans will become poorer as the years pass, and the dollar will remain the leading global currency. In other words: Trump wins.

Those Europeans who complain the loudest about Trump are the same who will oppose the action needed to make us more independent from him. They will oppose higher defense spending, lower welfare spending, lower taxes, deregulation and prying open business cartels to allow new generations of entrepreneurs to take their place. At EU level, they will oppose the removal of internal barriers to the single market, and the reversal of Net Zero, corporate governance and the tech legislation which has become such a burden for European companies.

When Trump makes his big announcement on Wednesday, I expect the Europeans will either scream and make empty threats, or fall into depression. And they will all be focused on the man. But what they should do is get Trump out of the picture and start to take action.

Canada’s prime minister has the advantage of being one step ahead of Europe. He has accepted the enormity of the situation and is thinking about what next. The Europeans, though, are stuck in a dead-end littered with cans from the past, and unfortunately there’s nowhere left to kick them.

In much the same way, it would be unwise in the extreme for a country’s leaders to embroil their people in a distant foreign conflict without a confidence approaching certainty that their military, industrial, economic and political resources are matched to the great challenge ahead. Were one, like one of our ambitious renovators, proceeding from a state of near-dereliction, then the confidence that the necessary reserves are there to be drawn upon would need to be even greater still; the risks of disaster all the starker. For those granted the power of the British state and the trust of its people to make these decisions, as the analyst William D. James observes in his penetrating 2024 book British Grand Strategy in the Age of American Hegemony, these basic calculations come under the intimidating rubric of “grand strategy”.

James’ view is that the essential calculation of grand strategy is “proportionality”. Ultimately, James observes, grand strategy is simply “the sustainable balancing of means and ends, based on a prudent calculation of the state’s interests and the threats to those interests”. Strategy of this kind requires the identification of “interests or objectives that are commensurate with the state’s aggregate power (economic strength, technological prowess, and military capabilities), its geographic location, and the nature of its security environment”.

In contrast, a “disproportionate” grand strategy would be based on imprudent calculations. The result, James warns, would be “overstretch (pursuing overly ambitious goals given available means) or underreach (identifying overly conservative goals given the security environment)”. For Chamberlain not to have rearmed in the late Thirties, given the precarious security environment, would have been irresponsible underreach. Yet for Britain to have sent a military expedition to support plucky Finland against the Soviet Union in 1939, as politicians and military planners convinced themselves was a strategic necessity, would have been catastrophic overreach, given the balance of power that a combined Nazi and Soviet juggernaut could bring to bear.

Today, Britain’s grand strategy, in as far as it exists, is set by the Government’s Strategic Defense Reviews, such as the one the Labour government commissioned last year, due to be released next month. Yet as James notes these works of distilled Whitehall wisdom are often triumphs of the willing spirit over the weak flesh, ending up “thin on the main question: the dialectic between a country’s aims and its ability to meet them”. No man can read the future; even so, the defense reviews of recent years have fared poorly. All too often, planning assumptions are rapidly overtaken by real-world events. In this vein, the 2021 Integrated Review, a triumph of Johnsonian cakeism aiming to enshrine post-Brexit Global Britain into defense policy, vastly understated the approaching risks to Europe’s security. As James notes, “Just three months before Russian armor rolled into Ukraine, Prime Minister Boris Johnson boldly asserted that ‘the old concepts of fighting big tank battles on the European land mass are over.’” Instead, the driving concept of the Integrated Review was Britain’s “Indo-Pacific Tilt”, the goal of which was for Britain to establish “a greater and more persistent presence than any other European country” east of Suez.

While “the Tilt” caused much excitement among defense wonks, no one could say with any certainty what it actually meant or what the purpose was. As the Commons Defense Committee warned in 2023, “the UK’s regional military presence in the Indo-Pacific remains limited and the strategy to which it contributes is unclear”, given that “fundamentally UK Defense is already under-resourced for its role within NATO in the Euro-Atlantic, which is the core current and medium-term security challenge for the UK and Europe”. Without effectively doubling the size of the Royal Navy, the committee warned, and also defining Britain’s actual strategy in the Pacific and how to achieve it, “the UK may need to curb its ambitions in the region”. As one expert witness, the Professor of Strategic Foreign Policy Greg Kennedy, more bracingly phrased it, the Tilt “is a distraction and costly prestige exercise that will have no significant impact, apart from a fleeting appreciation from the USN (US Navy)… The costs of operating beyond the Straits of Hormuz are not profitable in any sense: pounds, politics or prestige.”

Reading Policy Exchange’s initial argument for the Tilt, one is struck by its divergence from the actually-existing world of 2025. Aside from the scheme’s essential paradox — that of preserving Britain’s trade links with the Pacific, in which China is by far our greatest trading partner, through a policy of confronting China — the proposal rests on planning assumptions that must now be re-examined from ground-up. “To fully globalize Britain,” it states, “the Indo-Pacific region… must become a priority in the UK’s overall foreign and security policies.” Yet what is the advantage of fully globalizing Britain in a world of frantic deglobalization, where over-extended supply chains outside national control have become a major source of strategic anxiety?

The Tilt commits Britain to a project of “reinforcing its commitment to a rules-based international order” by confronting global autocracy, yet this order not only does not exist but is anathema to the Trump administration, happily engaged in carving up the world into civilizational spheres alongside likeminded autocrats. The conceit was that committing the armed forces to a project beyond their abilities, to defend a fictional order that the United States wishes to firmly bury, would boost the Special Relationship; and this conceit must surely now be consigned to the dustbin of bad ideas. Not only are the ends beyond the existing means but those ends are illusory. By any definition this is the antithesis of grand strategy.

Yet the same can be said of the Integrated Review’s hurried, post-invasion of Ukraine update, the 2023 “Refresh”, which, while reverting to Europe as Britain’s prime source of strategic anxiety, rests upon two worryingly dubious planning assumptions. The Refresh states with unshakeable certainty that “NATO remains the bedrock of collective security”, and “The United States remains the UK’s most important ally”, two assertions, made just two years ago, that the entire ongoing European defense crisis now treats as false. With no certainty of success, European leaders are currently engaged in persuading America not to walk away from NATO for the five to 10 years it will take Europe to fill its role. Both the Integrated Review and the Refresh revolve around a “NATO first” defense vision, preservation of global free trade, and a “high cooperation and low-tension Arctic”, all of which now put the UK in direct confrontation with the US, not least because the greatest current threat to NATO’s Arctic possessions in Canada and Greenland is American annexation.

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Reading the expert testimony around the Refresh, we see the “dean of British strategic studies”, Sir Lawrence Freedman, tell Parliament in 2022 that we need not worry unduly about the Army’s current state of readiness, as “I find it hard to believe that we will be sending a division into battle because Russia is now a diminished power”. Instead, he asserts, “The hardest thing for us to get our heads around is the implications of a Russian loss.” Three years later, it is precisely the opposite fears now driving Whitehall’s mounting sense of strategic panic, with the same voices that condemned any talk of peace negotiations while Ukraine had the upper hand now condemning Russia for not coming eagerly to the table when it is winning.

While Freedman’s repeated analyses of Russia’s inevitable defeat in the intervening years have not weathered well, the aim here is not to mock him for his lack of a crystal ball. Rather, it is to underline the observable fact that Britain now finds itself in a situation where the resources at hand are vastly below its commitments, because those commitments were made through faulty analysis regarding achievable ends, available resources, and probable outcomes. To have presided over two failures of grand strategy in half a decade might be considered unfortunate. To bolt on a third, at this perilous juncture, could prove fatal.

There is an old Irish joke where a driver stops to ask a weathered countryman directions to a nearby town: the response, that “First off, I wouldn’t start from here,” characterises Britain’s current search for a grand strategy. In normal times, as James states, “Decisions over commitments, as well as military capabilities and force posture, are rarely taken at rapid speed”: yet, overshadowed by the Ukraine peace talks to which Britain is not a party, this is precisely what is happening. The last two documents setting out Britain’s grand strategy were made under the planning assumption that what was always probable, a second Trump term and waning commitment to European security, was unthinkable. That failure of imagination is now a strategic threat of the highest order.

Yet the terms of reference of the ongoing strategic defense review, which promises “a root and branch review of British defense” also pledges “a ‘NATO-first’ defense policy”, asserting that “NATO will remain the cornerstone of UK Defense…” Its guiding hand, Lord Robertson, confidently assured the Commons Defense Committee back in 2022 that the Ukraine war had led to a firm American recommitment to Europe and the Atlantic alliance. As ever, the British state’s incapacity to distinguish wishful thinking from reality remains its greatest strategic deficit. Just as the engine of tragedy is an inbuilt and overriding character flaw, Britain’s material shortages of men, munitions and industrial capacity all flow downstream from this willed blind spot.

For Britain to rearm now, given the perilous security environment, is essential. Regarding a land war in Europe, James accurately warns: “Not only does the UK currently lack the necessary depth for such an engagement, but its military-industrial base is ill-equipped to fill any gaps in the short-to-medium term.” Yet the basic work of ensuring economic, industrial and political security and stability necessary for such a deployment — the testing of foundations and fixing of the roof that precedes choosing wallpaper for the nursery — must come first. Despite two great societal and strategic shocks in 2020 and 2022, this work simply was not done, while Britain instead piled greater and greater foreign commitments onto an unstable base, in a frenetic, and still accelerating burst of directionless activity.

We must hope that the forthcoming review displays a ruthlessness Labour have yet to display in other areas. The Indo-Pacific Tilt, we may assume, will be consigned to the graveyard of Johnsonian optimism. As the Defense Secretary, John Healey, has rightly observed, there needs to be “a realism about military commitments into the Indo-Pacific” and a renewed focus on our near abroad. If America, as is its right, does not wish to underpin Europe’s security, then the British goal of supplementing US power at the furthest edge of the Earth can likewise be laid aside.

Since the Suez humiliation, a guiding principle of British strategy has been that “we must never allow ourselves to be put in a position where we have to make a final choice between the United States and Europe”. Yet events now appear to be forcing that choice, with the hurried quest for a role in the Ukraine settlement occluding cool, long-term strategic thinking. Britain is fortunate enough to be a collection of North Atlantic islands, far from Russia, whose home defense ought to be a trivial matter. Instead of distant long-term commitments that cannot currently be met, a genuine root-and-branch rethinking of British defense would radiate outwards, establishing a sense of security within Britain’s borders that few currently feel, before extending outwards to Britain’s Atlantic near abroad, and onwards only as far as material conditions allow. The Spring Statement will bring an increase in defense spending, but nothing that will be transformative. This is, perhaps, the work of decades.

Yet those most insistent of a British role at the forefront of world events are too often eager to overlook the growing insecurity and instability of the home front. As James observes, “The ability to mobilize and allocate resources depends on a stable domestic political environment.” Denmark’s social democratic Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen addressed this problem with rare frankness last week, telling Politico that while Russia remains Europe’s greatest threat, “security is also about what is going on in your local community… Do you feel safe where you live? When you go and take your local train, or when your kids are going home from school, or whatever is going on in your daily life?” Devoid of both domestic stability and expeditionary capacity, perhaps Britain’s current weakness is a hidden opportunity. The risks of underresourced adventurism are greater than the immediate risks of inward-looking withdrawal from world affairs. Until the structure is solid and watertight, the need to make harder and more expansive geostrategic choices can be deferred as a future luxury.

This marks a significant shift in the US approach to ending the conflict. Previously, Washington sought to pressure Ukraine into accepting a US- and Russia-brokered deal largely on Moscow’s terms. Now, America is attempting to strong-arm Russia into accepting a ceasefire as the first step toward a broader peace plan — warning that if Moscow refuses, “we’ll unfortunately know what the impediment is to peace here,” as Rubio put it.

Whether Russia will agree remains uncertain. Moscow has repeatedly stated that it does not view a ceasefire as viable without a broader framework for negotiations. But the parties are far from agreeing on this broader framework. Russia’s demands are clear: above all, legal recognition by Ukraine and the West of Russia’s annexed territories as part of the Russian Federation.

Yet, just days ago, Zelensky reiterated his opposition to any territorial concession, while all European leaders (except Orbán) outlined a “peace strategy” that involved boosting Ukraine’s military capabilities (including through the delivery of air defense systems, ammunition and missiles) in order to improve its position at the negotiating table and achieve a deal that “respects Ukraine’s independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity”. In other words, no territorial concessions. This would be followed by strong security guarantees in the form of European (ie, Nato) troops on the ground — a demand echoed by Zelensky but firmly rejected by Russia.

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It’s difficult to see why Moscow would accept a ceasefire under these conditions — especially as it continues to make gains on the battlefield. But that may be precisely the point from the perspective of Zelensky and European leaders: to “put the ball in Russia’s court”, anticipating that Moscow will reject the offer — thus allowing them to portray Russia as uninterested in peace. If so, it would mean that Trump has been cornered by the pro-war party.

Indeed, ever since Trump began negotiations with Putin to end the proxy war in Ukraine, European leaders have been doing everything in their power to derail his peace efforts, hijack the negotiations and prolong the conflict. After all, their insistence on a “just and lasting peace”, and their emphasis on Ukraine’s “territorial integrity”, is, in effect, a recipe for continuing the war under the guise of “peace through strength” — the same failed strategy that has landed Ukraine in this mess in the first place. Meanwhile, the Europeans have unveiled a sweeping rearmament plan, aimed at deterring Russia’s alleged expansionist ambitions — if not actually preparing for a war with Russia.

This is not the behavior of those genuinely seeking peace. The same can be said for Zelensky’s insistence on territorial integrity and European peacekeepers — both non-starters for Russia. Adding to the contradictions, just hours before the US-Ukraine meeting in Jeddah, Ukraine launched its largest drone strike yet on the Moscow region, killing at least three people — an unusual way to enter peace talks.

At this stage, the most probable outcome is therefore a continuation of the war — at least in the short term. This would be the worst possible way forward for Ukraine: the longer the war continues, the worse Ukraine’s position will become. However, from Zelensky’s standpoint, it makes sense. If the war were to end, his political career would likely be over — and, in a more extreme sense, his very life could be at risk. In other words, Ukraine’s interests aren’t necessarily the same as Zelensky’s.

The same goes for Europe. From the perspective of Europe’s core interests, it is entirely irrational. Far from protecting Europe, the continent’s military build-up could very well create the very danger it purportedly seeks to avoid. Russia has neither the means nor the intent to invade Europe, yet the continuation of the proxy war, and Europe’s rearmament plans, only increase the risk of escalation. This is the exact dynamic that we saw play out in the case of Nato’s eastward expansion, and then in Ukraine.

Yet for the current European leadership, admitting defeat in Ukraine would be a massive political blow — especially given the steep economic toll borne by ordinary Europeans. The war has arguably become the sole source of purpose for EU leaders; without it, their failures would become painfully obvious. Meanwhile, the massive increase in defense spending, and the escalation of tensions, will further empower military-industrial lobbies and solidify the elites’ grip over European society by undermining welfare states and continuing their stifling of democracy under the guise of “fighting Russian interference” — as we are seeing in Romania.

Escalating tensions with Russia also offers a chance to further centralize power within the supranational arm of the EU — the European Commission. As Politico reported: “National capitals fear European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen will exploit this crisis to extend Brussels’ powers to new areas and strengthen her influence vis-à-vis national governments.”

Yet it would be a mistake to view the current transatlantic rift solely through the lens of the diverging interests of the European and American leaderships. Beyond these differences, there may be deeper dynamics at play: a coordination between Europe, the Democratic establishment and the liberal-globalist faction of the US permanent state — the web of entrenched interests spanning American bureaucracy, security state and military-industrial complex. These networks all have a shared interest in derailing peace talks and disrupting Trump’s presidency.

The US has, of course, a long history of political influence in Europe. Over the decades, it has built strong institutional ties with the state apparatuses of Western European countries, particularly among their defense and intelligence services. Additionally, the US establishment exercises considerable influence over European public discourse through mainstream English-language media outlets and think tanks. These organizations, such as the German Marshall Fund, the National Endowment for Democracy, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Atlantic Council, help shape the political narratives that dominate European society — and indeed today are at the forefront of pushing the idea that “no agreement is better than a bad one.”

Its origins lie in the Cold War, with the US actively promoting European integration as a bulwark against the Soviet Union. In other words, the EU, especially through its earlier iterations, has always been wedded to Atlanticism, and this has only intensified post-1991. This is why the EU’s technocratic establishment — specifically the European Commission — has historically been more aligned with America than European national governments. Ursula von der Leyen, dubbed “Europe’s American president”, is a prime example of this alignment, working tirelessly to maintain the EU’s commitment to America’s hawkish geopolitical strategy, particularly regarding Russia and Ukraine.

A key tool in this alliance has always been NATO, which today plays a key role in countering Trump’s efforts to shift the US approach towards Russia. In this context, Europe’s stance, though ostensibly aimed at Trump, stems from the recognition that elements within the US ruling class strongly oppose Trump’s overtures to Putin, harbor deep animosity toward Russia, and view the President’s threats to disengage from NATO and undermine other pillars of the post-war order as a strategic challenge to the systems that have upheld American hegemony for decades.

In other words, what on the surface appears to be a clash between Europe and the US may actually be, in a more fundamental sense, a struggle between different factions of the US empire — and, to a large degree, within the US establishment itself — waged through European proxies. After all, many of today’s European leaders have strong connections to these networks.

This could explain the “irrational” policies of those leaders, at least from the perspective of Europe’s objective interests — first, their blind support of the US-led proxy war in Ukraine, and now their insistence on continuing the war at all costs. According to this telling, the objectives of the transatlantic establishment appear quite clear: to demonize Trump, portraying him as a “Putin appeaser”; and to stoke European anxieties over their military vulnerability, including by inflating the Russian threat, in order to push the public into accepting increased defense spending and the continuation of the war for as long as possible.

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Neither side in this transatlantic civil war truly has Europe’s interests at heart. The Trumpian faction deems Europe as an economic rival, with Trump himself repeatedly criticizing the EU, calling it an “atrocity” designed to “screw” America. Just last week, he announced plans to impose 25% tariffs on European goods “very soon”. On the other hand, the liberal-globalist faction views Europe as a critical front in the proxy war against Russia.

In this context, a scenario in which Europeans prolong the war in Ukraine — at least in the short term — could be seen as a compromise between the two factions. The US can extricate itself from the Ukrainian quagmire while pursuing rapprochement with Russia and shifting its focus to China and Asia-Pacific, all while placing the blame for the failure to achieve peace squarely on Zelensky and the Europeans.

Meanwhile, Europe’s continued involvement in the war ensures its ongoing economic and geopolitical separation from Russia, and reinforces its continued economic dependence on the US — especially in the context of its defense spending hike, much of which would flow to the US military-industrial complex. At the same time, the European representatives of the liberal-globalist establishment would continue to use the Russian threat to entrench their power. Overall, this arrangement could be seen as acceptable by both sides.

In other words, as the geopolitical researcher Brian Berletic has suggested, what is often presented in the media as an unprecedented “transatlantic rift” may, in fact, be more of a “division of labor” in which the Europeans maintain the pressure on Russia while the US turns its attention to China. What’s worse, the scenario wouldn’t change that much even if some kind of peace deal were eventually worked out. Europe would bear both the cost and the responsibility for post-war security arrangements, while remaining locked in a new Cold War with Russia — all while the United States secures its control over Ukraine’s resources.

The long-term effects of this strategy would leave Europe in a perpetual state of instability, its resources drained by ongoing defense spending and its political autonomy further undermined. The true losers in this arrangement would be the people of Europe — and, of course, Ukraine — who will continue to bear the burden of this geopolitical tug-of-war.

The absurdity of the European position was perhaps best captured in its full hubris last year by the historian and writer Anne Applebaum when she won a prestigious German peace prize. During her acceptance speech, she maintained that victory was more important than peace, asserting that the West’s ultimate goal should be regime change in Russia. “We must help Ukrainians achieve victory, and not only for the sake of Ukraine,” she said. “If there is even a small chance that military defeat could help end this horrific cult of violence in Russia, just as military defeat brought an end to the cult of violence in Germany, we should take it.” This is the Second World War model in its purest form.

But most wars do not fit that pattern, they generally end with complex peace deals. A far better model for the current conflict would be the Thirty Years’ war that raged in central Europe from 1618 until 1648, and which pitched the Holy Roman Empire against the protestant towns and municipalities supported by Sweden and the Netherlands.

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That war did not end with glorious victory for any of the involved parties. But it did end with one of the most important peace treaties of all time: the Peace of Westphalia. One of the important principles it established was that of non-interference in other countries’ domestic policies. It laid the foundation of the modern nation state and marked the beginning of a golden age of European politics, art and science.

Russia’s conflict with the West has gone on for almost as long. Vladimir Putin has waged war in Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine and Syria in an attempt to regain those spheres of influence lost after the breakdown of communism in 1990. And without some sort of peace deal, Putin is certain to keep pressing the Russian advantage, with a strategy that may yet involve the Baltic states and Poland.

It is dangerous for Europe to insist, instead, on victory. For while Trump has talked a lot of nonsense about Zelensky and the war, he is right in one critical aspect. Without America, there is no road to victory for Ukraine. This is not primarily about weapons, ammunition, and financial aid, but about satellite support and intelligence. If the US were to switch off the satellites and stop the flow of information, the Europeans have no way of plugging the gap. Without the US, it’s over for Ukraine.

Not only has Europe failed to grasp this, it has also failed to map out a strategic path to victory. Politicians, journalists and academics parrot meaninglessly, that Europe will do whatever it takes. Or they assert that Putin will blink first, if only the war goes on for a little while longer. Or that the Russian economy will collapse as sanctions take their toll. But solidarity is not a strategy. Virtue signaling is not a strategy. Sanctions are not a strategy if the primary goal is to minimize the pain to ourselves.

A strategy is something that is costed, politically stress-tested, and that responds to different scenarios. A strategy has primary targets, together with an agreed definition of second-best outcomes. A strategy also has a clear exit route mapped out. Europe has nothing.

A credible path for a Ukrainian victory would have started three years ago with a massive expansion of military spending by all European NATO countries. There should have been an immediate expansion of military industrial capacity, which has been depleted in most western countries, and a concerted political campaign to organize trade-offs between other spending priorities and defense.

But Germany, France and the UK, those European countries which matter most, didn’t act back then and now all lack the fiscal headroom to corral such an approach. We have not figured out how we can support Ukraine and stay solvent. The most desperate idea has been to plunder Russia’s $300m in foreign reserves, which are currently frozen. Clearly this hasn’t been thought through. If that were to happen, the risk is that Euroclear, the Brussels-based financial depository where the reserves are held, could face a slew of lawsuits and even bankruptcy. The EU would be forced to spend tens of billions to recapitalize the company — potentially costing more than the aid to Ukraine. The trust in Europe as a safe place for assets would be lost and we could end up with a full-blown financial crisis.

Without a costed exit strategy now, and as America turns away, how then is the EU to defend itself in the future? Even if the EU were to set itself an agreed trajectory towards military spending of 3% of GDP by 2030, and to pool their procurement to make defense spending more efficient, I struggle to see how the continent can find the unity and determination to replace the US as guarantor for our security. Kaja Kallas, High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy, laughably exemplified Europe’s myopic attitude to strategy when she said “the free world needs a new leader”. This is preposterous, typical of European grandstanding. The EU, with its veto rights, its qualified majority voting and the explicit exclusion of defense from the single market, is structurally unsuited for foreign and security policy in a Hobbesian world. We couldn’t be further from a Westphalia moment.

We have been here before. Angela Merkel talked about European strategic independence from the US in 2018, after a disastrous meeting with Trump. But she did not put any political capital behind the idea because she did not want to pay the political price.

A structural increase in defense spending would require sacrifice. The US spends 3.5% of its GDP on defense. In 2023, the 27 EU countries spent an average of 1.6% of EU GDP. This gap of almost 2 percentage points arises because we Europeans spend the money on other things. Germany has a gold-plated social system. People are entitled to a basic citizens’ income whether they work or not. Germany has also given itself a budget of €150bn for the energy transition. The US, meanwhile, has food stamps, and no net zero policy. You cannot do it all. There are necessary trade-offs involved which the Europeans have not even begun to discuss.

In their desperation, though, the Europeans are now talking about funding an increase in defense spending through debt. This is economically insane. For that reason, it will also fail to achieve its declared goal — to deter an enemy attack. The credibility of our security policies depends on a willingness to finance them. Defense spending should be funded through current revenue. If you do try to do this through debt, the bond vigilantes are going to get you before Putin does.

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Putin must surely see that Europe is desperate. The UK only managed to increase its 2027 military spending target from 2.3% to 2.5% by cutting its foreign aid budget. Meanwhile, France’s divided politics has left the country on an unsustainable fiscal path, even as the Germans are grappling with their own fiscal rules. This molly-coddled, self-absorbed Europe is not about to fight and win a war against Russia. We applaud speeches calling for regime change in Moscow. But we want someone else to do it for us just like in the Second World War. The difference is that back then, America was willing to play a progressively stronger part. This time, the US is in open retreat.

If the Europeans were smart, they would take Zelensky to one side, without the cameras, and tell him that the game is up, and that he should cut a deal with Trump now. They should insist that what the President was trying to negotiate before the Oval Office showdown is as good as anything Ukraine will ever get — the minerals deal will keep the US engaged in the besieged nation’s future. For now, though, it seems clear that Europe and Ukraine are currently asking for more than Trump is willing to concede, especially since the White House is convinced that they aren’t ready for peace.

Seeking victory, Zelensky walked straight into a trap in the White House last week. He may have been more at ease with his European friends in London who cajoled him with warm words and big promises. But their shared illusion that there is a path to victory will inevitably lead to a more dangerous future for us all.