Admittedly, tensions had been rising for over a month as politicians and fascists politicised a murder at a wedding to sow hatred and division. But nobody expected it to come to this. How could a European city so rich in culture and on the road to development be torn apart by such brutal violence? Overnight, Sarajevo had become a byword for the dangers of ethnic division, ultra-nationalistic fervour, tribalism and wanton extremism.

The events of the past few days in the United Kingdom reveal a number of familiar traces. Southport has become synonymous with Sarajevo, in the sense that, once again, under the watchful sun a small extremist minority is seeking to politicise a brutal tragedy and turn it into something whose consequences reach across the country. This is not protest; it’s about violence, terror and a naked appeal to intimidation.

The idea of a civil war has traditionally referred to an internal conflict where one armed group seeks to wrestle power from the state. While some may brush this aside by suggesting a civil war is not something that the British do, we should not be so complacent. Remember, after all, that alongside the American version, the English civil war between 1642-51 remains one of the most instructive. As a result of this very British version of civic slaughter, the modern theory of sovereignty appeared in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. Not only did it put forward the now-familiar mantra that there is no politics without security and no security without the state, it also set in place the fundamental understanding — later picked up by Max Weber — that only the state can engage in legitimate violence.

What marks a civil war from this perspective is a contesting of that very monopoly and the state’s right to use force for the preservation of order. That the police forces who appear on the front lines often become the first targets is not then incidental. But where is the line that needs to be crossed so that civil tensions become a war? Since the Seventies, critical thinkers such as Michel Foucault sought to invert the logic of civil war to explain how states are always waging a kind of silent battle upon minority groups. Through this, notions such as structural violence emerged. Presenting a civil war as a process — one that is not always about widespread slaughter but can also be measured in terms of a broader account of violence and social tensions — does have some merit. The danger with such reasoning, however, is that if everything is a civil war, nothing is.

If Sarajevo made explicit how the new emerging contours of civil war would be written in ethnic terms, it had already been shown in Somalia, Mexico and later Rwanda how the very idea of a civil war was no longer bound to single movements whose sole aim was the capture of the state. Such unbounded violence went global with 9/11, which revealed the utter nihilism of certain ethnic doctrines. It also showed how the lines between race, religion and political beliefs are far from homogenised.

Political violence has since been very much driven by ethnic division, which speaks to a problem that is far more expansive than reductive explanations that focus on race. Of course, there are some overlaps between race and ethnicity, but they are not mutually exclusive. A failure to recognise this means we fail to properly understand the causes and the solutions.

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Three decades on from the violence in Yugoslavia, the world is undeniably a different place. The UK political landscape is notably a world away from how it looked in the early Nineties, divided as we have become by all the social media tensions that, as recent days have shown, actually makes violence easier to provoke by non-uniformed and misinforming online generals. This has been matched by the Americanisation of our political system, where performativity — including the performativity of violence and outrage — has replaced substance and where the complex lines of identity and ethnicity have been reduced to crass caricatures based on neat categories of race, sex, gender and whatever other category we care to impose.

The category of race, for example, in itself tells us little about a person’s privileges or political and religious beliefs. That is why counter-narratives around “whiteness” are also unhelpful here; just as they are useless in explaining why many black and Asian people in the US support Donald Trump, or why Enrique Tarrio ,who is of Afro-Cuban descent, became the chairman of the neo-fascist organisation Proud Boys. We should not forget their cos-play riot on Capitol Hill, for what that pantomime showed was such movements today really don’t expect to be able to take on the state. Instead, their enemy are other Americans who have a different vision of what being American actually looks like.

Unlike in Britain, the idea of a possible civil war there has been part of mainstream discussion in America for some time now. Indeed, what marked out Alex Garland’s compelling film Civil War was precisely its plausibility. Garland revealed one of the truisms of a civil war, where its experience is never universally shared. A civil war has never meant that every street is a battlefield. The violence is always concentrated. Witnessing the streets ablaze in Belfast at the weekend should remind us of this. That city, which for many impartial observers looked on the precipice of a civil war for a number of decades, was also liveable even as the ethnic divisions required the physical construction of walls. Belfast also shows how the lines of ethnic divisions are never static but take on new forms.

How should we respond to it? Many have dismissed those engaging in the weekend’s violence by emphasising its thuggery and blaming the likes of Tommy Robinson or Nigel Farage. While I sympathise with this instinct — the criminality was parasitic and abhorrent — it shouldn’t come at the expense of understanding that it was also carried out in the name of a certain ethno-nationalistic vision. So, just as we asked “why do they hate us?” in the aftermath of 9/11, so we must now ask “why is there so much hatred in Britain?”.

A staple explanation in studies of global conflicts since the mid-Nineties has been the idea that poverty is the greatest single cause for violence. Indeed, the edict that underdevelopment was dangerous has been advanced by every single international organisation and humanitarian group tasked with mitigating conflict and violence. Certainly, areas of Britain are desperately poor at the moment. And they have been suffering from the fallouts of years of austerity, the impact of Brexit and the costs of the Covid lockdown. That the anger is spilling out from those areas is cause enough for deeper reflection. But we should not fall into the trap of reducing everything to a question of economy.

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One of the best books written on the rise of extremism and how a small minority can change the course of history is Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism, which was published as Hitler was coming to power in 1933. Reich encouraged us to move beyond simplistic explanations for fascism’s rise. Instead, he asked us to question the fascist that exists within each of us. We can all learn to desire power and violence, and seek to belittle, shame and intimidate others. Fascism as such doesn’t solely reside on the Right or the Left of the political spectrum. Any identity or ethnicity can become fascistic, just as any identity or ethnicity can become peaceful and welcoming.

Despite the protestations of radical moral puritans, then, there is nothing inherently fascistic about Englishness, the flag of St George, or any other symbolic accoutrements. It is instead about how they are mobilised and whether they are appropriated in the service of violent means.

History needs heeding. As Reich showed, once fascistic desires are liberated, that is when politics tends to get reduced to questions of survival. We saw this repeatedly played out over the weekend as narratives of survival, from the protection of our children to the preservation of a way of life, resulted in the open assault upon police officers and burning of libraries and advice centres. Such calls to violence thrive in febrile moments when questions of sovereignty are translated into everyday concerns. And more dangerous still, the freeing of that violence creates the very conditions in which rigid positions have to be chosen.

Thankfully, Britain is not an armed society, and its violence is mostly contained. But that shouldn’t mean that can’t change. Across the world, civil wars have been raging in the name of revitalised ethnic divisions, which have only required a single spark to set entire societies and nations ablaze. Britain is contending with these forces, and they could become much worse. It would be foolish to believe that we are too civilised to ever let that happen. The potential for civil war is written into the DNA of all ethnic conflicts — and, like a sleeping demon, once its fires are lit there’s no knowing where it will spread.

The Party of God had begun striking Israel in “solidarity” with Hamas and has not stopped since. But it was always careful not to escalate. Israeli security sources told me that the strikes were fastidious in their proximity to the border, delivering fatal payloads but also a clear message: Hezbollah would respond, but did not want war with Israel. This thesis was confirmed when the group’s leader Hassan Nasrallah gave one of his famous “bunker sermons” in which he congratulated Hamas on a masterful operation — not least the manner in which it had been absolutely and unequivocally carried out without the knowledge of him or his party of thugs. He said this more than once, in one form or another.

More to the point, pretty much every country in the world — even Iran — wanted to avoid an all-out regional war. But Israel was stuck. Hezbollah had de facto veto over daily life in northern Israel — something no sovereign state can allow — but Jerusalem had little choice to restrain itself.

A miserable stasis held. Until now.

Israel has seen civilians killed once more; and once more, it is enraged. Saturday’s rocket strike on a football pitch in the Golan Heights killed 12 Druze Israelis, all aged between 10 and 20. In response, the Israeli security cabinet has given authorisation to prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defence minister Yoav Gallant to decide when and how Israel will retaliate. Matters are not helped by the IDF’s conclusion that Hezbollah struck using an Iranian Falaq-1 rocket. Tehran cannot be divorced from the 12 Israeli deaths over the weekend — the crisis is regional.

In committing this atrocity, Hezbollah has made a big mistake, not least because it upended its own long-standing strategy toward Israel. Broadly speaking, Hezbollah bases its policy of force on a so-called “deterrent equation”. This is, according to the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Center, built on four objectives: one, proactive attacks on Israeli targets; two, attacks in response to IDF offensive operations; three, attacks on key Israeli targets and infrastucture; and four, increasing the range of attack in response to Israeli attacks. The idea, outlined in May by the head of the Hezbollah faction in the Lebanese Parliament, is to keep Israel from “deluding itself into thinking it was capable of attacking Lebanon”.

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Above all, the “deterrent equation” is based on rules around the use of force, which primarily limit attacks to those on Israeli military targets within a range of 3-5km from the border. They also seek to kill soldiers and destroy military capabilities, while trying to avoid harming civilians. This preference, of course, exists only in theory; when Hezbollah fires rockets into Israeli cities, it knows that civilians are likely to be struck — especially given the sheer amount of ordnance it sends in.

As the fighting between the two sides has continued, Hezbollah has sought to tweak the “equation” by gradually escalating when it deems the situation appropriate — either through longer-range weapons during, say, a peak in the Gaza war or following the killing of one of its commanders. With regards to Gaza, its official position is that it will only stop attacking Israel when the war ends.

Unsurprisingly, Israel’s response had gradually taken shape in recent days. Reports on Monday claimed that two people died and three were injured in an Israeli drone strike outside the southern Lebanese town of Shaqra. Another was also killed and four wounded in Israeli airstrikes on a car and motorcycle driving between the towns of Mays al-Jabal and Shaqra. Netanyahu, for his part, has promised “harsh” retribution.

Strip away much of the geopolitical and strategic rhetoric and Hezbollah’s “equation” comes down to a simple tactic: mirroring. If Israel attacks deeper into Lebanon, Hezbollah will strike deeper into Israel. If Israeli strikes hit Lebanese civilians, Hezbollah will do the same south of the border. Indeed, Lebanese institutions demand it. Following an Israeli strike that killed three militants at the start of the war, Ibrahim al-Amin, the editor of the Hezbollah-affiliated daily al-Akhbar, wrote that the group should reasonably expect to act according to the “equation of symmetry”, which required it to carry out a military operation that would result in the death of at least three Israeli soldiers.

Yet now, Hezbollah finds itself in a deeply precarious situation. The group initially denied Saturday’s strike — perhaps unsurprisingly given that they killed not Jewish soldiers but Druze children. They realise that this is bad for them. Nasrallah must also know that the blame for further escalation now lies with Hezbollah: the consensus is that the group fired heavy rockets at an IDF base on Mount Hermon, above Majdal Shams, but that one of the rockets overshot the target.

During the 2006 Israel-Lebanon War, which began after a cross-border Hezbollah attack led to the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers and the killing of eight others, Israel devastated large parts of south Lebanon. Afterwards, Nasrallah declared that, had he known that Israel would have reacted so ferociously, he never would have countenanced such a raid. Yet he also repeatedly boasted that Hezbollah had “won” the war. (As a friend in Beirut later remarked to me: “Any more ‘victories’ like that and we won’t have a country left.”)

More than anything, the conflict taught Hezbollah one overarching lesson, and it is the bedrock of the “deterrent equation”: do whatever you can to deter and inflict pain on Israel — but always keep it below the threshold of all-out war, because that you cannot win.

Today, however, that strategy is now at risk. When I returned to Israel early in the year, a government official told me that the elements within the IDF leadership were keen to take out Hezbollah. No longer, they reasoned, could they allow the northern part of their country to be held hostage to a terror group. No longer would they accept the north being emptied of its people. They understood the scale of the worldwide opprobrium that would follow. But the alternative — to live with a terror army perennially on your border — is, they concluded, worse. What other nation would accept that? And besides, the world has already turned against Israel — so why not take the opportunity to try to remove the country’s greatest terror threat?

One might think that the trajectory of the war against Hamas would give the IDF pause for thought. But this is post-October 7 Israel: an even angrier and traumatised nation. And the threat is undoubtedly very real. How many rockets should a country “accept”? How many civilians should be killed, before it responds with full force?

On Saturday, Hezbollah may have given them the green light they need. And if Israel escalates, Hezbollah — by its own doctrine — will be forced to escalate in turn. Then there is probably only one way this will end: in catastrophe, for Israel and Lebanon, and for the civilians on both sides.

If there were fissures, they had been smoothed over: deviant Hungary, long a blemish on the pact’s public-facing unanimity, had agreed not to block military aid to Ukraine provided it would not have to partake in any Nato operations there. All members of the alliance were in total agreement on the basic facts of the war, Stoltenberg insisted. Under Biden’s steadfast leadership, he asserted, the world had united behind Ukraine.

The self-mythologising PR was fitting for a summit that was also the 75^th anniversary of the alliance’s founding. And 75 years after the 12 original signatories of the North Atlantic Treaty gathered in Washington to pledge collective defence, the alliance and the world look very different. NATO has always cast itself as a moral arbiter, disseminating “values” and ideology, while simultaneously fostering member states’ dependency on the United States and securing American hegemony over Europe. But this vassalisation has reached a new stage since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The invasion brought a Cold War alliance of questionable 21st-century utility roaring back to life; the long-time neutral holdouts of Sweden and Finland have even opted to join. During the Cold War, NATO counted many of its most ardent critics among left-wing opponents of US militarism; today, its most prominent skeptics are on the Right, and include Donald Trump.

Small wonder, then that American domestic politics loomed large. Held just days ahead of the Republican National Convention, the gathering was timed perfectly to allow Nato leadership to ensure one of their key points for this year — that many hitherto freeloading allies had stepped up their defence spending — would be fresh in the minds of its Republican critics. Back during the now infamous 2018 summit, Trump lambasted flunkies for not paying their fair share and even threatened to withdraw the US from the alliance. This year, though, Nato leaders could boast that at least 20 out of 32 member states would be spending 2% of their GDP on defence. Both anxious Atlanticists and Nato sceptics would be reassured that the alliance was, as Stoltenberg said, adaptive and agile; it would endure, regardless of dramatic changes in political leadership in its member states. And it was responsive both to events on the ground and internal criticism.

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But efforts to make the event about the steadiness and durability of Nato — a rare fulcrum of stability in an unpredictable world — were challenged by mounting concerns about the cognitive fitness of 81-year-old President Biden. Despite the usual pomp and pathos, along with attempts to pander to Trump Republicans, inevitably, it became a referendum on Biden’s age. Then, during the brief interlude between the summit and the start of the Republican National Convention, an assassination attempt on Trump’s life made it clear that there would be no assurances forthcoming about Nato’s future, that nothing would be predictable.

Things had begun on a triumphant note, in the Mellon Auditorium in Washington, where the North Atlantic Treaty was signed in 1949. There was no shortage of grandiosity on display. “The most successful military alliance in history”, claimed Stoltenberg, had now become the longest-lasting — outliving even the Delian League of ancient Greek city-states. The auditorium looked like Nato’s holy temple, with Biden describing the US commitment to the Alliance as a “sacred obligation”. His performance was better than at last month’s debate, but it wasn’t reassuring. His eyes were glued to the teleprompter as he seesawed back and forth between jingoistic shouting and barely audible, indecipherable mumbling. He managed to muddle through.

The President’s lapses of memory and coherence weren’t such  a surprise. Earlier this year, Biden twice referred to dead European leaders — former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and former French President François Mitterrand — when referring to recent discussions with foreign counterparts. At the summit, Biden did not mistake contemporary leaders for those long dead, but he did confuse allies with enemies, calling Ukrainian President Zelensky “Putin” and Kamala Harris “Vice President Trump”.

With Biden faltering so badly, the spectre of a new Nato-sceptic Trump administration drew closer, prompting some of the more hawkish member states to tailor their talking points to address the Republicans. At one panel composed of the three top defence officials from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, participants spoke in a language they knew the Trump camp would understand: golf. “Nato is a club,” Estonian Defense Minister Hanno Pevkur said. “When you have club rules, then you respect the rules and you expect that everyone will also respect the rules. When you pay your fee in the golf club, you can play. It doesn’t matter how big is your wallet.” They hammered away at the idea of all those members who were now spending 2% of GDP on defence, hoping to convince Republicans that Europe was now pulling its weight. And yet, as international relations theorist Patrick Porter told me, this “magical 2% figure” was arrived at with full US commitment in mind. Europeans are still avoiding the difficult question: if America scales back its commitments in Europe under a Trump presidency — many in his camp advocate for a “pivot to Taiwan” and a shift of focus to the Indo-Pacific — who will fill in the gap?

In fact, much of the summit did seem to be a carefully calibrated pitch to America — or at least those Nato sceptics at the RNC. Kosovo’s Prime Minister Albin Kurti, whose country is a Nato aspirant, wrote a front-page op-ed in the New York Times with the title “Don’t Doubt NATO, it Saved My People”, outlining the role the alliance played in ending the Kosovo conflict in 1999. Meanwhile, Latvia’s President Edgars Rinkevics addressed the criticism that the US does much more than Europe to support Ukraine, claiming that in truth, it was the other way around. “It’s also very important to explain to the American public,” Rinkevics said in a speech on Tuesday. European Atlanticists fear an American retreat from the continent under Trump, who has complained that Europe has given too little aid to Ukraine, while the United States has given too much.

The contentious subject of Ukraine’s future membership in Nato was the other big theme of the summit. Germany and the United States are unwilling to extend full Nato membership while Ukraine is still at war with Russia. Instead, they say, Ukraine should be granted a “bridge to Nato”, a nebulous promise that fell far from aspirations of full membership that Ukraine has been waiting for since 2008. However, some felt the language of the communique was made stronger by the insertion of the word “irreversible”: apparently the bridge to Nato can only be crossed in one direction. But the Ukraine section of the Washington Summit Declaration, published last week, was ambiguous about its future. “We reaffirm that we will be in a position to extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the Alliance when Allies agree and conditions are met.”

Meanwhile, Ukraine and its supporters in Eastern Europe are adamant that the country be granted membership, or at least a timetable for it. Only full membership, they claim, can deter Russia. Some suggest that Article 5 security guarantees — the provision that states that an attack on one member state is an attack on all — be introduced incrementally, first on territory already under Ukrainian command, and eventually under those parts of the country Zelensky’s forces win back.

But critics counter that admitting Ukraine risks triggering all-out war with Russia. They contend that membership would make it far more difficult to negotiate a ceasefire or engage in peace talks, since Russia has long insisted that Ukraine in Nato is a “red line”. And they point out that, contra the exalted Atlanticist rhetoric surrounding the current war, Nato has no intention of fighting for Ukraine. And if Nato is not committed to entering the war now, as Ukraine is fighting for its life, then it certainly isn’t going to make any promises about some undefined point in the future. They suggest a dialing down of the rhetoric and scaling of expectations. In fact, dozens of foreign policy experts signed a controversial letter ahead of the summit urging caution. “If Ukraine were to join NATO, Russia would have reason to doubt the credibility of NATO’s security guarantee — and would gain an opportunity to test and potentially rupture the alliance. The result could be a direct NATO-Russia war or the unraveling of NATO itself.”

Notwithstanding membership, Ukraine won’t leave the summit empty-handed. Nato has pledged five strategic air defence systems over the coming year, as well as F-16 fighter jets. These will be donated under the proviso that they can’t be used to strike targets inside Russia. Along with the equipment, a new Ukraine command, staffed with 700 employees, will be established in Germany, and Nato will deputise a senior representative to Kyiv. Ukraine will also receive at least €40 billion of assistance within the next year. The Alliance is also looking to “Trump proof” its assistance for Ukraine and will take over coordination of military aid for Ukraine through the Ukraine Defence Contact Group, a role hitherto played by the US Department of Defence. This reorganisation was made to ensure that Ukraine will continue to receive military aid, even if a new Trump administration decides to cut it.

With Biden’s cognitive state drawing all media attention, some significant developments received far less scrutiny. There was, for example, a joint-statement by the US and German governments announcing that the US would, in 2026, begin “episodic deployments” to Germany of long-range missiles, including SM-6, Tomahawk, and developmental hypersonic weapons. Some of these weapons have a range that would have seen them banned under the defunct Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, signed by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987. Russia’s response to news of the planned deployments was dramatic. “Without nerves, without emotions, we will develop a military response, first of all, to this new game,” deputy minister, Sergei A. Ryabkov, told Interfax. But what was most remarkable about news of the imminent deployment was how closely it echoed events of the Cold War — but with one glaring difference. During the early Eighties, the United States began deploying Pershing II missiles to West Germany. The news was met with deep anger by the European Left. More than one million people took to the streets in West Germany as weeks of demonstrations also swept through Paris, Stockholm, Rome, and London.

Today, in contrast, the announcement was met with comparative silence. This is doubtless down to the fact that the Left is being slowly absorbed into the Nato project. All four of Nato’s newest member states — Sweden, Finland, North Macedonia and Montenegro — opted to join with Social Democratic-led governments in power. Emblematic of this shift are the German Greens. One former party leader, Petra Kelly, was a star of the anti-missile protests in West Germany, yet some 40 years on, the Greens are now among the most hawkishly Atlanticist in Europe. Meanwhile, many peace initiatives and calls for a ceasefire in Ukraine have come from the Right. Hungary’s Viktor Orban has been on a self-styled “peace mission” in recent weeks, visiting Moscow, Kyiv, and Trump in Mar-a-Lago in an effort to bring the warring parties to the negotiating table. Orban and his ilk are not the dedicated anti-war activists of the Cold War. They support conflict; they just don’t like this one, which they view as an unwinnable liberal pet project. But broad swathes of the Left have also proved inconsistent: they may say they dislike the foreign policy of the United States, but they have uncritically embraced a military alliance that ensures its hegemony over Europe.

As Biden stumbled through his final, possibly terminal, press conference, he did manage to make one clear point: that Trump and his ilk were a threat to Nato. Why the average American voter should care as much as the tbose assembled in Washington, he did not say. And while the eyes of the world watched this very public demonstration of his vulnerability, it was clear that the future of Nato and the entire transatlantic order will be determined by who is elected president in November. The summit that was supposed to be a celebration of the alliance’s stability and longevity was instead a testament to its frailty.

Unfortunately for them, this is at odds with the electorate: a new poll of British voters by UnHerd, conducted by Focaldata, reveals a notable realism towards foreign policy that is not reflected in either of the main party platforms. This is just one of the big issues facing the nation that isn’t being properly interrogated in the general election campaign, and it is the focus of the first instalment in a polling series that will seek to understand the views of UnHerd Britain.

Eighty years on from D-Day, our headline finding is a clear scepticism towards foreign adventures and an unambiguous focus on British national interest, a view which markedly differs from the prevailing liberal interventionism of past decades. A majority of voters (52%) believe that “British foreign policy should be focused on what is in Britain’s interests, even if that is not in other countries’ interests”, compared with only 30% who believe that “British foreign policy should try to make the world a better place, even if it has costs for Britain”.

UK voters: foreign policy should be based on national self-interest

Which of the following comes closer to your view?

This more “realist” option is preferred by overwhelming majorities of Reform and Conservative voters, but is also the preference of people planning to vote Labour, at 45% to 36%. Only Liberal Democrat and Green voters tend the other way, preferring a more idealist foreign policy.

When it comes to overseas conflicts in general, only 7% of voters think that Britain should be more engaged than it currently is, while 44% think it should be less engaged, and 36% think we should keep roughly the current levels of involvement. Again, in a powerful sign of how ideas of British imperialism are no longer in favour on the Right, 64% of Reform voters want less engagement and this is also the preferred position of Conservative voters (44% compared with 42% who say “about the same”). In fact, there is support across all parties, with the exception of Labour, for a reduction in Britain’s engagement in overseas conflicts; Labour voters narrowly opt for the current level of engagement (41% to 39%).

Do you think Britain should be more or less engaged in overseas conflicts?

Polling text

These findings highlight the conundrum that awaits a future Labour government: while its voters are broadly the most supportive of idealistic British involvement in overseas conflicts, the party also contains a strain of passionately anti-war Leftists. The “progressive realism” coined by shadow foreign secretary David Lammy to describe Labour’s approach is best understood as an attempt to square this circle.

The thorniest issue for Keir Starmer will be Israel. Labour voters have a far more critical view of the current war in Gaza than their leader. Asked who they blame for the war, Labour voters choose “the Israeli Government” ahead of Hamas, while British voters in general blame Hamas ahead of Israel. Endorsement of the ICC’s prosecution proceedings against Benjamin Netanyahu is at 53% among Labour voters; only 14% oppose it. Starmer has voiced support for the arrest warrant, and one assumes he would comply with it if issued.

Right-leaning voters, when asked about the conflict, would prefer to disengage entirely rather than taking a tougher stance on either Israel or the Palestinians — this is the preferred option among both Conservative and Reform voters. But Labour voters fall narrowly alongside more progressive voter groups such as the Greens and Liberal Democrats in believing that “the UK should take a tougher stance on Israel”. Once again, disengaging from the war is the most popular option among British voters in general.

British voters: UK should disengage from Israel-Hamas war

British voters

This move towards "realism" extends also to the escalating standoff between the United States and China. Asked what British policy should be towards the standoff, 41% would align with the US; notably however, it is not a majority. Most voters think the country should either be aligned with neither (37%), or China (5%) or aren’t sure (15%).

Do you think the UK should align itself more with the US, China, or neither?

British voters

There is an exception, however, to British voters’ more isolationist mood: Ukraine. Most think that the UK’s level of involvement is about right, or could be further increased. Only a minority of voters would prefer a reduced role or none at all. Voters would reject, if offered, a peace treaty in which Russia would gain possession of eastern provinces of Ukraine and Crimea, and there is even substantial support for the UK allowing Ukraine to shoot missiles into Russian territory (40% compared with 22% against) and allowing British troops into Ukraine to help train Ukrainian forces (39% support compared with 34% against). However, any suggestion of British troops engaging in active combat against Russia is dismissed entirely, by absolute majorities of all political party voters.

Attitudes to Ukraine

British voters

Questions of distant wars, however, only become the defining political issue when citizens are asked to fight in them — and on this question, the results of the UnHerd Britain poll make concerning reading for any government. We asked parents whether they would be prepared to send their children into battle for a range of causes, and the numbers of those who would are vanishingly small. Only 15% would consent to their children taking up arms to defend Poland from a Russian invasion, 14% to defend France from invasion, 9% to defend Ukraine from further Russian attacks, and 7% to defend either Taiwan or Israel. Overwhelming majorities, between 71% and 82%, would object to their children being called up to defend any of these causes.

Would you want your children to fight in the British Army in each of the following circumstances?

Polling Text

Even in the event of a direct invasion on British soil, only 21% of parents say they would want their children to fight to defend the country, 67% of parents say they would not want them involved and a further 10% are not sure.

These results confirm a sobering reality that has not been reflected in the election campaigns yet: there is a strong antipathy to military engagements of any kind, and if a new war should arrive, it is not at all clear that Britain could muster an army even to defend itself.

As the election campaign progresses, UnHerd Britain will be investigating other questions of public opinion missing from the campaign. See full results of today's poll HERE.

Chechnya has for two centuries been a thorn in imperial Moscow’s side. Over and over again, its people have revolted against the imposition of Christian Orthodox power and dragged Russia into protracted and bloody conflicts. The first of these post-Soviet conflicts, which ran from 1994 to 1996, saw Russian troops humiliated. Boris Yeltsin, who had staked his reputation on reasserting control over the region, saw his reputation permanently damaged. Worse, Russians themselves were humbled. A decade earlier, they had been vying for global supremacy with Washington. Now, they could not even win a war against a separatist rabble in their own backyard.

When in late 1999 Putin, then a young and straight-talking upstart, stormed into the halls of power, he promised to bring Chechnya back into the fold at any cost. Launching a new war, he sent his troops into the breakaway region with carte blanche to exterminate and destroy. Almost a decade of fighting left more than 50,000 civilians dead and Grozny razed. Widespread criminality — looting, rape and murder — by Russian troops at the front went mostly unpunished.

Into this maelstrom of violence stepped a young Ramzan Kadyrov, one of many former insurgents turned pro-Russian fighters. Appointed by Putin to lead the territory in 2007, his 17 years in power have been characterised by an awkward combination of Moscow-style autocracy, with various strongmen vying for favour while Kadyrov watches on, and regressive Islamism, designed through a combination of misogynism, traditionalist flourishes and militancy to appease and oppress the majority Muslim local population in equal measure.

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But above all, Kadyrov has ruled in the same style as the Russian army conducted its invasion: with criminality and absolute violence. Kadyrov and his henchmen have personally been involved in torture and extrajudicial killings of political opponents and purported criminals. Brutal anti-gay purges have seen hundreds abducted, tortured and beaten — and several killed. Putin and his ally seemed to have found a solution to the age-old problem of Chechen insurgency: a flexible nationalism, ruthless violence and a mafia-like internal politics.

Imagining a post-Kadyrov Chechnya, pundits float bold hypotheses: could Kadyrov’s death provoke a bitter succession crisis that would spark another regional war? If Russian troops had to be deployed, would Putin’s reputation as the man who quelled the restive Chechens for good be ruined? Could rebellion in Chechnya even lead to a wave of revolts across the imperial peripheries, where Muslim minorities have not profited from the past two decades like their ethnic Russian peers and where local populations have borne much of the burden of fighting in Ukraine? If the wrong leader is imposed by Moscow, could demonstrations like those in Bashkortostan — another Muslim majority province where in January several thousand angry locals clashed with security services after a local activist was jailed — break out and perhaps spread? Both Kadyrov and Putin have plans in place to ensure that such disasters don’t unfold, but the situation is flammable.

Kadyrov himself seems intent on a dynastic succession. Two of his sons, the teenaged Adam and Akhmat, are being groomed for power. The 16-year-old Adam has been appointed supervisor Chechya’s Special Forces School, while his 18-year-old brother is the territory’s Minister for Youth and even attended a one-on-one meeting with Putin in 2023. The former shows the same penchant for violence as his father: Kadyrov announced he was “proud” when footage of Adam viciously beating a man who had burned a Koran went viral.

Yet neither of these stripling dauphins, who lack the support of either the public or a force of loyal foot-soldiers, would likely be able to keep control of Chechnya for long. A crowd of potential challengers, such as Kadyrov’s right-hand man Magomed Daudov, another Chechen War turncoat, and Apti Alaudinov, who commands a unit fighting in Ukraine and seems to be the Kremlin’s preferred choice, eagerly watches on. Each possesses far more significant support among Chechnya’s elites than the risible Kadyrov siblings. Should one or the other make a play for the top spot, it is hard to see the Kadyrov dynasty surviving.

Still, none of the challengers represent a separatist movement. Each has a vested interest in maintaining Putin’s support — and thus the inflow of money and, should any troubles arise, extra security services. Each would be able to rule in much the same vein as Kadyrov. Meanwhile, a fragmented separatist movement lacks the resources and manpower to mount a serious challenge. Significant opposition to Chechnya’s status as part of the Russian Federation does exist, and some Chechens are even fighting against Russia in Ukraine, but Chechnya is not the rebellious place it once was. Unlike other peripheral regions, it has not seen major protests as a result of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Even anti-Russian rebel leaders have suggested that Kadyrov’s death would not be a “game changer”.

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The real danger for the Kremlin, then, is in Chechnya’s various power blocks engaging in an internal struggle so violent that it threatens regional stability. Unlike in the Nineties and 2000s, they would not fight for secession but for power. In a territory where mountainous and sparsely populated territory provides the perfect platform for guerilla warfare, and where performative masculine violence — showcased in regular mass demonstrations of Chechen military might — and traumatised veterans dominate political culture, such a conflict could easily spiral out of control. Perhaps the only way for Putin to restore order would be to deploy Russian troops en masse — and even then, judging by past wars, the conflict would not be resolved quickly.

That said, such a low-level conflict would not be regime ending. Putin’s propagandists would beat the patriotic drum, claiming that one or other (or all) sides were being funded by the usual enemies: the CIA, Islamic extremists, Ukraine. The conflict would be painted as just another example of how the West is trying to smash Russia apart — and thus proof that Putin remains the only man who knows how to face down this existential threat. It would fan the flames of anti-Muslim xenophobia, long nurtured by the Kremlin as a convenient means of rallying racial hatred for political ends and at a peak following the government’s handling of the Crocus City Hall terrorist attacks, rather than anti-Putin rebellion. Many Russians welcomed the sight of visibly brutalised Tajik Muslims appearing in court following the Crocus attacks; a wave of spontaneous victimisation of Central Asians has followed. In this febrile atmosphere, Chechens could easily receive the same sort of treatment.

In this case, Putin might emerge with his reputation intact or even enhanced. But a period of instability following Kadyrov’s death could also be a golden opportunity for Russia’s opponents to seriously weaken the Russian president. A military venture in Chechnya would hoover up significant money, manpower and materiel — all in short supply after two years of war in Ukraine. Just as the Russian army is gearing up for a big summer campaign to break through its stagnant position in eastern Ukraine, it could be drawn into a long and bloody war in Chechnya.

All Russia’s opponents need to do is fuel the ambitions of Kadyrov’s potential successors and encourage them to plot and commit violence against one another. Even providing arms to the handful of separatists operating in Chechnya or perhaps those fighting in Ukraine, if they were willing to return home to combat Putin, might be a viable option if it were to seriously disrupt Moscow’s war on Ukraine. Such a course of action would be cheap, has the potential to save Ukrainian lives, and might give Putin pause for thought as he weighs up his options vis-à-vis Kyiv. Kadyrov’s death might be the gifthorse a war-fatigued Western world is looking for.

In the short run, Groves was wrong, while Oppenheimer’s guess was correct. The Hiroshima uranium bomb was in fact more powerful than 1,000 Tallboys, with the Nagasaki plutonium bomb exceeding even that. But only five years later, Groves’s prediction came to pass. First the United States, and then the Soviet Union, and then each successive nuclear power came to the realisation that their nuclear weapons were too powerful to be used in combat. This has remained true in the decades since — all the way up to the invasion of Ukraine. For, despite Putin’s atomic sabre-rattling, he too is subject to the logic of Groves’s prediction. Decades after his conversation with Oppenheimer, a brief historical summary of nuclear war has much to teach us about the situation in Ukraine — and how victory might only be attainable there through much more conventional means.

The first test of the nuclear age came with the Korean War. In December 1950, hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers crossed the River Yalu to support their North Korean allies against the US. With America in immediate danger of losing tens of thousands of men, General Douglas MacArthur decided that he had to use nuclear weapons to stop the Chinese. By far the most respected US military leader of the time — he had led American forces in the Pacific from humiliating defeat to total victory, and then acted as Japan’s de facto Emperor in reforming the country — MacArthur expected Truman to assent to his superior military judgment. Instead, the answer was a flat no. MacArthur insisted, and he was dismissed.

Truman recognised that the nature of warfare had fundamentally changed since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When he authorised those strikes, neither he nor anyone else knew that the explosions would also cause radiation fallout, which would sicken and even kill thousands of people miles from the site of the detonation. Moreover, in 1945, Truman was facing the prospect of losing many more American troops in the conquest of Japan than in the entirety of the Second World War up to that point. The Japanese really did fight to the last man, and still had 2 million troops to expend. Truman would have been thrown out of the White House if he had allowed the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans by refusing to use the bomb.

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But five years later, the situation was very different. Facing catastrophe in Korea, Truman had the alternative of evacuating US troops to Japan if all else failed — and therefore never even considered using atomic weapons. Under the next president, his fission bombs evolved into thermonuclear fusion bombs at least 100,000 times more powerful than Tallboy. But that only made Truman’s “No” of 1950 even more definitive. Nuclear abstinence became the only possible choice for Americans and Russians alike, as the Cuban Missile Crisis precariously but definitively showed.

However, it would take much longer for this logic to develop into a definitive doctrine. Following the establishment of Nato 75 years ago today, and especially in the Sixties and Seventies, exhaustive efforts were made to extract some additional advantage from nuclear weapons and somehow gain the upper hand for the new Western alliance. So-called “tactical” nuclear weapons were made not more, but much less powerful, supposedly to enable their use on the battlefield. Their advocates claimed that they could provide firepower very cheaply, with small nuclear warheads replicating the effect of hundreds of howitzers. Both the US and Soviet armed forces duly acquired thousands of nuclear weapons: not only “small” bombs for fighter-bombers, but also bombardment rockets (some small enough to be carried in a jeep), anti-aircraft missiles, torpedoes, and even portable demolition charges.

But this illusion could not be sustained. Military planners came to understand that if US commanders tried to defend Nato territory by attacking invading Soviet forces with small “tactical” nuclear weapons, the Russians would use their own arsenal to destroy the defending Western forces. The same would apply for any attempt to replace conventional military force with nuclear weaponry. And so it was understood that, while nuclear weapons are a useful deterrent, they can only be used to strike back against a prior nuclear attack — and never to achieve any kind of victory. Thus in the Seventies, when the United States and the Soviet Union were engaged in the elaborate and highly publicised “Strategic Arms Limitation” negotiations, officials on both sides quickly agreed to quietly stop developing, manufacturing and fielding new “tactical” nuclear weapons, before equally quietly disassembling tens of thousands of these weapons.

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But in the end, it was the newest nuclear powers, India and Pakistan, that conclusively demonstrated the redundancy of their own nuclear weapons for anything beyond reciprocal deterrence. In the Kargil War of 1999, which involved multiple full-scale battles and thousands of casualties, neither side attempted even a sotto voce threat of a nuclear strike. And this is still true today. When Putin‘s loudest attack dog, Dmitry Medvedev, started barking about the use of “tactical” nuclear weapons after the failure of the initial Russian invasion in 2022, it was only the least competent journalists and those obedient to Moscow who echoed his warnings. Eventually, after several months of this foolishness, Putin came out and said it: Russia would only use nuclear weapons only “when the very existence of the state is put under threat” — meaning by a corresponding nuclear threat.

The situation in Ukraine has turned again, but the same logic holds. Instead of frustrated Russians bogged down in their trenches, now it is the Ukrainian position that looks precarious. Kyiv presents this as a question of materiel, and continually asks for more and better weapons from the West. Yet while more guns and missiles could be sent, it is clear that what is forcing Kyiv to retreat step by step is not a lack of firepower, but a lack of soldiers.

Until this week, conscription in Ukraine only started at the age of 27, as opposed to the global norm of 18. Zelensky has now reduced this to 25; but with many Ukrainians exempted from service, his total armed forces amount to less than 800,000 active personnel. Ukraine is hampered by the age distribution of its population, with children and older people over-represented when compared to young men in the 19-35 age bracket. But its troop total is still too low for a population that exceeds 30 million by most estimates, considering that Israel can rapidly field an army of around 600,000 from a population of around 8 million. This means that, unless Putin decides to end the war, Ukraine’s troops will be pushed back again and again, losing soldiers in the process who cannot be replaced. Russia doesn’t even have to send its finest troops to achieve this — merely volunteer contract soldiers attracted by good pay, or Russian prisoners serving ordinary criminal sentences, recruited straight from their prison cells. Regardless of quality, though, the Russian army already outnumbers the Ukrainian, and the gap is becoming wider every day.

This arithmetic of this is inescapable: Nato countries will soon have to send soldiers to Ukraine, or else accept catastrophic defeat. The British and French, along with the Nordic countries, are already quietly preparing to send troops — both small elite units and logistics and support personnel — who can remain far from the front. The latter could play an essential role by releasing their Ukrainians counterparts for retraining in combat roles. Nato units could also relieve Ukrainians currently tied up in the recovery and repair of damaged equipment, and could take over the technical parts of existing training programmes for new recruits. These Nato soldiers might never see combat — but they don’t have to in order to help Ukraine make the most of its own scarce manpower.

Crucially, with China coming ever closer to an attack on Taiwan, the US cannot provide more troops than the roughly 40,000 who are already in Europe. Thus a momentous decision is in the post for the other Nato members, especially the most populous: Germany, France, Italy and Spain. If Europe cannot provide enough troops, Russia will prevail on the battlefield, and even if diplomacy successfully intervenes to avoid a complete debacle, Russian military power will have victoriously returned to Central Europe. At that point, Western European powers will have to rebuild their armed forces, whether they like it or not, starting with the return of compulsory military service. Perhaps in those circumstances, we might even witness an outbreak of nuclear nostalgia, foolishly harking back to the illusion that apocalyptic weaponry might be enough to keep the peace.

Known as J, short for Junior, Flores is 42, but looks younger, with thick cropped hair and wide alert eyes. He’s driven and talkative, disarming with an easy manner and a lively mind that jumps from details of his trafficking logistics to the books he read in prison. He knows both the world of Chicago’s Little Village, where he was born, and small-town Zacatecas, Mexico, where his father hails from. He speaks with a Chicago-Latino accent.

Though he doesn’t have an aggressive demure and was never convicted of violence, Flores was key to networks that have pumped narcotics into America and drowned Mexico in blood. Mexican drug traffickers wouldn’t have made their vast fortunes without US associates to move their product north of the river. “Chapo or Mayo or Arturo couldn’t do what we did in the United States,” Flores says. Indeed, the twins made more bank from their hometown of Chicago than many of the drug lords south of the border.

Flores didn’t exactly choose this world — he was born into it. When his mother was pregnant with him in 1981, his father was incarcerated for being caught with 11 kilos of black tar heroin. He and Pedro grew up with an older brother who became a shot caller for the Latin Kings, a fearsome street gang, as well as a major drug dealer. “I didn’t have your regular childhood,” he tells me. “My brothers were in the most violent, biggest organisation which was the Latin Kings… I am basically being raised in that kind of culture.”

When his father finally came out of prison, he was furious. He was an old-school narco from Zacatecas and forbade the twins from what he saw as the crude, tattooed life of gang bangers. “He despised gang members, believe it or not. It’s this weird contradiction. Because he was in prison with them. He didn’t understand their reasoning.”

His father’s idea of education, meanwhile, was taking the twins down to Mexico to buy marijuana and drive it back to Chicago. On their first trip, aged seven, they helped stash weed in the gas tank. Over the following years, they learned how to find marijuana plantations in the mountains and negotiate with sellers. “My father made sure he introduced us to everyone and that we treated everyone with respect.”

When they were 12, their father went on the run to Mexico. After a stint there, the twins returned to Chicago to live with their Latin King brother — and help him deal drugs. After he too was sent to prison, they began making their own deals with Sinaloa Cartel intermediaries in Chicago. By 17, they had made their first deal — 30 kilos of cocaine — and by 20, they were shifting more than a tonne a month and making millions.

That the twins rose so fast up the ranks was partly thanks to their upbringing, which put them in a special position to link the drug lords in Mexico with the gangs that sold drugs on US streets. They knew both worlds, but weren’t quite part of either. Instead, they styled themselves as businessmen. It helped that they’d had a better education than most of their counterparts: even while trafficking through their teenage years, Margarito had received a high school diploma and Pedro did a couple of semesters of college.

In this business, brains are important. “Drug trafficking is not easy,” Flores says. “Prisons are filled with failed drug traffickers. Cemeteries are filled with failed drug traffickers.” He explains that moving dope in America is about running a smooth logistical operation. The cartel needs the drugs delivered fast and the payment back faster. Traffickers who are slow to move loads and mess up on paying are the ones who get killed. Luckily, the twins were workaholics who took care of every detail as they built a network of independent truck drivers, discreet stash houses, and crucially, money-counting machines.

Meanwhile, the twins kept an eye on the fluctuating cocaine prices in different cities like brokers watching the stock market. Since sale prices are higher the further north you go, they made profits by delivering to the northeast and into Canada. The buying prices are also lower the higher up the chain you get, so the twins cut out the middlemen and built relationships directly with the heads of the Sinaloa Cartel.

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Gaining the trust of the top players was not easy, however. In early 2005, an associate of El Chapo kidnapped Pedro and held him for over two weeks, almost starving him to death. Flores went to the mountains, where he successfully negotiated with El Chapo for Pedro’s release — though he ended up paying off a debt that had been caused by El Chapo’s own man messing up. Eventually, the twin’s gained El Chapo’s approval to buy cocaine directly from the inner circle of Sinaloa drug lords at a cheaper rate. This would boost their trafficking to more than three tonnes a month and up to $10 million in profit.

El Mayo (or Ismael Zambada), another Sinaloa Cartel warlord, was easier to work with, praising their ability to move so much powder, and joking about how much they could have moved if they were triplets. “He was a fierce man, but he was also one of the fairest,” recalls Flores. Now 76 years old, El Mayo has never been inside a jail cell. The veteran drug lord boasts a reputation for smoothing relations and paying off cops.

“He reminded me a lot, even nicer probably, than my father,” Flores says. “I feel like he had genuine love and respect for us… When it came to any type of business, he would be like, ‘Whatever you guys decide and you know what, here is an extra something for you guys.’ It doesn’t surprise me that he continues to be the head of the organisation, the most successful one for sure.”

In their case, US prosecutors portrayed El Chapo as the supreme head of the Sinaloa Cartel. But Flores’s account paints a picture of a federation with a cupola of bosses: among these, Arturo Beltrán Leyva, a roughneck known as Barbas, or The Beard, was actually moving more cocaine. “He was a calculator; I would grab my phone to calculate and before I even pressed a number, he was already telling you what it was,” says Flores. “He was one of the best businessmen I feel like there was in drug trafficking.”

However, Beltrán Leyva also had a reputation for murder and even cannibalism. Margarito says it bothered him that he wasn’t as famous as Chapo and Mayo, and he used violence to put himself on the map. “It’s always about legacy… To them, you are your name,” he says. “He had no limit when it came to violence.”

Another gangster with a bloody reputation was El Mencho, or Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes. When Mexican federal agents arrested the twins in Jalisco, Mencho led a squad of gunmen to force their release. He was then a rising figure in a local group affiliated with the Sinaloa mob, but Margarito says he was an aggressive, hungry guy and he didn’t like to do business with him. “He had that chip on his shoulder, a violent man from the beginning.”

In 2008, these Sinaloan bosses broke into a bloody civil war. The violence had various fronts, but a central battle was between Beltrán Leyva and El Chapo — The Beard versus Shorty. As these old childhood friends turned into bitter enemies, their gunmen painted the streets of Sinaloa with blood. In May, sicarios fired 500 bullets into a son of El Chapo, Édgar, at a Culiacán shopping mall, and from then on residents lived with ensuing daily revenge hits.

The twins were ordered to choose between Chapo and Beltrán Leyva. But by this point, they were working with the DEA. They tried to play the two men off against each other, hoping to gather evidence on both. “We were threatened by the two most powerful, most violent, drug cartels I would say in the world at that time,” says Flores.

Flores has a tear in his eye when he describes their decision to co-operate. He realised his path would only lead to death or the Super Max but flipping gave him a glimmer of hope. “I had a spiritual epiphany one day,” he says. “I felt like, I wanted to do something good for my family.” I’m reminded of his earlier description of watching the film Scarface as a kid: “Scarface was a great story, but it never motivated us to die like him.”

With the civil war raging, the twins began recording their dealings with traffickers. The risk of being caught snitching was huge, but they made good under-covers. Their sentencing memorandum has a list of 54 recorded conversations with narcos. Finally, they got El Chapo himself on the phone. To lure him in, Pedro renegotiated the price of a batch of heroin they had already received. “In the drug business you don’t do that,” Flores says. “You don’t receive a shipment and then try and get a better price.”

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On 30 November 2008, the twins handed themselves into custody and went from living the life of millionaire narcos to witnesses in jail cells. Their cooperation led to indictments against everybody: Chapo, Mayo, Beltrán Leyva, their sons and brothers and lieutenants, and even members of the twins’ own organisation in Chicago. They spent years alone in prison, segregated for their own safety. Then in 2018, Pedro took the stand and testified against Chapo in his showcase trial in Brooklyn.

As a reward, the twins were given 12 years in prison rather than a life sentence. At least, Flores says, they are alive and able to be fathers and husbands. Since his release, he has been trying to turn his life around. He’s giving classes to law enforcement about the inner workings of cartels with a group called Dynamic Police Training and testified before the Congressional “Task Force to Combat Mexican Drug Cartels,” headed by Rep. Dan Crenshaw. “I have this need to do something with all my knowledge,” he says. “I want to make sure that by the time I leave here my legacy is something positive.” Indeed, Mexican journalists often complain that the US side of the trafficking equation is poorly documented — Flores is shedding much-needed light on it.

“This a cautionary story, we are not trying to promote the life at all,” Flores says. “My brother and I were always applauded for bad, so now it feels good to go to an event where I am teaching law enforcement. Where I get a hug or a handshake or a standing ovation. And they tell me ‘Thank you.’”

A version of this interview appeared on Ioan Grillo’s CrashOut Substack.

Unsurprisingly, this didn’t go down well with Nato allies, whom the French president hadn’t even bothered to warn beforehand. This was probably designed to maximise the statement’s impact: Macron is prone to attention-grabbing pronouncements that are never actually acted upon, often as a way of deflecting attention away from domestic problems.

This time, though, Macron overplayed his hand. His statement was so obviously unhinged that it fuelled a sizeable backlash in France, where half of the population opposes providing more aid to Ukraine. Marine Le Pen accused Macron of playing with the lives of French children, while radical leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon called it “madness”. Outside of France, meanwhile, practically all Nato members rebutted Macron’s suggestion and ruled out sending ground troops to Ukraine, while Putin himself yesterday warned such a move could spark a major escalation.

But how long will Nato leaders maintain this stance? After all, Macron is right about one thing: Nato countries have crossed virtually all the red lines they had given themselves at the start of the conflict. “Many people who say ‘Never, never’ today were the same people who said ‘Never tanks, never planes, never long-range missiles’ two years ago,” he said. In this sense, the whole troops-on-the-ground debate is little more than a distraction from the fact that we are, of course, already engaged in a de facto war against Russia — troops on the ground or not. Besides, it’s an open secret that Western special forces are already present in Ukraine — including British troops.

Indeed, there is hardly any disagreement among European leaders about the fact that their countries should continue to wage this so-called proxy war; the question is whether the aim should be that of supporting Ukraine’s official strategy of retaking every inch of Russian-controlled territory — a proposition that is now increasingly recognised as impossible even in Western quarters — or if it should rather be that of bolstering Ukraine’s defences with the goal of arresting the Russian advance. European countries seem to be increasingly leaning towards the latter, with Germany currently leading the way.

Even though Germany has emerged as Ukraine’s biggest supporter in the West (as the US Congress continues to block a new aid package), Scholz has hitherto resisted pressure from the opposition, as well as from members of his own coalition, to send German-made Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine. His argument is twofold: first, that the missiles have a range of 500 kilometres and could be used to strike Moscow; second, that their delivery would require specially trained German troops to be on the ground in Ukraine. This would effectively draw Germany into a direct war with Russia.

But even Scholz’s apparent caution seems troublingly naïve in the face of Nato chief Jens Stoltenberg’s recent announcement that the bloc has given Ukraine the green light to use Western-supplied F-16s to strike targets in Russia — yet another dangerous escalation that brings Nato closer and closer to a direct confrontation with Russia. Ultimately, however, the disagreements within Nato are over tactics, not strategy: virtually all countries agree that Ukraine should be supported “for as long as it takes”.

To this end, several European countries, including the UK, have just signed bilateral long-term security agreements with Kyiv, committing to “provide Ukraine with swift and sustained security assistance, modern military equipment across all domains as necessary”. Yet no one really knows what supporting Ukraine “for as long as it takes” really means. There’s no clearly defined and agreed war goal — aside from “not letting Russia win”, and a vague hope of wearing Russia down economically and militarily.

But even that appears to be little more than wishful thinking. Not only has the Russian economy weathered the Western sanctions (and may have even benefited from them); more crucially, as The Economist recently acknowledged, “Russia is winning in Ukraine” — and there’s little realistic hope of this being reversed soon. As Anatol Lieven wrote in Time: “The implication of Ukraine standing indefinitely on the defensive — even if it does so successfully — is that the territories currently occupied by Russia are lost. Russia will never agree at the negotiating table to surrender land that it has managed to hold on the battlefield… Even if [Western] aid continues, there is no realistic chance of total Ukrainian victory next year, or the year after that.”

So, what’s the point of supporting a long and bloody war of attrition, one that could potentially last for years? As Lieven argues, “however painful a peace agreement would be today, it will be infinitely more so if the war continues and Ukraine is defeated”. Yet, in recent months, the US and Ukraine have reportedly continued to reject Russia’s suggestions of a ceasefire.

So why does peace continue to be a taboo in the West? For starters, there is good reason to believe that Western support for Ukraine was never really about helping Ukrainians, but about using them to pursue the West’s own economic and strategic aims. From this perspective, the war has been a success — for some at least. In the US’s case, this is rather self-evident: it has been able to reassert its military hegemony over Europe, while driving a wedge between Europe (and Germany in particular) and Russia, a longstanding American geopolitical imperative. Especially now that the US has succeeded in “Europeanising” the war, by having the EU carry the burden for supporting Ukraine, Biden has no obvious incentive to end the war before the elections, especially on terms favourable to Russia.

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For Europe, it’s a very different story: aside from the continent’s military-industrial complex, which has benefited enormously, the war has been an economic and geopolitical disaster. Moreover, Europe has obviously much more to lose from the increasingly alarming prospect of nuclear war between the West and Russia. Indeed, one may argue that Europeans have an existential interest in bringing the conflict to an end.

Yet not only are European governments not doing anything to work towards a peaceful resolution — they seem to be actively exacerbating tensions. In recent months, we have witnessed a sustained propaganda campaign aimed at convincing European citizens that Russia is bent on invading Europe at some point in the more-or-less-near future — and that, therefore, we have to prepare for war by heavily boosting Europe’s “defence” capabilities. According to the Danish defence minister, Russia could attack Nato in as little as three years. “We have to realise it’s not a given that we are in peace. And that’s why we are preparing for a conflict with Russia,” said Dutch admiral Rob Bauer, the Nato military committee chief. In several other European countries, there is talk of reintroducing mandatory military conscription. And this isn’t just talk: along its north-eastern flank, Nato has recently begun its largest military exercise in Europe since the Cold War, involving 90,000 troops, 50 ships and more than 80 fighter jets.

But is there any evidence that Russia intends to march across Europe? For John Mearsheimer, this is a “ludicrous” proposition. “Putin has made it clear that he does not intend to conquer all of Ukraine,” he said, “and he has never indicated that he was interested in conquering any other country in Eastern Europe, much less Western Europe. He also doesn’t have the military capability to conquer eastern Europe — the Russian army is not the second coming of the Wehrmacht.”

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If this is true, how can we explain the relentless peddling of this narrative? I see three options, all equally alarming.

The first is that European leaders have started to believe their own propaganda and are truly convinced Russia is bent on attacking Europe. If this is the case, it risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy: Putin would view an increase in defence spending as a sign of a growing threat. The second explanation is that Europe’s leaders know that Russia is unlikely to invade, but are raising this phantom threat to justify the continuation of the proxy war in Ukraine, as part of a wider strategy aimed at containing the Russo-Chinese challenge to the US-centric system. The third possibility is that the continent’s leaders have simply gone bonkers and are deliberately trying to precipitate a war with Russia, for reasons unfathomable to sane-minded people.

Amid such unclarity, the good news is that citizens, at least in Western Europe, don’t seem to be buying it. Despite the relentless fear-mongering, Russia ranks only 11th, 7th and 6th among the concerns of Italians, Germans and the French respectively, below crime, inequality and immigration, according to the latest Munich Security Conference report. But perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that our elites would rather drag us into war than address our societies’ actual problems. They created them — and they benefit from them. And as long as they do, it seems unlikely that peace will arrive soon.