When will Europe's leaders wake up to the Russian threat? |
Europe’s leaders flocked to London this week, determined to show the world a united front. Like school boys at a bus stop, Ukraine’s president Zelensky stood beside Keir Starmer, German chancellor Friedrich Merz and French leader Emmanuel Macron in a carefully staged tableau of Western resolve. It was designed to send a message to Moscow: Europe is ready. Yet the spectacle only highlighted the uncomfortable truth: Europe talks like a military power, but behaves like a political debating society. The continent insists it has woken up to the new reality, yet it still refuses to build the armies required to confront it.
Europe talks like a military power, but behaves like a political debating society
For all the stirring rhetoric about stepping up, the hard numbers remain damning. If Europe truly intends to be taken seriously – by Russia or by the United States – it needs forces on a scale it has not contemplated since the Cold War. Not polite increases in defence budgets, not symbolic deployments, but vast armies capable of deterring a nuclear-armed imperial power.
Even Nato is stepping up its critique. Yesterday, the alliance’s chief Mark Rutte warned that too many on the continent were ‘quietly complacent, and too many don’t feel the urgency’. ‘Russia could be ready to use military force against Nato within five years.’ Instead, Europe’s........