After "Victory."

How much is enough?

First, two pieces of news about translations. Yannick has been busy again and has produced a superlative translation into French of my recent essay The Day After. It’s already available online at the website of the Cercle Albert Roche. The link is:

https://cercle-albert-roche.fr/2025/05/31/le-jour-dapres-et-le-jour-suivant/

So, francophones among you, please go and visit the site and support its work and that of Yannick.

And Guiseppe Germinario writes from Italy, to remind me that many of my articles are now on line on the site Italia e il Mondo and you can find them here.

https://italiaeilmondo.com/category/dossier/contributi-esterni/aurelien/

These essays will always be free, but you can continue to support my work by liking and commenting, and most of all by passing the essays on to others, and passing the links to other sites that you frequent. (Astonishingly, we seem to be creeping up on the figure of 10,000 subscribers and “followers”) If you would like to take out a paid subscription I won’t stand in your way, (I’d be very honoured in fact) but I can’t promise you anything in return except a warm feeling of virtue.

I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here.☕️ Thanks to all of those who have recently contributed.

And as always, thanks to others who tirelessly supply translation in their languages. Maria José Tormo is posting Spanish translations on her site here, and Marco Zeloni is also posting Italian translations on a site here. I am always grateful to those who post occasional translations and summaries into other languages just as long as you credit the original and let me know. And after all that …

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After last week’s little excursion into Buddhism and the Ego, we’re back with a crunch this week to the Ukraine crisis and the politico-military issues that surround its ultimate resolution. This is because the “debate,” if you can call it that, has begun to tip-toe towards speculation about how the war might end, and what victory conditions the Russians (as opposed to the West) might accept. As usual, there’s a lot of loose thinking being thought, and a lot of hot air being generated, so let’s try to dispel some of that by going back to first principles, and then applying those principles to the current situation. Let’s also remember that very often in history victory conditions haven’t been met, or turn out to have been wrongly formulated, or were just never possible anyway. And sometimes they have unexpected and even disastrous consequences.

It’s not clear to me that the Russians can escape these traps altogether. I make no claim to special knowledge about what Moscow is thinking, I do not pretend to instruct its Army about how to proceed, nor what political end-state its leaders should be thinking of. I don’t know the country personally and I don’t speak the language, so this essay remains, for the most part, at the level of general principles illustrated by examples. In any event, objectives and strategies change and adapt with time, and for that reason I’m not going to speculate endlessly about the significance of this or that person’s last statement: things may well have changed by the time I get to the last paragraph, anyway.

OK, that concludes the apophatic section of the essay. On to the things we can say. First, let’s recall, for the umpteenth time, what Clausewitz said two centuries ago. It’s not hard to understand, but it’s apparently easy to forget. The point of the military, he said, is to give a state extra policy options, involving the use of force. (I think he would have accepted that the threat of force can also be a useful tool.) There’s thus a need for a clear political objective at the start, and this objective is pursued with the use of military force until the enemy finally does what we want. Precisely what the military objective is will depend on circumstances, but military forces should be targeted against what he called the “Centre of Gravity,” the entity around which everything else revolves. In many cases, this will be the enemy Army, but it can also be the capital city, or even the armed forces of an ally. Clausewitz was in Russia at the time of Napoleon’s invasion and he understood quite clearly that the ultimate political objective of that invasion was not to defeat the Russian Army as such, nor yet to take Moscow, but to force Russia out of the anti-French coalition. Battles were just a mechanism for achieving that.

Like most simple processes, those above are easy to visualise, but require both logical consistency and the organisation and deployment of sufficient capabilities, to bring them about. In many cases, more than one step of the process I will describe is missing, is impossible or can’t properly be articulated. The worst example I can think of at the moment, you won’t be surprised to hear, is the western “strategy” towards Russia. Simply put, at the highest level, it doesn’t exist. Oh, you can find any number of speeches, articles, think-tank reports and the like going back years and even decades, setting out fantasies about what might and should happen, but none of them are connected to each other, and none of them have ever been backed up by coherent plans for implementation. If you ask what is the collective western view of the ideal security relationship with Russia in the future, there’s a cacophony of different voices followed by an embarrassed silence. Indeed, if there’s a fundamental intellectual defect in western strategy since the Cold War, it’s speculating endlessly about future threats and fantasising about future objectives, but never actually putting the measures in place at the operational level to address them properly. A national security strategy is not a speech act, after all, it’s just a document.

So western strategy towards Russia at the highest level doesn’t exist; or if it does exist, it’s very well hidden. Rather, there’s a soggy consensus over disconnected short-term objectives which all, or most, nations can support, and which amounts to little more than:

• Keep the war going somehow.

• Stuff happens.

• Putin falls from power.

• ?

Beyond that, there are fantasies about breaking up Russia, and fantasies about Russia turning into an ally of the West, and fantasies of other kinds as well, but none of these are connected to each other, let alone to reality, and none grapple with even medium term issues.

So the three criteria then, are (1) a political end-state which you can describe and which is politically feasible (2) an operational plan which is at least in principle capable of bringing about that political end-state and (3) the military, economic and organisational capacity to formulate and implement the plan.

This all sounds a bit abstract, so I’m going to run through a few cases—some very simple, others a little more complicated—where one or more of these components was missing or defective. Since this discussion is in the context of Ukraine let’s talk about the previous round. In 1941, the Germans invaded Russia hoping to destroy the Red Army, bring down the Communist state, and eventually conquer and exploit the country up to the Urals. The plan was clear and detailed enough: General Plan East was a detailed manual for genocide. But it didn’t meet the first criterion of political realism, because it was based on fantasies of instant collapse, and a hopeless misreading of the country and its Army. Indeed, historians suggest today that unless somehow all of the German fantasies had come true, the war was effectively un-winnable after October 1941. Of course it’s more exciting to read Panzer Battles than to get into questions of logistics and war production, but the latter is necessary if you want to understand the difference between fantasy and reality.

The British, meanwhile, desperate to avoid another bloody land war in Europe, showed that they had understood that the next war would be decided by exactly these factors. Their choice of strategic bombing was intended to bring about the collapse of German society and shut down German war production in a far shorter time, and with far fewer casualties, than would result from a major land war. The story of the origins of this doctrine, and its implementation and essential failure, has been told many times and we won’t go into that here. But in terms of our argument, the reasons why it failed are instructive.

First, the political objective was impossible. The British believed that the Nazi regime, although brutal, was not strong, and could be overthrown by determined popular action. They therefore began by dropping propaganda leaflets telling the German people that they could have peace “at any time’ if they wanted to. Even mass absenteeism from armaments factories was believed to be enough to bring about German surrender. But of course the logic of this was flawed from the beginning. How exactly were the German people to organise to bring the regime down? After all, the bomber was an undiscriminating weapon, but the Gestapo was highly selective. And after 1941, surrendering to the British and Americans meant surrendering to the Russians as well. Moreover, the British and Americans had no idea what would follow such a collapse: something that, in any case, they could not influence.

Second, the selection of “the morale of the civilian population and especially that of the industrial workers” as the target, as though Morale were a small town near Munich, meant that it was impossible to design an operational plan to achieve the objective. There was no way of measuring morale, and no way of knowing what, if any, effect bombing was having on it. Other than arguing that being bombed must be bad for morale, advocates of this strategy really had no arguments, other than the pragmatic one that bombing was the only way they could directly attack Germany.

Finally, although the British, in particular, poured a massive proportion of their war effort into strategic bombing, the technology did not exist until the very end of the war to bomb accurately. And although the majority of the targets chosen were cities with munitions factories, or major transport hubs, actual damage to these facilities, and thus influence on the outcome of the war, was far less than hoped. Even at the brutal level of casualties alone, the results were disappointing: about 300,000 Germans died during the bombing campaign, whereas the British and Commonwealth forces alone lost 55,000 aircrew, virtually all of them highly-trained officers and NCOs who could have been better employed elsewhere.

Most military campaigns that fail do so because they do not respect at least one of these criteria. Some fail because they are just utterly incoherent, and respect none. A good example of the latter is the German offensive of 1918, which has been the subject of a lot of popular history books, but whose objectives remain as nebulous now as they were then. Ludendorff in his memoirs was quite open that Germany had to make some kind of last-ditch effort to shake the Allies and force them to sue for peace. How and why this was supposed to happen he never revealed. Stuff just happens. And the operational plan, as he admitted, was based on attacking where he thought the German could break through, irrespective of “merely strategic” considerations. How it could have been imagined that the Allies, after four years of war, would agree to his minimum conditions including German control of the Belgian railway system, must remain a mystery. By contrast, although the war plans of the Allies have been much criticised, they were based on the correct perception that war itself was passing through a phase where the tactical defensive was dominant, and therefore, whilst tactical advances were sought and indeed welcome, the war could only really be won through attrition, as was indeed the case.

Essentially the same considerations apply at every level of warfare. They explain, for example, why the French eventually left Algeria, but why the British outlasted the IRA in Northern Ireland. Yet on a first view it is not obvious why there should be such different outcomes. Consider: like Northern Ireland, Algeria had been part of France for a long time. Most of its “European” inhabitants had been born there and few had ever set foot in France. There were various political solutions on offer in the early 1950s, many more moderate and attractive than the FLN’s brand of then-fashionable nationalist-marxist liberationism. Likewise, the FLN proposed the forcible imposition of an anachronistic western nation-state model on an ethnically diverse territory that had been someone’s colony for thousands of years. Even when the FLN succeeded in exterminating its rivals, the French gained the upper hand military, and effectively destroyed the FLN operation inside the country, as well as largely preventing infiltration across the frontiers.

And yet, the French left, and the FLN succeeded in imposing one-party rule on the country. Even from a French perspective this was not obvious. There was sympathy for European nationals in Algeria (where there were often family ties) and on all parts of the political spectrum there was the absolute determination that France should not suffer another territorial humiliation barely twenty years after the defeat of 1940.

However, the war was ruinously expensive both financially and in manpower and resources, and made France unpopular in a world where the discourse of anti-imperialism was gaining strength. Neither the US nor any European power was prepared to help, and indeed pressured the French to leave. De Gaulle with his usual ruthless pragmatism recognised that he had to bite the bullet and did so. The price was betrayal of the European minority and of the Algerians who had fought with and supported French forces, radicalisation of the European minority, leading to wide-scale terrorist attacks, the entry into France of hundreds of thousands of discontented refugees who flocked to parties of the extreme Right, attempts to assassinate De Gaulle, and an inflamed domestic situation that could have turned into civil war. But the alternative was even worse, and “independence,” on the FLN’s terms, was something that De Gaulle actually had the power to bring about.

This was not true in Northern Ireland where, critically, the Unionists were a majority and not a minority. The British—who detested the Unionist leaders, whom they believed to be ignorant and bigoted—nonetheless realised that such a frightened, isolated community would violently resist any attempt to impose a united Ireland, and the result would be a bloody civil war even worse than the violence of 1921-23, and one in which the British would be forced to intervene. Moreover the IRA, whose objectives were complicated by the fact that they also wanted to overthrow the Dublin government which they saw as illegitimate, were so lost in the mists of history and martyrdom that they never really understood this, and seem to have imagined that the problem of one million Protestants in the North would just conveniently disappear. The fact was that, whereas the political consequences of France leaving Algeria were just about manageable, the consequences of British “withdrawal” from Northern Ireland, whatever that was exactly, were not. Thus, the fundamental difference between demanding of your adversary something that is possible, if difficult, and demanding something which it is not in their power to give.

We could multiply examples, but that’s not really necessary, I think. What I want to do now is to move up one final level, to the level of ultimate political strategy, not only in war itself, but also in the period of peace that ideally follows. If we look at Ukraine for a moment, then what the Russians are up to is fairly obvious in terms of our list above. As good students of Clausewitz, they intend to destroy the Ukrainian Armed Forces, thus bringing about the fall of the current government, and obliging any future government to adopt a policy of neutrality. As in the First World War, the technology, and to some extent the terrain of the war, favour the defence at the tactical level. Moreover, defence is easier than offence in the current situation, so even poorly-trained Ukrainian soldiers can delay the Russians for a certain amount of time. The Russians are therefore fighting an attrition war, albeit trying to capture key towns and transport hubs, and concentrating on the destruction of equipment and logistics installations.

That’s fine as far as it goes. But what happens after victory? And indeed is there even such a things as “victory” at all? The problem is that there are no objective standards for ‘victory” and “defeat” outside what may be described as the Carthaginian Option. After all, who “won” the Battle of Jutland? Or the Battle of Borodino? It depends who you believe. And even a total military defeat may only imply a temporary “victory.” The French Army was comprehensively defeated by the Prussians in 1870-71, and Prussian superiority was established in Europe. Fine, but in the aftermath of the defeat, the new Republican government oversaw massive changes and improvements to the Army, and introduced universal conscription. The Army itself went through very important internal reforms. The populist traditions of the Revolutionary Armies were revived, and even on the Left, with its Jacobin heritage, enthusiasm for national defence was strong. So in 1914, the Germans faced a stronger, better-armed, better-led and more united France than in 1870. (Indeed, fear of a revanchist France was one of the many complicating factors in the German approach to the whole 1914 crisis.) And military defeat of Germany, in 1945 as in 1918, was total, but obviously also temporary. Germany would survive as a country, and indeed after 1945 its two halves were rebuilt by the West and Russia.

Even military “victory” can be debated. What does “destroying” the Ukrainian Army mean in this context? How would you know when Ukraine was “disarmed.” After all, when Germany and Japan surrendered in 1945 they both still had substantial forces left. We say that they were “defeated” at this point, because we judge that they were no longer capable of “winning,” or at a minimum that they could not prevent us from “winning,” according to our definition of that state. At least in the case of Germany, the capital was occupied, and there were no independent forces capable of disputing Allied control of the country. In the case of Japan, though, it’s far from clear that an invasion of Honshu, the main island, and the capture of Tokyo, was even practicable. And if the Japanese had had enough petrol, their air force could have continued fighting for some time.

Thus, definitions of this sort are contextual and subjective. War is not like a sport with agreed rules where you can say someone has objectively “won,” or at least is now so far ahead that the opponent cannot mathematically catch up. I don’t know what the Russians have decided, but I suspect that they will make a pragmatic definition of victory: when Ukrainian forces are no longer capable of organised resistance to the Russian Army. But a moment’s thought suggests that there’s more to “victory” than that. The other two principal Russian demands seem to be for the eviction of extreme nationalists from government, and the permanent neutrality of the country. So the question is, how precisely would “victory” in the sense I’ve described lead to the other two concessions being achieved? (As well as potentially territorial concessions too.) The short answer is that there is no obvious reason why it should. The War might actually be the easy bit.

First, there is the political recognition of defeat, which has to happen in some form. I’ve talked about some of the complications of this in the past, and at the very least some authority will have to make an agreement with some Russian authority about how surrenders will be taken, troops disarmed, prisoners exchanged and the like. Yet in reality, and in spite of the defeat of its forces, a Ukrainian government could actually just refuse to surrender, perhaps calling for some kind of popular resistance. (Pretty much what happened France in 1870-71.) Whilst the Russians could theoretically occupy much more of the country, and conceivably even Kiev, they simply don’t have the forces, and couldn’t generate them, to control the whole territory against opposition. And anyway, the more territory they control, the more they make themselves a target for freelance drone operators and saboteurs.

Thus “victory,” even if defined in this very narrow way, actually turns out be a very complicated objective. In effect, three things are required. One is an authority capable of ordering surrender, a second is an actual decision to do so, and the third is the capability to enforce it. It’s not clear that any of these actually exist at the moment. Any government ordering surrender would have to appear legitimate to the soldiers concerned. We don’t know what such a government would look like, and neither do the Russians. We don’t know whether surrender would be politically possible: whether, in terms of this essay, we are in an Algeria or Ulster situation. In any event, there will be those who refuse to surrender, because there always are. The question is how many there will be and how much trouble they can cause. Nobody, including the Russians, knows that. There is clearly the chance of serious conflict and opposition to any surrender, whether it is containable, as was the case over Algeria, or much graver, as with the civil war of 1921-23 which pitted the Irish republicans who accepted the ceasefire with the British against those who did not. If violence were widespread, there is probably no way the Russians could avoid becoming involved.

What the Russians are probably aiming at is a Vichy-style collaboration regime in Kiev, made up of politicians who believed that the best interests of the country (and themselves) would be served by working with the Russians. The problem, of course, is the acceptability and the resilience of such a regime, and its willingness to actually enforce the terms of whatever surrender document was negotiated. The less the regime can do this, the deeper the Russians are likely to be drawn into trying to do it for them. We could yet see the Russians in the position of the US in Afghanistan, trying to shore up a weak regime. The Russians will no doubt try to veto certain parties and individuals from taking part in government, but that will make the construction of an effective government even more difficult, and there is nothing to stop parties changing names or leaders. And that’s before we get to issues like protection of Russian speakers, which will require legislation to make it happen. What are the Russians going to do, park a tank regiment outside the Rada? And what happens if the law is repealed a month later? In practice, Russia will either have to abandon such aspirations, or be prepared to stay in Ukraine a long time.

But let us assume that some kind of generally-accepted interim government emerges which is acceptable to the Ukrainian people and to Russia, and that it is able to declare and enforce surrender of what remains of its forces. It would have to be accepted, in that case, that there would be rough edges, and that there would probably be lots of light weapons left, and perhaps small armed groups somewhere between bandits and a resistance. Although it’s difficult to reconstitute a functional military clandestinely, it’s not impossible, and there would have to be measures to try to control any illegal arms flows. This would be very difficult with drones: you could constitute quite a decent capability from drones, civilian vehicles and suitable electronics. And even then, the new Ukrainian government would have to be heavily armed enough to maintain the monopoly of legitimate force against bandits and bitter-enders.

At that point, the Russians seek to impose a longer-term relationship on Ukraine, to fulfil the neutrality requirement. It’s hard to know what this actually means in practice, and if the Russians have specific ideas, they haven’t said much about them. It obviously has at least two components, one practical and one legal. The best outcome for Russia would be a shaken and bruised Ukraine which is nonetheless still capable of acting as a state, and voluntarily agrees to adopt the kind of neutral status that Sweden and Austria had in the Cold War, because they think it is in their interests. The complication here is that neutral states often have substantial armed forces, precisely to protect their neutrality: there is no example I can think of, of a state which is both neutral and disarmed. The key issue is likely to be a decision that no foreign forces can be stationed in the country. (This has its own problems as we’ll see.) But the problem I foresee is that there will be an attempt to codify this in a treaty. Now let me remind you once more that treaties only work if they set down in writing what the parties have already basically agreed to. They cannot and should not be used as weapons to force things to happen.

Indeed, the generic problem with treaties is that they are only as good as the will to respect them and to continue to implement them. It’s a basic principle of international relations that no government can bind its successor. Virtually all treaties contain withdrawal clauses (see Brexit) and in practice, even if a treaty is signed in 2026, there is nothing to stop a future Ukrainian government (or for that matter a future Russian government) from withdrawing from the treaty and doing what it wants. Yet it is quite possible that massive amounts of time and energy will be spent on issues which have no practical significance, such as a definition of “foreign forces” —a defence attaché? two? three? a training team for medical services? Likewise, a treaty obligation not to seek NATO membership only binds Ukraine to respect it until it doesn’t. And of course any treaty would have to pass through whatever parliament may then exist in whatever configuration, as well as the Russian Duma. The Russians will have to beware of asking a future government in Kiev for things it’s not in their power to give.

Which neatly brings us to wider international issues. Clearly, whether Ukraine becomes a NATO member depends ultimately on NATO, and a treaty modification ratified by NATO parliaments. Sending western forces to Ukraine is ultimately a matter for western governments. Taking the first one first, how would NATO deal practically with a Russian demand to formalise “no further expansion?” Well, first of there would be a political crisis within the alliance. To give such a public undertaking at all would drastically weaken NATO, which of course the Russians well understand. But any internal private struggles in Brussels would be almost as destructive. There’s no precedent, as far as I know, for international organisations unilaterally declaring themselves closed to new members, and no doubt Ukraine would harass NATO members at the ICJ. Amending the Treaty would require ratification by national parliaments, and I would’t want to have to draft a statement by a Head of Government explaining that NATO had been bullied into this by Russia. And because “NATO” doesn’t have an international legal personality, and can’t sign treaties, anything else would have to be signed by individual states, and I can’t imagine what that would be. It’s doubtful in practice whether any formal, legally binding agreement to end NATO expansion is politically feasible, and I hope the Russians realise this.

So any agreements of this kind will have to be non-binding political declarations. One way out, which is what I would recommend if it were my job, would be a bland sentence in the next Summit Declaration, something like “We discussed the possibly of future expansion of the Alliance, and concluded that in the current circumstances, our efforts are best concentrated on more pressing issues.” Whether the Russians would buy that formulation even as a basis for possible de-escalation I don’t know, but in the end it may be all they are going to get.

Which is not necessarily a disaster, so long as the two sides have essentially the same understanding of the situation. The West would need to accept that the game is over, and that pragmatically there will be no more expansion, and no stationing of foreign forces in Ukraine. The Russians will have to accept that there will be some rough edges, and that perhaps some foreign “advisers” and visitors will be there from time to time. The danger will arise if one or more countries starts to nibble around the edges. A Ukrainian-Polish Security Cooperation Treaty, for example? Invitations to Ukrainian parliamentarians to the North Atlantic Assembly? Once again, it all comes down essentially to a common understanding of overlapping interests, and this may not happen.

Finally, the Russians clearly want some kind of larger, treaty-based regime with western countries. The idea of some kind of new European Security Order has haunted strategic discussions for thirty-five years, now, and many of us were enthusiastic then for the idea. But even at the time, it was hard to understand what it might look like: any formal structure would be a cockpit for US-Russia rivalry, and without the US, such a structure would be dominated by Russia. If anything, the problems are worse now, and the chances of any treaty-based order being more than a talking-shop seem to me to be vanishingly small.

We have some idea of what the Russians are after from the draft treaties they tabled at the end of 2021. It’s extremely unusual—even bizarre—to table draft treaty texts like this with no preparation, and it’s hard to know what the Russians thought would happen. Perhaps they were just going through the motions, or perhaps they hoped to gain a propaganda advantage. But since all the concessions were on the western side, it was obvious that western nations would not negotiate on such a basis (although NATO’s reaction was extremely unhelpful as well, it must be said) and the Russians presumably realised this. A similar treaty will be no easier to negotiate this time, with the balance of forces very different. (The draft treaty was supposed to come into force when half of the signatories had ratified it, which is actually impossible for practical reasons.) Such has been the investment of western governments in hysterical anti-Russian rhetoric, though, that even if they were prepared to sign such a treaty, parliaments would be unlikely to ratify it. Western governments have painted themselves into a corner, and what was impossible in 2021 is doubly impossible now.

This means that future security arrangements in Europe are going to have to be unwritten and in part unspoken, and will very largely be the product of the military dominance of an angry Russia, and an almost pathological refusal to face facts by western governments dreaming of revenge but without the means to bring it about. Not a safe or positive combination. And here, perhaps, we approach the central problem , which is that in spite of all the warm Liberal rhetoric, collective security is seldom actually possible, and is often a zero-sum game, especially where borders and populations are concerned. There is no conceivable configuration of circumstances, let alone a treaty text, which can satisfy all Russian security concerns without scaring European nations. Whether either side’s concerns are “legitimate” is not the issue, and in any event there are no objective standards for measuring such things: this is a matter of politics, and of the invariable concerns that small nations feel when they are near to large ones with which they have complicated and bloody histories.

We went through this in the Cold War, when the security arrangements of each side were perceived as aggressive by the other. The Soviet Union, traumatised by the events of 1941-45, had decided that only large, powerful forces deployed forward, on a high level of alert and prepared for a pre-emptive strike, could prevent another Barbarossa. The problem was that such forces and doctrines were in practice indistinguishable from what you would need for a surprise attack on Europe. And NATO plans to try to cope with that were perceived in Moscow as confirmation of aggressive intentions.

So the Russians are going to have to grapple with the old question: how much is enough? And the usual answer is, always a bit more, because we are dealing with subjective fear and feelings of vulnerability, which is what life mostly consists of at all levels. (Thus, Elle magazine, no less, recently carried an article advocating that swimming pools in France should be segregated because women felt “threatened” by men in swimming trunks )

And this is the problem, whatever level we are talking about, from the strictly personal to the grand strategic. Consider the events of the last few days. Could not an enemy hide long range drones on a cargo ship and launch them from the Black Sea? A hundred perhaps? With the range to reach Moscow? And with nuclear warheads? OK, maybe it’s not likely, but can you prove to me that it’s impossible? And if it’s possible, shouldn’t we protect against it? That would mean the Russian Navy controlling the Bosphorus, and searching suspicious ships, there and outside Black Sea ports. There’s plenty of historical precedent for this. I remember decades ago seeing the 1941 film Sieg in Westen which among other things presents the German view of the events of the 1930s: a country surrounded by enemies, with British and French aircraft able to bomb Berlin from bases in Czechoslovakia. Who could doubt that Germany’s objective security interests required control of those countries? Even non-paranoid Nazis (if there were any) had to concede that such things were not impossible.

Once you start down this line of reasoning, there is no obvious place to stop. Where should Russian forces advance to? How much territory should they try to permanently control? If there’s a cordon sanitaire along the border, should it be fifty kilometres? A hundred? How few heavy weapons should Ukraine be allowed? How many concessions should NATO be forced to make? How long should Russian forces stay in parts of Ukraine they won’t permanently occupy? A year? Two years? Five? Ten?

Anyone who’s been involved in trying to plan defence programmes and budgets knows that there is no such thing as “enough.” There are no algorithms that can tell you how much to spend or what to do with the money, because all defence planning is based on uncertainty, and on fear of what might happen, and attempts to plan for it. The risk is that after the war, a resentful and heavily-armed Russia may be drawn into over-insurance by internal political pressures, and by taking seriously the continued belligerent squeaks from the West.

Whatever western leaders and publics “should” feel, the actual results of Russian moves after “victory” are likely to cause fear and uncertainty, combined with anger at the political leadership for getting them into the mess. Even if level-headed leaders argue that the last thing Russia will want to do is to control more territory, they will have to concede that Russia has the ability to destroy large parts of Europe with conventional missiles without fear of reprisals. Maybe they could demand that Finland leave NATO and accept Russian troops on its soil? Well, not now, perhaps, but can you foresee Russian policy in five years time? Ten? Fifteen? How confident are you that this will never happen? And that’s the problem.

I’m not going to go once more through why rearmament and conscription in the West are impossible, but in many ways the poisonous combination of weakness, fear and aggressive rhetoric that a Russian victory will produce in the West is a bigger and more dangerous issue. Some in Russia will take the inevitable flailing around as an indication of actual revanchist plans. After all, they might say, Germany in 1931 was effectively disarmed: a decade later they were at the gates of Moscow. OK, they are weak at the moment, but in five years? Ten? Fifteen? Could they attack us again? How confident are you that this will never happen?

Maybe good sense and rational self-interest will triumph over irrational fears about a deeply uncertain future. The trouble is, history tends to suggest the opposite. The real problems may arise after “victory.”