The Day After.

And the day after that.

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A number of these essays have dealt with the consequences of the war in Ukraine for western states, and especially for the Europeans. I have talked about the quasi-religious fervour which lies behind the vilification of Russia as an “anti-Europe,” as well as the wider traditional fear of the size and power of that country. It’s clear that there is no real understanding of how close we are now to the appearance of a single, hostile dominant military power on the continent, which the Europeans cannot even begin to resist,. Meanwhile, the traditional counterweight—the United States—seems increasingly less interested, and anyway less capable.

It’s time to bring these reflections up to date, and to try to peer into what seems to be a very uncomfortable future for Europe, and one which its leaders will have no idea how to deal with, either institutionally as in Brussels, or at the level of nation-states. That last point is important, because we are moving into entirely uncharted territory here, where an unimpressive generation of European political leaders and bureaucrats will be presented with intellectual, political and even moral challenges which at the moment they show no signs of being able to comprehend, let alone able to deal with, and which, critically, will divide their countries from each other.

Europe is a small, crowded, historically violent continent, whose exact definition and boundaries vary depending on the question you ask and the period you are talking about, but whose rulers and nations have historically looked to military force and military alliances to keep the peace and fight the wars. Nations that were dominant at certain periods (Spain, France, Prussia …) tended to attract opposition, but national rivalries were themselves overlaid by and mixed up with higher-level ones (the Pope versus the Emperor, the French King versus the Emperor, Catholics versus Protestants) and lower-level ones (regionalism, nationalism, ethnic rivalry, commercial rivalries, the mismatch between groups and borders) in a dizzying and frequently changing pattern. (Most books on the Thirty Years War begin with an introductory chapter just explaining how complicated it all was, and how many other factors than religion were involved.)

“Europe” seldom acted as an entity for this reason: internal jealousies and rivalries meant that one nation’s problems could be another nation’s advantage: thus the notable absence of the French from the European coalition fighting the expansion of the Ottoman Empire for example. We have tended to forget since 1945 that Europe’s habit of producing more history than it can consume, and its endless historical, cultural and territorial disputes that generated this history, have not actually gone away, but have just been repressed and concealed. Like some traumatic childhood memory they are still there, waiting to resurface.

The Second World War was fought according to these norms. It was essentially a consequence of the fundamental structural problem of European politics since the nineteenth century, of borders not reflecting the distribution of ethnic and national groups. (This “self-determination of peoples” thing turned out to be more difficult than anyone had expected.) It became clear that you couldn’t replace multinational empires with tidy, viable nation-states just like that, and attempts to do so created anger, and demands to change the resulting borders. In traditional fashion, Germany attempted to reclaim territory it considered its own by threats and force: in traditional fashion, Britain and France threatened war if it did so. And thus.

As I’ve stressed several times, European elites emerged from the war exhausted, traumatised and stunned, recognising that the Continent simply could not survive another such episode. I’ve been through the sequence of events that produced NATO, the European institutions and eventually the European Union enough times that there is no need to reproduce it all here. But what’s important in the present context is that when they were actually needed, like now, these institutions turned out to be weak, and unsuited to the current situation. NATO was conceived against the belief in a common threat, but when the circumstances originally envisaged actually arose—a major crisis in Europe involving Russia—it turned out to be largely useless. And as I will explain, that situation is unlikely to change, let alone improve. And the EU was conceived less to resolve internal tensions and contradictions within Europe than to suppress and hide them, and it is already clear that it can’t do that much longer. Again, I’ll say more about this in a moment. In many ways, we are seeing a return to traditional patterns of European politics now, much more so than was the case in 1989 for all the excitement of that moment. And these are not patterns that we are necessarily going to like.

Before embarking on these questions, however, I want to first talk about a fundamental characteristic of the international system which is generally left out of international relations textbooks, especially those written by Americans or under the influence of realist or neo-realist dogma. This is the complexity of the relationships between larger and smaller nations, and what smaller nations do to try to avoid giving away too much. I should say that all of my attempts to explain this to Americans have failed, although it’s not actually that complicated. But even if Americans understand the problem intellectually, they cannot, for historical reasons, understand what it feels like to be a smaller and weaker power confronted with a larger. So with due apologies to Americans I haven’t met, and who can understand this kind of thing, let’s move on.

In spite of what dominant international relations theories may say, the world does not consist of unitary “nations” perpetually fighting each other for influence and power and sometimes coming to war. Nor did it ever. As I’ve pointed out many times, the international system only works at all as a result of widespread cooperation, as often as not on the basis of mutual self-interest. Great powers and lesser powers can actually both benefit from the same agreement, even if their objectives are diametrically opposed to each other. The world is, in fact, a gigantic assemblage of Venn diagrams , where smaller nations are often obliged for practical reasons to choose options they would rather not choose, because the alternatives are worse. And indeed larger nations can sometimes find themselves in that position as well. International relations, especially in the security area, is not a zero-sum game.

But countries that are not enemies, and may even be allies of various kinds, nonetheless have complex relations with each other, and often one will predominate. The relationships between Australia and New Zealand, Nigeria and Ghana or Brazil and Paraguay are not conflictual, but not relationships of equals, either. Beyond a certain point, though, imbalances of power can be large enough to be problematic, and generate a sense of insecurity and fragility. At that point, a wise government looks around for a counterbalancing force to strengthen its position. The classic example for many years was Saudi Arabia, a large but weak state, with important tribal and religious tensions. Through commercial and military relationships with western nations, and purchase of western military equipment, as well as stationing of foreign military personnel in the country, it turned western nations into guarantors of its own security, and western personnel into hostages in the event of an attack.

But this co-optation of other nations in your defence is a common strategy for weaker nations in the face of stronger ones. And here, we need to be clear that we are not talking in the crude realist vocabulary of threats and conflicts. Yes, other things being equal, size and power do matter, as does the willingness to exploit them for political ends, but in a more subtle fashion than is often realised. So countries like Vietnam, Thailand and Japan are not afraid of China in the sense that they fear invasion and occupation, but rather they are nervous in the face of an industrial and military giant in their backyard, and the pressure that giant may be able to exert. For decades, for example, the Chinese have been ruthlessly exploiting Japanese guilt over the Manchurian War, and indeed “spontaneous” demonstrations in the region every time the Japanese government altered a few words in a history textbook were, and I think still are, a common occurrence.

Thus, the US presence in Japan, for all that it is frequently resented, and for all that its details are much more complex than is publicly admitted, acts partly as a stabilising factor with China (since a dispute with Japan is implicitly a dispute with the US as well) and partly as an attempted guarantee in the region against Japanese revanchism. In the absence of such a guarantee there are reasonably-well-founded fears that Japan would develop nuclear weapons, which it could do extremely quickly, and that would not be regarded as helpful The problem with this kind of relationship, of course, is that it freezes rather than addresses the underlying problems, and so in recent years Japanese nationalism has become more of an issue, as many of us always thought it would.

It is therefore, as it has been through history, a good idea to make a major power feel that your security is in their interest, especially if your own security and freedom of operation are threatened, either by neighbours or by internal divisions and tensions. Thus, the thinking behind the Washington Treaty, of involving the US in any East-West confrontation in Europe, and so changing the political balance of forces, is a conventional way of dealing with such imbalances historically. It is worth pointing out also that in the late 1940s Europe was economically and militarily on its knees, and the disparity with the strength of the Soviet Union, even weakened by the War, was much greater than it was subsequently to become. Thus, as I have insisted many times, the United States was not “protecting” Europe, but rather implicitly involving itself in any crisis with the Soviet Union, and now Russia, which might arise there.

For the first time since 1945, and arguably for the first time since 1917, this situation cannot be taken for granted, and it’s worth looking at three reasons why that should be so. The first is the attitude of the US itself. Throughout the Cold War, an actual conflict was never very likely, and this was widely if tacitly acknowledged. However, it was assumed that in any major political crisis, the US would support its European allies politically. Partly, this was because the US saw the Soviet Union as a competitor everywhere, and partly, and perhaps mainly, because Europe was a major economic and political partner, and the idea of Europe falling under Soviet influence, let alone domination, was utterly unthinkable. But this was always accompanied in Europe by a nagging feeling that, if the crisis got to the point of actual shooting, the US would cut a bilateral deal with the Soviet Union and leave. Its control of the NATO command system would have made this easy to do. Thus, among other things, the stationing of US units far forward in Germany, the British and French independent nuclear systems and the French decision to maintain a national command system for their own defence.

But all this became much more complex after the end of the Cold War, and at various points—notably the election of Bush the Younger in 2000—there was real concern in Europe about the reliability of the transatlantic link in a crisis, with advertised US interests shifting to the Middle East and Asia. Seen from Washington the situation was not easy either, because there were two basic tensions pulling in different directions. On the one hand, it was thought that Europe was basically stable, and that crises such as the Former Yugoslavia could be left to Europeans to sort out, while the US looked elsewhere. (Even then, the US couldn’t keep its hands off the problem and delayed the resolution of the conflict by at least a year.) On the other hand, if things got really bad, would not the Europeans still seek US help? As one US official said to me at the time “there’s always the chance you will do something that we will regret.”

It’s quite likely we are now at the point where these fears are about to become realities. The US involvement in the Ukrainian saga has been disastrous, and no doubt different groups in Washington will be knifing each other for years, if not decades, trying to attribute responsibility and guilt to others. But it’s already clear that the Trump administration sees some kind of detente with Russia as a higher priority than continuing an un-winnable war in Ukraine. This does not mean that such a detente is necessarily possible, still less that it is being pursued competently by the present team, but it does mean that support of Europe will never again be the priority it once was.

The second point is the redundancy of NATO. Now of course if we measure the success of an organisation by the number of members, then NATO has never been more successful. It’s not so long ago, after all, that pundits were rejoicing that Finland, a small country with a long border with Russia and small armed forces, had become a member, indeed that it posed “a nightmare” for the Russian government. This is “success” in the sense that a musician is successful selling more music. But NATO does not exist (yet anyway) to sell music.

And if you have ever been involved in a committee or working group of any kind, especially an international one, you know that an arithmetical increase in membership brings a geometrical increase in complexity. (There’s actually a mathematical formula to describe it.) And it’s not simply a matter of numbers, but also issues: thus, two nations may agree with each other on some subjects, agree to differ on other subjects, and be violently opposed to each other on yet others. In practice, once an organisation reaches a certain size, the potential for disagreement becomes effectively infinite, in relation to the limited management resources usually available. This has historically been true of NATO even with a much smaller membership. In 1999, the organisation effectively ceased to function after a few days of the Kosovo crisis, and was run by closed meetings of a handful of the most important nations and the Secretary General. In 2003, the entire NATO deployment to Afghanistan was held up while German parliamentarians were recalled from the beaches of Croatia to approve their country’s participation. And so on.

If NATO had seriously expected that its support for Ukraine might lead to a prolonged war, and organised accordingly, then things might be different now. But such ideas could not be publicly aired in Brussels, and “NATO” involvement with Ukraine before 2022 was the usual uncomfortable mixture of national and institutional meddling, with no internal logic or coherence. Insofar as the Russian reaction was considered at all, it was necessarily discounted, because the internal dynamics of the organisation were too powerful, and if NATO stopped expanding, its entire purpose and future would be in question. Indeed, it was unthinkable that NATO should stop expanding just because the Russians didn’t like it. Who did they think they were? In any event, Russia was not a priority for the West at the time, and NATO was busy trying to make an enemy out of China instead. The result was that NATO was caught institutionally unprepared, and indeed the practical support for Ukraine has either been purely national, or the result of ad-hoc coordination between interested countries. Ukraine simply illustrates what many of us have maintained for a very long time: crisis management at scale is effectively impossible.

But that’s the easy bit. At least there’s a war on, and the basic situation is (relatively) simple. We do not know how that situation will evolve post-Ukraine, or even during what is likely to be a messy and protracted end-phase. But it is unlikely that NATO will be able to make much of a coordinated contribution beyond formation handwaving, not least because this is the point where national interests will start to diverge quite seriously, and in ways that are not yet obvious. Defeat will damage and even destroy some political figures, parties and institutions, and strengthen others. Snarling defiance and epic sulking will only get you so far. At some point, actual practical issues will have to be addressed, and past experience suggests that they will bring along many unforeseen and divisive problems. NATO is thus presenting the Russians (who have the advantage of being a single player) with an open goal into which it would be unreasonable to expect them not to kick.

Something will no doubt be done at the level of rhetoric. Task forces will be assembled, new strategic concepts will be worked on, and they may even be agreed and published. But they will mean nothing because there will be nothing behind them, because there is no chance of an actual agreed strategy, and so no idea of what future NATO forces would actually be for. I’ve explained many times why there will be no “rearmament” of Europe, and I won’t go into that now. The most that can be hoped for is the utilisation of slack capacity within existing defence manufacturers (those not in China, anyway) and possible small increases in the size of western armed forces, if enough money and persuasion can be put into the process.

But wait a minute, what about the excellence of western equipment? Well, here we have to understand that on the whole western equipment is quite good for what it was designed to do. So, the tanks that were sent to Ukraine were conceived (and in some cases built) during the Cold War, when NATO expected to fight a short and extremely high-intensity defensive war, and elected to try to win it with smaller numbers of high-quality weaponry. Size and weight of tanks was not an issue, since they would be retreating along their own lines of communication, and would not have to move that far anyway. In spite of many upgrades and new capabilities, western tanks of today come from this fundamental lineage, and have been thrown into a battle for which they were not designed. Other types of western equipment were developed specifically for low-intensity warfare, where the likely adversary (someone like the Islamic State or the Taliban) would not have anti-aircraft systems or artillery. So much NATO equipment is inherently unsuitable for the current environment: a crash programme could conceivably develop and begin to field new types of equipment in the next decade or so, if, and only if, there were a coherent series of high-level doctrines and operational concepts based on a clear strategic vision. And I don’t need to tell you how unlikely that is.

OK then, but what about the US, and its “hundred thousand troops in Europe?” Can’t they deter, or even defeat the Russians? Well, let’s have a look at the official site of US Forces in Europe. Oddly, it contains massive amounts of everyday information, many pictures and videos and many topical news items, but almost nothing about the actual US forces deployed in Europe, apart from a few references to headquarters and components. And indeed it’s hard to find any factual information about units and their strengths on any official site. In many ways, this is surprising, since such information is rarely classified: it is on public display in most cases. Can Wikipedia help us here? Well, the page is reasonably up-to-date so what does it say about ground combat units? In Germany, there is a Stryker Cavalry “Regiment”also described as a Brigade Combat Team, some 4-5000 strong. The Stryker is a lightly-armed and armoured wheeled infantry transport vehicle, and the unit consists predominantly of such vehicles, with some more heavily armed variants, and with some combat support elements added. The unit concerned—the 2nd Armoured Cavalry regiment—was extensively deployed in Iraq, but is not suitable for high-intensity operations such as those in Ukraine. In Italy, there is the 173rd Airborne Brigade, overwhelmingly parachute infantry, some 3000-3500 strong. It was deployed extensively in the Gulf and Afghanistan, and its deployment in Italy is essentially to allow it to move back to the Middle East when needed. It would be of no use against the Russians. There is also a Brigade-sized unit of combat and support helicopters in Germany. And that’s about it for ground combat units.

There are, of course, a large number of US aircraft in Europe, notably at Rammstein in Germany, with small units deployed elsewhere. The majority of the aircraft are fighters, and here we encounter a more sophisticated version of the problem I discussed with tank design. Throughout the Cold War, NATO air forces were intended to dominate the air space over Western Europe and thus help to defeat a Warsaw Pact invasion. It was assumed that WP air forces would mount conventional attacks at the start of a war, including against the British Isles and the periphery of the Continent. Hence the need for sizeable numbers of sophisticated air superiority fighters, intended to duke it out with their Soviet equivalents.

Whether the Soviet Union would actually have fought like this we will never know, but it is fairly clear that the Russians will not and have not in Ukraine. Russian doctrine seems to be to make use of air power only when air superiority has been gained through the use of offensive and defensive missiles. In any future conflict, it can be assumed that their first attacks would include massive missile strikes on western airbases, against which there is currently little effective protection.The surviving aircraft would actually have very little to do, since the kind of war that might follow is not the one they were designed for. And in any event, flying distance from Rammstein to, say, Kiev, is of the order of 1500 kilometres, and of the order of 1000 kilometres even to Warsaw, so at the published extreme operational range of aircraft such as the F35.

It would therefore be unwise to rely on US forces to “come to the rescue” of Europe in the event of a war with Russia. True, reinforcements could be despatched from the US itself, but their safe arrival could not be guaranteed. In that sense, the US has much less usable combat power in a land/air war in Europe than, say, Spain, which does at least have hundreds of modern main battle tanks. Nuclear weapons would be irrelevant to this kind of crisis, and the large United States Navy would not be able to intervene usefully in a conflict of the kind I have described.

But the US armed forces are a million strong, aren’t they? The country has a population of 350 million, an armaments industry and lots of engineers and scientists. Couldn’t they remobilise as quickly as they did at the start of World War 2? Well, we are back in the problem I discussed last week, that of magical thinking, where you can vaguely imagine what the outcome might be, but you have no idea of the practical steps needed to get there. Now assuming, as an economist would say, all sorts of things, it might be theoretically possible to reconstitute a heavy armoured capability for the US Army, and bring it to Europe.

To give an idea of what is involved, the US has one Armoured Division at the moment with about 250 tanks, and about 500 medium and light armoured vehicles. It’s hard to know what size a militarily useful force in Europe would be, or indeed what “useful” means in this sense, because in Ukraine armoured units very rarely fight each other. But there are lots of tanks and armoured vehicles in storage, and it would be theoretically possible to bring them back into service, upgrade them, fit them with all sorts of modern equipment such as anti-drone defences if it can be bought, retrain soldiers if that’s possible, buy lots of new support vehicles if they are available, buy huge quantities of tank ammunition if it can be produced, buy huge quantities of spares and components if they can be sourced, organise, staff and train complete new divisional and brigade command structures, develop completely new sets of doctrine and tactics, and teach and rehearse them, build massive camps the size of small towns somewhere in Europe (an armoured division can easily have fifteen thousand personnel, plus support and families), as well as huge ranges for practicing manoeuvres, exercises and firing, together with massive ordnance depots and repair organisations, and then transport all this to Europe and install it there. But of course that’s only half of it, because during the Cold War western militaries expected to fight near where they were deployed in peacetime. No-one has the remotest idea where some future US armoured forces in Europe would actually fight, or how, let alone how they would get there. So it’s perhaps best not to wish for things you can’t have.

As regards the third point, I’ve already discussed many of the issues affecting Europe implicitly, since they overlap with those affecting NATO. I don’t need to insist any more, I think, that the idea of “rearming” Europe is a fantasy. But the real question is going to be whether “Europe” is capable of acting as a reasonably united whole in the post-Ukraine world at all. I put “Europe” in quotes because the Europe of Brussels and the Political Union exists as a kind of ghostly counterpoint to the traditional “real” Europe of countries, languages, cultures, histories and traditions. Indeed, as I have explained on a number of occasions, it was deliberately constructed so, to bury allegedly “divisive” issues under a veneer of facile Liberal goodthinking clichés about diversity, tolerance, free movement of peoples etc, and to create a purely transactional continent, where there were no loyalties or identities except economic ones.

For as long as it could be argued that the problems of European security were now in the past, that Russia was a weak state in need of discipline and sanctions and that China was no more than an economic challenge, all this was just about feasible. Europe’s military forces could be drawn down to almost nothing because they would only be employed as peacekeepers, or occasional enforcers, in less fortunate regions of the world. The political energy thus liberated could be used to prevent voters making the wrong choices in EU elections, and punishing them if they did.

It’s clear that such an ideological construction cannot be “defended” in any real sense, whether politically or militarily, which is why the dominant political discourse is about hostility to Russia, not loyalty to Europe. In fact, there is nothing there: as I’ve said repeatedly, nobody is going to die for the Eurovision Song Contest, or for that matter the European Commission or the ERASMUS programme. This is the moment, if ever there was one, for Europe’s leaders to rediscover and play up Europe’s rich history and culture as something worth protecting and defending. With impeccable timing the Commission has just announced a €10M campaign to stress the Islamic contribution to European civilisation.

As with NATO, the EU enlargement machine has rumbled forward without anyone at the controls really sure where it was going, to the point where a vast, clumsy, almost unmanageable bloc has been created which contains so many hidden tensions and historical sensitivities that it is incapable of actually confronting a genuinely serious crisis without simply coming apart. And that, I fear, is what we are going to see. The illusion of homogeneity, and a post-historical, post-cultural, post-political European world-view was always a myth outside the rarified, incestuous world of the European ruling class itself. And in the end that class isn’t held together by very much except shallow ideology, inane political and social clichés, personal contacts and the accompanying fear of stepping out of line ideologically, and being ostracised by those they lunch with. At some not very distant point in the future, I think, when the sound of pitchforks being sharpened becomes unmistakeable, this class will suddenly discover that it is better to adapt than die, and it’s hard to say much about the results except that they are unlikely to be positive.

We can of course take refuge in coping strategies. We can believe that “somebody is in control,” because even the worst options (Zionists , the City of London, the CIA, the Vatican, the Bilderberg Group) are better than nobody being in control. We can adopt the alternative coping strategy of imagining some kind of rebirth of European democracy through unspecified means. But in reality, we are moving now into a situation where the facile European constituent ideology is likely to come apart under the strain of real-world events, and countries are going to find themselves with different, and sometimes opposed, interests, and a political class which has been struck about the face by the wet fish of reality, and has no idea what to do.

The current bluster of European leaders is based on the childhood fantasy that if you refuse to recognise something strongly enough it will go away. They cling to the idea that one more month of fighting, one more missile attack, one more round of sanctions and Russia will collapse. Instead of being a potential answer to feared Russian aggression, Ukraine’s increasing links with the West became the cause of the war. The incredulous relief of Europeans in February 2022, with its belief that the Russian campaign would quickly collapse and Putin would be overthrown, has given way to a cold, sick realisation of the greatest foreign policy blunder since 1945. The European ruling class is, in fact, unable even to conceptualise defeat or failure, and it is being dragged slowly in the direction of reality at the speed of a small child being dragged off to see the dentist.

And there isn’t any way back. This same ruling class seems still to believe that it can threaten and dictate terms to Moscow, and that the Russians will do almost anything to ensure that sanctions are lifted. The idea that it is Russia that will dictate the terms has scarcely began to penetrate the brainpans of even the most advanced thinkers. But why should Russia make Europe any presents? They will dominate Europe militarily, with the capacity to destroy any European city with conventional weapons and without fear of retaliation. And they will be severely annoyed.

I don’t know what the Russians are going to do—I doubt if they do yet—but it won’t be funny. The usual rules of international politics will apply: hit a man when he’s down. Europe will be weak and divided, unable to hurt Russia militarily, and the United States will be unable to do very much even if it has the will. Historians of the decline of Europe will, I fear, have to invent an entire new vocabulary to properly describe the gratuitous self-mutilation that Europes ruling class has inflicted upon its citizens.