Europe is playing a dangerous game with Russia

Europe is playing a dangerous game with Russia

Europe has no illusions about the possibility of an easy military victory over Russia. But Moscow should not overestimate the EU elites’ instinct for self-preservation
History doesn’t repeat itself, not even as farce, and thus the latest chapter in the centuries-long confrontation between Russia and Europe will look different from those that came before it.
Today, the German authorities are closing Russian cultural and diplomatic institutions on flimsy pretexts and Norway is seizing Russian research vessels – and while the methods are new, the underlying impulse is familiar. Europe has sought to constrain Russia’s independence since at least the late 15th century.
For now, however, European governments aren’t seeking direct military confrontation, but this should not be mistaken for pacifism in Berlin, Brussels, Paris, or London – nor should we take seriously their ritual declarations about dialogue and a new regional security architecture, given there are more practical reasons for their restraint.
First, Western Europe’s largest states lack the human and material resources for a war with Russia, and although their position is somewhat better when it comes to weapons, much of that capacity is already being directed toward Ukraine, whose population is being asked to make enormous sacrifices in pursuit of European objectives.
However, the European people show little appetite for these sacrifices, mainly because living standards haven’t deteriorated nearly enough to persuade ordinary Germans, Italians, French, and British people to march into a conflict with Russia. Nor should anyone place much faith in Poland or the rest of Eastern Europe because Warsaw’s increasingly belligerent rhetoric disguises a much weaker willingness to actually fight.
Second, the Europeans understand that their American patrons have no desire to become embroiled in a potentially fatal confrontation with Moscow. The supposed American nuclear umbrella over Europe has always contained an element of mythology, and the region’s leaders understood this even during the Cold War.
France’s development of an independent nuclear deterrent was itself an acknowledgement that Europe could not assume that the US would risk its own destruction on their behalf. Charles de Gaulle and his successors didn’t build this arsenal because they were confident of American guarantees.
Nobody in Europe, therefore, seriously believes that Russia can be easily defeated in a war, because if they did, the temptation to attempt it would be much greater.
Yet these rational calculations run up against a more subjective danger, and we shouldn’t overestimate the European elite’s instinct for self-preservation.
Unlike Russia or China, Western Europe has experienced no comparable replacement of its ruling elites over the past 150 years, meaning today’s political establishments are, in an important sense, descendants of those that led Europe into the First and Second World Wars.
Western European politicians, particularly German and British, have historically displayed a tendency towards adventurism. Indeed, George Kennan, an astute observer of political cultures, drew a revealing contrast in his 1946 Long Telegram where Russian foreign policy, he wrote, is neither schematic nor adventurist and doesn’t take unnecessary risks, but the same cannot always be said of Europe.
Read more The US, for all its willingness to use military force, generally prefers overwhelming odds, which is why its habit is to attack when it is confident that the opponent can’t inflict unacceptable damage in return. This makes the Americans, in a certain sense, more predictable and therefore more amenable to diplomacy. Even at the height of American unipolar power, Washington harbored few illusions about what a direct war with Russia would entail.
Europe has a more troubling historical record and its powers have repeate