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That poses a timeline problem, underlying the existential one. Defense experts believe the Kremlin will be prepared in as little as five years to attack a soft target on Europe’s eastern flank. But it will take the continent at least a decade to meet that threat by rebuilding armies, weapons stockpiles and industrial capacity that have shriveled since the Soviet Union’s collapse.
The peril isn’t lost on Europe’s leaders, yet few are taking the steps to avoid or prepare for it. They call to mind Leo Tolstoy’s observation in “War and Peace” that “nothing was ready for the war that everybody expected.”
Poland and the Baltic states, the likely front line in a Russian attack that could test NATO’s mutual assistance pledge, have undertaken major military buildups. They are the exceptions.
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Five of Germany’s most prominent historians have warned Chancellor Olaf Scholz that growing calls for appeasing Russia from his Social Democratic Party — to which the historians also belong — is a “fatal” error, blind to history.
Yet Scholz himself, leader of the world’s No. 3 economy, is a portrait of ambivalence. Despite sending arms and munitions worth billions of dollars to Ukraine, he refuses to give Kyiv the bridge-busting Taurus missile system, and opposes joint European borrowing that could raise billions for the continent’s rearmament.
That idea is championed by French President Emmanuel Macron, who has come around to the view that Russia poses an “existential” threat. But France itself, on a per capita basis, is among Europe’s biggest laggards in funding Ukraine’s defense, despite providing some key weapons systems.
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NATO’s European members have patted themselves on the back for making tens of billions of dollars of progress toward meeting the alliance’s defense-spending target over the past decade, though they remain well short of the mark.
Yet the NATO benchmark to which they aspire — annual military spending equal to 2 percent of economic output — is itself obsolete.
To fund the alliance’s updated war plans, drafted by U.S. Gen. Christopher G. Cavoli, the supreme allied commander in Europe, would mean a 50 percent increase in collective defense outlays by the bloc’s European members, alliance officials have told me. That means well over $100 billion more annual spending, a massive fiscal and political lift.
“We are moving in the right direction but too slow and too late,” foreign ministers Radosław Sikorski of Poland and Jan Lipavsky of the Czech Republic wrote last month.
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Abraham Lincoln identified will as the product of two elements: moral sense and self-interest. In Europe today, the moral resolve of leaders who grasp Moscow’s threat is subverted by the muddy self-interest of politics as usual.
Macron and another major European leader, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, are clear-eyed about the mounting risks and the importance of defending Kyiv. The French leader even floated the idea of sending European troops to Ukraine. Yet both have pressed to restrict European Union imports of Ukrainian food, fearing they would depress domestic prices and provoke local farmers already angered at foreign competition and climate-change measures.
Washington has engaged in similar equivocations. President Biden has insisted that Russia must be stopped. But the White House has pleaded with Ukraine to halt air attacks on oil refineries inside Russia, perhaps worried they will drive up the cost of global oil — and gas prices for American drivers in an election year.
The cost of dissonance between real-world dangers and political hypocrisies is that Moscow will read it as evidence of the West’s weakness. Miscalculation could heighten that risk, drawing the world toward the most daunting precipice it has faced since the Cold War.
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PARIS — As a parting gift of wisdom to the alliance he has led since 2014, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg is pushing a $100 billion package seen as a move to “Trump-proof” military aid for Ukraine over five years.
If the idea is workable, it could help Kyiv withstand Russia’s onslaught. Yet it leaves unanswered the critical question of how Europe will assure its own security in the face of Moscow’s mounting aggression.
Stoltenberg’s proposal, which might be finalized when NATO meets for its 75th anniversary summit in Washington this summer, reflects Europe’s waking realization that Donald Trump could regain the White House. The former president opposes a new U.S. aid package for Ukraine that has been stalled in Congress for months.
Stoltenberg wants to shift the West’s current, relatively uncoordinated flow of weapons and munitions to NATO’s control to protect Kyiv from “the winds of political change,” according to the Financial Times. Major issues remain, including whether all 32 NATO member states are onboard — notably Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orban has resisted backing Ukraine.
Even if Stoltenberg succeeds, he leaves office this year as it dawns on the alliance’s European members that they themselves might face a hot war with Russia before this decade is out.
That poses a timeline problem, underlying the existential one. Defense experts believe the Kremlin will be prepared in as little as five years to attack a soft target on Europe’s eastern flank. But it will take the continent at least a decade to meet that threat by rebuilding armies, weapons stockpiles and industrial capacity that have shriveled since the Soviet Union’s collapse.
The peril isn’t lost on Europe’s leaders, yet few are taking the steps to avoid or prepare for it. They call to mind Leo Tolstoy’s observation in “War and Peace” that “nothing was ready for the war that everybody expected.”
Poland and the Baltic states, the likely front line in a Russian attack that could test NATO’s mutual assistance pledge, have undertaken major military buildups. They are the exceptions.
Five of Germany’s most prominent historians have warned Chancellor Olaf Scholz that growing calls for appeasing Russia from his Social Democratic Party — to which the historians also belong — is a “fatal” error, blind to history.
Yet Scholz himself, leader of the world’s No. 3 economy, is a portrait of ambivalence. Despite sending arms and munitions worth billions of dollars to Ukraine, he refuses to give Kyiv the bridge-busting Taurus missile system, and opposes joint European borrowing that could raise billions for the continent’s rearmament.
That idea is championed by French President Emmanuel Macron, who has come around to the view that Russia poses an “existential” threat. But France itself, on a per capita basis, is among Europe’s biggest laggards in funding Ukraine’s defense, despite providing some key weapons systems.
NATO’s European members have patted themselves on the back for making tens of billions of dollars of progress toward meeting the alliance’s defense-spending target over the past decade, though they remain well short of the mark.
Yet the NATO benchmark to which they aspire — annual military spending equal to 2 percent of economic output — is itself obsolete.
To fund the alliance’s updated war plans, drafted by U.S. Gen. Christopher G. Cavoli, the supreme allied commander in Europe, would mean a 50 percent increase in collective defense outlays by the bloc’s European members, alliance officials have told me. That means well over $100 billion more annual spending, a massive fiscal and political lift.
“We are moving in the right direction but too slow and too late,” foreign ministers Radosław Sikorski of Poland and Jan Lipavsky of the Czech Republic wrote last month.
Abraham Lincoln identified will as the product of two elements: moral sense and self-interest. In Europe today, the moral resolve of leaders who grasp Moscow’s threat is subverted by the muddy self-interest of politics as usual.
Macron and another major European leader, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, are clear-eyed about the mounting risks and the importance of defending Kyiv. The French leader even floated the idea of sending European troops to Ukraine. Yet both have pressed to restrict European Union imports of Ukrainian food, fearing they would depress domestic prices and provoke local farmers already angered at foreign competition and climate-change measures.
Washington has engaged in similar equivocations. President Biden has insisted that Russia must be stopped. But the White House has pleaded with Ukraine to halt air attacks on oil refineries inside Russia, perhaps worried they will drive up the cost of global oil — and gas prices for American drivers in an election year.
The cost of dissonance between real-world dangers and political hypocrisies is that Moscow will read it as evidence of the West’s weakness. Miscalculation could heighten that risk, drawing the world toward the most daunting precipice it has faced since the Cold War.
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