What are you so afraid of?

The US hints at drawing down its military commitment to Europe. Europeans are on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

“The Bewitched Man”, Francisco Goya (1798), after a play about a man who believes his life depends on keeping a lamp burning

I have a number of drafts idling, but before I get to them, I need to dash off something that has been irking me for a while. After all, I started this blog as a therapeutic ploy: no more biting my tongue about things that trouble me.

So here goes: what’s with the sense of doom and panic that European policy-makers feel at the spectre of another Trump presidency and his explicit threat of ending US military protection for Europe? We’re hearing less about it since Biden has dropped out of the race and imbued Democrats (and political leaders across most of the spectrum in Europe) with hope for keeping the White House. But there are two-and-a-half months to go until the election, and whenever Kamala Harris’s poll numbers wobble, as they inevitably will in the course of any campaign, the howling and gnashing of teeth from Europe will become louder again. In any case, the suggestion that Europeans do more for their own defense isn’t only coming from Trump, though Europeans prefer to see it as a symptom of his uncouth derangement and not as the persistent, mainstream discourse it has been in US foreign policy circles for a quarter century.

I’m not one of the many, many voices on both sides of the Atlantic who are in unisone agreement that Europe “must do more for its own defense”. By which they mean European states should spend more on weapons and put more men (“and women!”, the tank-riding and tank-hugging faux feminists will chirp) in uniform. I don’t believe this at all. I’ve learned from people who survived wars (barely, with splintered souls and holes in their lives where their mothers and brothers should be) and from activists who try to end war that militarism doesn’t make us secure.

Militarism doesn’t stop war; it generates war. Even in peace time, militarism is a hungry beast that will greedily swallow all the resources we could instead use to build just, safe communities in which everyone can thrive. When acute warfare is unleashed, militarism will devour entire generations. Si vis bellum, para bellum. This is not a rarified lesson I could only learn in places where the ground was trembling with artillery fire. It is right there in the works of (women) peace activists from the 19th and early 20th century, which came to underpin the very international system the world has tried to build since.

With my priors out of the way, on to the main point: those European pundits and officials fretting at the prospect (distant, for now) of the US withdrawing troops and hardware from Europe and reducing its commitment to defending NATO members, what were they thinking all those years after the Cold War? That if it wasn’t for the massive conventional power of the US and the nuclear umbrella it extends over NATO members, their countries would be under attack? Certainly, inevitably, more likely than not, constantly under attack? Attack from where, by whom and for which reason?

Setting aside for a moment more recent bugbears like China or Iran, that leaves us with Russia. It seems absurd to assume that absent US commitments at post-1991 levels, Russia would have attacked Germany in, say, 1999 (revenge for Serbia, anyone?) or the Netherlands in 2003 (for the impudence of joining the coalition of the willing that invaded Iraq?), or the Czech Republic in 2009 (just because, no special reason). So absurd that it’s impossible to imagine it for any but the clunkiest tabletop strategy exercise scenarios.

Ok, but in the aftermath of 02/24/2022, aren’t all bets off? The day we learned that Putin is a megalomaniac madman who has finally come around to the master plan he has been hatching for a quarter-century, namely restoring the Soviet Union? Scratch that, not just the Soviet Union, no, he wants to invade all of Europe. In the next five to eight years at that, according to the German Minister of Defense.

The fervor of this conviction in European foreign policy and security circles is astonishing. It has come out of nowhere and is not based on any conceivable, let alone available, evidence. Not only does Russia lack the military capacity to attack NATO by a ridiculously wide margin (and that’s assuming its military isn’t pinned down in Ukraine), but it has no desire to do so, judging by the aggregate statements and actions of its representatives over many years. Russia has no designs on any NATO members (let alone any of the few remaining neutral states). Over the post-Cold War period, Russia’s issues with EU and NATO members have tended to be narrowly military-technical, such as the installation of missile defense launch sites.

History shouldn’t be enlisted as a guide to the future, but the claim that Russia will most certainly attack EU and NATO states must originate somewhere, so we might as well start with history. The short version is that while Russia fought its share of wars with Europe’s other major players, it very rarely started them. Russia never attacked Germany or Austria, not even back before World War I, when it shared long, messy and fluctuating borders with them. It has never attacked any countries further west. When great European powers like Britain or France ended up embroiled in war with Russia, they had typically started it. Even the likes of Sweden or Poland, with their massive chips on their shoulders, have the sort of histories with Russia which might be summed up as “they give as good as they take”.

The Cold War period, when Moscow controlled much of Eastern Europe, stands out as an anomaly, brought on by the existential trauma of a war of conquest and extermination. That Eastern Europe’s governments, who share a history of forced membership in the Warsaw Pact, have among them radically different takes on the supposed danger emanating from Russia today, speaks volumes.

Plus, the Soviet Union (in many important ways not the same as Russia) had an ideological project - communist revolution - with an inherently global scope, if applied with little enthusiasm for long stretches of its history. After all, Stalin had opted deliberately for “socialism in one country” and then gone on to finish off Trotsky and others who wanted immediate revolutionary expansion all over the world. Today’s Russia is remarkably ideology-free, cobbling together one astroturfed state ideology after another, usually containing nationalist elements and some reactionary, patriarchal soundbites that resonate with boomer uncles anywhere, all anchored in a thick baseline of consumerism. Consequently, Russia’s alliances around the world aren’t driven by ideology, but are pragmatic, opportunistic and hands-off when it comes to its partners’ domestic affairs. There is no axis of autocracy.

If we assume, as is widely done,¹ that Russia attacked Ukraine in 2022 because of unreconstructed imperial delusions about Ukraine, its statehood and its people, then that same reasoning cannot be employed to predict an attack on countries like Germany. Or even Latvia. Definitely not Portugal. It is Ukraine’s unique tragedy that it holds a unique place in Russia’s history and geographic imagining.

If there are no indications of either intent or capacity for a Russian attack on NATO members, why are so many in Europe so nervous? Here’s a hunch. The prospect of the US scaling down its military commitment to European security has uncovered a peculiar wrinkle about how that commitment had played out since the end of the Cold War: as a security blanket that induced Europeans, and certain Eastern Europeans especially, to punch above their weight, to preen, strut and taunt where they would otherwise have been cautious, prudent and diplomatic.

At human rights conferences at the OSCE, minor Eastern European states would lob the shrillest accusations at Russia, on issues they clearly knew little about and cared for even less. At one such conference on violence against women, I gave a presentation about female genital mutilation in the North Caucasus, only to be followed into the corridor by a representative of one of those minor Eastern European states, who could barely contain his hand-rubbing excitement as he cornered me and told me “this is brilliant, wanna brainstorm how we can use this against Russia?”

At the OSCE, the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly and the UN’s Human Rights Council, countries like Estonia would be the loudest and most opportunistic in their criticism of Russia. Like a demented chihuahua yapping at the heels of an elephant. This demeans and diminishes human rights mechanisms and erodes the very human rights the latter were set up to protect. It also lost us the OSCE as a platform for building the indivisible peace that was to be its hallmark.

After some three decades of belittling and ignoring Russian interests, lecturing successive Russian governments, manipulating multilateral mechanisms like the Council of Europe, and, of course, over two years into arming Ukraine and European weapons killing Russian soldiers and hitting targets on Russian soil, European leaders now seem afraid of their own courage. Like a kid who used to stick out his tongue at a bully while his big brother was nearby, but suddenly his brother is gone and he finds himself alone with the bully.

And it’s not even only about Russia, or whether those fears of an imminent evasion are earnest and credible. It’s about China, too. For some years now Lithuania has been lashing out at China, loudly taking Taiwan’s side, supporting HongKong protesters, fulminating about Uyghur human rights, pontificating in UN settings. What began as an elite project has over the years swayed Lithuanian public opinion, so that large pluralities now see China as a threat and opponent. There are similar stirrings all over Europe, and not just about China, but also directed at Iran.

I don’t know why so many in Europe considered this imitation neoconnery a good idea, what they thought was in it for them. No one would seriously argue that the average European nation has immediate security interests in the South China Sea or the Persian Gulf. The closest I can put my finger on is a sort of vicarious primacy, or primacy by proxy. No Europeans, not even the French or British, could aspire to primacy in their own right, to occupying the top of the heap in a unipolar order. But they can hitch their geopolitical wagon to the US’s claim to primacy and fill the gaps in this logic with their specific European mission civilisatrice: that they have figured it all out - wealth, the good life, peace, perfect governance and all of it held up by supranational technocracy, their secular religion and secret of their superiority.

There is a pronounced supremacist streak in the way European elites think about themselves, their political project at home and their geopolitical projects atEurope’s peripheries and around the world. This supremacist thinking pairs well with the primacy by proxy European policy-makers have adopted.

Here is another hunch: if a German general (or minister, for that matter) tells us Europe will have to fight Russia in five to eight years, it’s not because he has any intelligence of Russia cooking up those very plans. It’s because he is cooking up those plans. I’m not saying he’s planning for an outright Western invasion of Russia. But I expect he’s pricing in actions Germany and its partners intend to take that they know will make war with Russia more likely. In classic security dilemma fashion, the very actions Europeans are admonished to take in the same breath with such dire warnings - increase military spending and the size of their militaries, put their economies on a war footing, build more weapons, put more of them and of the troops that wield them closer to Russia’s border, endlessly ratchet up the rhetoric - will make direct conflict with Russia far more likely.

These days, Europeans are inundated with dark and oddly specific predictions of when Russia will attack and what it will take to become “kriegstüchtig”, German for “capable of war”, a compound neologism that nevertheless manages to sound scratchily old-fashioned in the way of a 1930s newsreel. They’re told to be afraid, that they must start an arms race, sacrifice their prosperity and social harmony, and fret about their youth being too soft for war.

Amidst this din, no one is questioning whether going to war with Russia five years down the road is indeed kismet. Barely anyone dares to suggest that we could invest in political engagement and diplomacy instead of arms manufacturers, and how that would deliver far greater and more certain security for our continent. No one (no one in charge, anyway) is proposing an alternative vision: at this and that fork in the road, of the kind that come into our view all the time, we can take another turn, wind down open warfare, engage in confidence-building, reverse arms races and revert to arms control, restore security and rebuild peace. Si vis pacem, para pacem, intentionally, painstakingly.

Europe faces serious threats to its security, no doubt. Climate change above all, which is already the second-largest cause of death in Europe after the war in Ukraine, and that’s not accounting for the many other ways it will wreak havoc. Violent extremists of all colors. Not just the geographic proximity to the battlefield in Ukraine and now Russia, too, but the fact that European weapons, military advisers and financial support for this war leave us guessing how far down the slippery slope we have already slid. Militarism won’t save us from those threats. On the contrary, it makes them worse.

Europe - the EU, NATO’s European members and Switzerland for good measure - doesn’t need to fight anyone. Nobody wants to fight them. They can steer clear of war by building peaceful relations with the rest of the world. For that, they would have to abandon that vicarious primacy, but honestly, who would want it anyway?

1. for the record, my take is that it’s more complicated