RW Johnson: Ukraine now a 1938 redux for dozy peaceniks of Europe

Europe's complacency about defence is facing a stark reckoning as Russia's aggression threatens stability. The reliance on the U.S. nuclear umbrella has left Europe militarily underprepared, with only a few nations like Finland and Poland urgently rearming. As NATO grapples with cohesion, Trump's possible U.S. retreat intensifies fears of Russian expansion. Lessons from history warn against appeasement—if Europe fails to act decisively, it risks a crisis reminiscent of 1938's Munich Agreement..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here..The seventh BizNews Conference, BNC#7, is to be held in Hermanus from March 11 to 13, 2025. The 2025 BizNews Conference is designed to provide an excellent opportunity for members of the BizNews community to interact directly with the keynote speakers, old (and new) friends from previous BNC events – and to interact with members of the BizNews team. Register for BNC#7 here. .By RW Johnson ___STEADY_PAYWALL___.The fears that Europeans have of the incoming Trump administration were well summed up in a Q & A session with Trump's nominee for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth. Asked about the US's commitment to its European allies Hegseth replied: "Would we send troops to defend Europe ? Been there. Done that. Twice. Next question ?" The implication that Europe really ought to defend itself is hardly unreasonable. The EU, at 450 million, has a far larger population than the US – and Britain has a further 68 million. And Europe is many times richer than the only obvious aggressor, Russia..The problem is that Europe has become only too comfortably used to sheltering under the US nuclear umbrella since 1945. European countries have all run down their armies and defence industries and their populations have been dozing in the face of the new Russian threat, and do not wish to be disturbed. Mass immigration has meanwhile undermined the social cohesion of many countries. The result is a situation in which, whenever defence experts foregather, they agree that Russia's war against the West has already begun, that there is little chance that Russia's army will stop at Ukraine, that already there is a Russian campaign of sabotage, cybercrime and assassination right across the West – but they also agree that it's not possible to tell the public that war has already begun. .The problem the West faces is that both Russia and China grew as vast imperial states. Instead of colonising far-off Australia, Africa or Indonesia, they both colonised neighbouring states. And whereas the British, French, Dutch and Portuguese empires have been dismantled completely, both Russia and China are attempting to re-assert control over huge areas they once controlled. China not only demands Taiwan and virtually all the South China Sea but regularly prints maps showing parts of Russia and the central Asian republics as Chinese territory. Russia has not only invaded Ukraine but has intervened to rig elections in Georgia, Moldova and Rumania. In addition Moscow makes it clear that it aims to reincorporate the Baltic republics and that it regards Stalin's extension of Russian control over the whole of Eastern Europe as providing a still valid frontier for Russian hegemony. (The old Russian joke is that the only secure border is one with Russian soldiers on both sides of it.) And no one has forgotten that in 1945 Stalin attempted a grab for Iran, Libya and Turkey's Bosphorus Strait..There is a sharp difference between Western Europe on the one hand and those states who have known the reality of Russian occupation. The latter were in no way surprised that Russian occupiers of Ukrainian cities raped, tortured and murdered not only prisoners of war but civilians at large. Most of them experienced a situation in which the KGB was the only law, where massacres and large forced removals were common, where children were kidnapped, where torture and forced labour to assist the Red Army were common. The experience was so nightmarish that only the Nazi occupation compares..Read more: 🔒 The Economist: Elon Musk threatens to deepen the rift between Europe and America.The result is that Czechia, the Baltic Republics, Poland and Finland are already frantically re-arming. Canada talks of reaching 2% of GDP spent on defence by 20345. Poland is already spending 4.23% of GDP on defence. The Finnish Defence Forces have 280,000 troops and a further 870,000 reservists – almost one third of the entire working age population, while the British Army has only 70,000 soldiers. (The last time the British army was so small was in the 1790s.) Moreover, Poland, alone in all of Europe, still has a factory making TNT – critical for all military explosives. The UK has only 29 F-35 fighters. Finland has 64. .Finland is, indeed, a byword for resilience and a "whole of society" approach to self-defence. "Finland doesn't have a defence force", the saying goes. "Finland is a defence force." Typically, the Finns were quick to spot that Russians were quietly buying up land next to military fortifications of any kind – and they have put a stop to that. Norway has only recently woken up to the fact that Russians had purchased a whole block of properties adjacent to their Defence HQ, while the British have been so fast asleep that the Loch Striven Oil Fuel Depot in Scotland, storing fuel for NATO warships and aircraft, is now entirely surrounded by Russian-owned real estate..The scenario which most worries Western military chiefs is that Russia might seize a small part of one of the Baltic states and then halt – thus replicating in miniature its seizure of Crimea in 2014. NATO would then have to decide what to do – with Russia threatening nuclear reprisals for anyone who dared attack them. The fear is that many NATO members would then find reasons to do nothing, that NATO's entire rationale – that it protects all its members – would then fail and NATO would fall to bits. It was this worry that led NATO to adopt its Enhanced Forward Presence policy, with NATO members pre-emptively basing troops in the Baltic states and Poland so that, willy-nilly, they would be involved in resisting any Russian invasion. But now that Trump will soon be in the White House, all these fears have come alive again, for if the US pulls its forces out, all bets are off. .Should that happen then, fairly certainly, Ukraine will have lost its war. But the ramifications go far further than that. Already Russian nationalists on the Kremlin's main radio station are demanding the return of the Baltic Republics to Russia, the incorporation into Russia of all the former Soviet republics, and even the return of Alaska. The immediate question is whether Europe on its own would stand by Ukraine if the US backs out. One has to doubt it. But all too easily a crisis of confidence could arise and millions of refugees could start fleeing westwards from the border states with Russia so as to avoid coming under Russian control..Read more: 🔒 Max Hastings: Europe's struggle with MAGA is unlikely to end well.If the US were to remove itself from Europe's defence the question is whether Britain, France and Germany could stand together against the Russian threat. It seems unlikely. Chancellor Scholz has already broken Putin's isolation by phoning him and Germany always dreams of a historic understanding with Russia. President Macron has blown hot and cold. Moreover, British opinion has never forgotten how the much larger French army collapsed before the Germans in a few weeks in 1940, leaving Britain fighting alone. Already Britain has devised an alternative, the Joint Expeditionary Force – an alliance of ten northern nations – the UK, the Baltics, the Scandinavians, Finland, Iceland and the Netherlands. Potentially this NATO sub-set is far more cohesive and likely to be faster responding than NATO. But for JEF to be truly effective, Britain needs to increase its defence spending by a very large margin..With hindsight one can see that the West has been far too timid in its response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. By the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 Ukraine agreed to surrender all its nuclear weapons to Russia and in return was given security assurances by Russia, the US and UK. Russia effectively tore up this document when it seized Crimea in 2014 and when it invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Unfortunately the British PM at the time was Boris Johnson – an empty blusterer – and Biden was the US President, whose mental faculties were already beginning to fail him. The US and UK should have immediately sent troops to Ukraine and made it clear that they stood by their security guarantees. It is most unlikely that Putin would have persevered had the West then stood firm. But from the start the West was more worried by possible escalation than it was concerned to stand by its guarantees..In effect we are back to where we were in 1938 when Hitler menaced Czechoslovakia. Because the British and French premiers, Chamberlain and Daladier, were mainly anxious to avoid war at all costs, they failed to stand by the Czechs. Had Hitler been forced to back down, there might have been no Second World War. But in fact the refusal to stand up to Hitler then merely guaranteed a much bigger and more costly war a year later. The only difference is that after the Munich sell-out to Hitler, the Western Allies convinced themselves that they had won "peace in our time". But with Russia already making it quite plain that if it gains victory in Ukraine it will not stop there, there is no excuse for such delusional thinking this time..Read also:.🔒 Trans-Atlantic rift: The future of US-Europe relations – Andreas Kluth🔒 RW Johnson: Right-wing surge in Europe – what it means for SA and the world🔒 Europe braces for Putin's shadow war: Hal Brands

RW Johnson: Ukraine now a 1938 redux for dozy peaceniks of Europe

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