Europeans, and especially Western Europe’s leadership elites, have succumbed to a decades-long “crisis of disbelief”, argues Andrew Michta, a Polish-born American academic who is professor of strategic studies at the Hamilton School, University of Florida.
He argues that the UK, in common with many European nations, has very low levels of psychological preparedness, and that authorities are not being candid about the looming threats.
“The Germans have totally disarmed during the last 30 years. The UK is also largely disarmed and, most importantly, mentally. There is no readiness for what’s happening because the policy elites are not addressing their publics in a way that would honestly state the gravity of the situation,” Michta says.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, many European countries began a decades-long winding down of military preparedness, dramatically cutting defence spending, in the belief that the threat from Russia had disappeared.
Michta singles out Germany’s heavy reliance on Russian energy via the Nord Stream gas pipelines – which transported huge quantities of gas from Russia to Germany under the Baltic Sea – in what he sees as the mistaken belief that Berlin could manage its relationship with Moscow via political and economic means.
“So you’ve lived through 20 years of appeasement in Europe driven by the elites’ lack of willingness or courage… to articulate how the situation was changing and how rapidly.”
General Sir Richard Shirreff argues that Russia’s initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014 was the real turning point, the moment Russia revealed itself as a tenacious threat to western security.
“The reality is that Russia believes it’s been at war with Nato since 2014. Not a conventional war, but a war designed to undermine the integrity of target states or alliances.
“I would never take the Russians for granted. It would not be beyond the realms of possibility for them to try to unhinge Nato by, for example, attempting to take over Spitsbergen [in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard] or something else indirect.
“So that’s what we need to be prepared for”.