Let us not mince words. The Russian troop build-up around the Donbas city of Kramatorsk is not a ‘crisis’. It is a test.
A test of a Western alliance that has spent the last two decades perfecting the art of theatrical indignation while its military teeth grow blunt. Our European allies are sounding the alarm, as they always do when the bear begins to stir. But what exactly do they expect?
That the ghosts of Chamberlain’s umbrella brigade will rise from the grave to wave sanctions and sternly worded communiqués until the tanks turn back? The parallel to the Sudetenland in 1938 is almost too painful to draw, yet how can one avoid it? Then, as now, a revanchist power tests the resolve of a complacent continent.
Then, as now, the response is a symphony of diplomatic hand-wringing while the aggressor calculates the odds. But here is the uncomfortable truth: Europe has outsourced its security to an exhausted America. The British, once the empire’s enforcers, now content themselves with being Washington’s loyal but toothless terrier.
The French? Let them keep their nuclear posture, but their will to project force has been in hospice since the end of the Cold War. The Germans?
The Bundeswehr is a museum piece, a joy for historians but a liability for soldiers. Kramatorsk is not merely a city under threat. It is a mirror held up to the decadence of a civilisation that has forgotten the meaning of deterrence.
The Victorians understood that the price of liberty was eternal vigilance, not eternal consultation. They erected a global order on the back of gunboats and grim resolve. We, their heirs, have replaced that resolve with a crutch of international law and economic interdependence.
And when that crutch fails, as it inevitably will, we shall discover that a well-argued op-ed in the Financial Times is no match for a battalion of T-90 tanks. The Russian playbook is not subtle. They probe.
They test the waters of alliance cohesion. They watch for the telltale signs of fragmentation: Hungary’s Viktor Orbán playing footsie with the Kremlin, the Turkish obstructionism over Sweden’s NATO membership, the rising far-right parties across Europe that see Putin’s autocracy as a model rather than a threat. And what do our leaders offer?
The same tired refrain: ‘We stand with Ukraine.’ Indignant press conferences. More weapons, but never enough.
More sanctions, but always with gaping loopholes for energy imports. It is the politics of the halfway house, and halfway houses do not stop invasion. The British, in their better moments, used to understand this.
Lord Palmerston’s gunboat diplomacy was not sentiment; it was a calculation of power. Today, our Foreign Office issues statements in the tone of a disappointed schoolmarm. We need not march to war, but we must signal that the cost of aggression exceeds the gain.
That signal, however, requires credibility. And credibility comes from a willingness to act, not merely to tweet. Our European allies are rightly alarmed.
But alarm without action is merely panic in a suit. The Donbas will fall not because Russia is strong, but because the West has grown weak in its soul. It has chosen comfort over courage, talk over will.
And history, as always, will judge accordingly.
