In just about the grimmest assessment by a Nato secretary general since the end of the Cold War, Mark Rutte warned last week that Vladimir Putin could invade one of the organisation’s European member states within the next five years.
‘We must be prepared for the scale of war our grandparents or great-grandparents endured,’ he said, chillingly.
Could we at least hope for salvation from the Americans again? We shouldn’t count on it, to judge by the national security strategy recently published by Donald Trump.
The US President, who has previously questioned his country’s long-term commitment to Europe’s defence, now appears to feel that soon there may not be much left in Europe worth defending. The continent, he claimed, is facing the ‘stark prospect of civilisational erasure’ – and not just at the sharp end of Putin’s tanks.
Migration policies, the undermining of national sovereignty by the EU, censorship of free speech, cratering of birth rates and the loss of self-confidence are all contributing to the fall of a continent that ‘will be unrecognisable in 20 years or less’.
While European economies have dragged their heels this century, the US economy has outgrown them at an annual average of 0.5 per cent. That might not sound much, but compounded up, it has become a financial chasm.
‘It is far from obvious whether certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies,’ Trump added.
That is subtext for: if you get into a war with Russia I won’t be afraid to do the same to you as I am doing to Ukraine – negotiating lumps of it away to achieve peace.
Mark Rutte warned last week that Vladimir Putin could invade one of the organisation’s European member states within the next five years
What is not being discussed is Europe’s arsenal of nuclear weapons, which comprises 515 warheads under the command of either Britain or France (file image)
Alarm rang through European parliaments. According to the former prime minister of Sweden Carl Bildt, Trump’s remarks are ‘JD Vance on steroids’ – referring to how the vice-president used a speech to the Munich security conference in the spring to castigate Europe for its suppression of free speech.
European leaders can huff and puff all they like. To many of them, Trump is an oaf who opposes all that they value in Europe and in the world. But there is another interpretation of Trump’s words: that he is not merely a friend, but the most useful of friends.
He is not the drinking pal who provides the laughter as we knock back the whiskies; he is the one who is prepared to tell us to our face that we are drinking too much and we will kill ourselves if we don’t stop. He has form. During his first presidency, he scolded European countries for not spending enough on defence, while they fed the coffers of Russia by importing its gas – the very country they saw as the enemy.
In a 2018 tweet about the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, then nearing completion, he said: ‘Germany just started to pay Russia, the country they want protection from, billions of dollars for their energy needs coming out of a new pipeline from Russia.’
The then Nato secretary general Jens Stoltenberg described the remarks as ‘inappropriate’ while German leader Angela Merkel’s aides sniggered at what they saw as Trump’s ignorance.
If only she had listened. Following Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and the sabotage of the pipeline, Germany hurriedly built floating terminals to import liquified natural gas from the US.
Still, Trump’s words jolted many countries out of their complacency. Today, 16 European Nato allies are spending more than 2 per cent of GDP on defence, up from four states in 2018. Some, such as Poland, have more than doubled defence spending.
Energy security has emerged as a priority across the continent. But we shouldn’t feel too comfortable. It is one thing spending money on defence; quite another spending it effectively.
According to an exercise by the International Institute for Strategic Studies carried out before the Ukraine war, Nato’s European members notionally have advantage over Russia in conventional forces. Yet they are so dissipated that only 30-50 per cent of them could actually be deployed within 180 days of a Russian invasion.
Moreover, some of that extra defence money is being spent in some countries on reviving national service – which has become more of a social policy than a military one. In Britain, we are spending millions trying to turn our Armed Forces ‘Net Zero’.
What is not being discussed is Europe’s arsenal of nuclear weapons, which comprises 515 warheads under the command of either Britain or France.
Are we to believe that in the event of an attack on a Nato member – say, either of the three Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia – London or Paris will deploy them against Moscow?
As much as collective defence underpins the Nato alliance, Putin may well calculate that Britain and France would not countenance a nuclear reprisal to avenge a country a thousand miles away.
Yet if we help equip the Baltics with their own nuclear weapon capability, Putin’s forces wouldn’t dare cross the border.
It’s unlikely that Putin would have invaded Ukraine, either, had it not relinquished its nuclear arsenal, inherited from the Soviet Union in the 1990s.
How they must regret that, now that we know the security guarantees they traded those weapons for were not worth the paper they were written on.
We forget how the Cold War was won: by Ronald Reagan promising to invest so much in nukes and in his ‘Star Wars’ defence system against intercontinental missiles that an economically weak USSR threw in the towel. It simply could no longer compete.
Today, Europe has far greater spending power than Russia; as Trump says, it shouldn’t really be living in fear of Moscow. But it is shackled by its Net Zero commitments and ever more excessive social legislation fattening an already corpulent welfare bill.
If the Siberian wolf really is at the door, as Mark Rutte says, and we are on the brink of war with Russia, then ‘nuclear proliferation’ – that long-time dirty phrase in world politics – must be discussed in the corridors of Nato.
But that would require a Trumpian boldness, a clear security strategy that unapologetically seeks to preserve our status in the world both militarily and economically. And that would be anathema to Europe’s current state of sclerosis and indecision.
l Far From Eutopia: How Europe Is Failing – And Britain Could Do Better, by Ross Clark, is to be published in paperback by Abacus on January 8.