Only if Britain, France, and Germany abandon their post-Cold War fantasies will the West stand a chance of stopping Putin
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s troop buildup along Ukraine’s borders initially caught Western powers off guard. Russia’s first invasion in 2014 didn’t get the West to abandon its post-Cold War daydreams. But there are signs that Putin’s threat of another invasion is now forcing the West to shed its illusions.
The United States, France, Britain, and Germany each have their own fantasies: Washington wants to think Europe is done and the United States can now focus on confronting a proper superpower rival, China, forgetting that Putin’s rearmed post-Soviet Russia is still strong enough to menace America’s allies. France wants strategic autonomy for Europe—being able to act independently of the United States on the world stage—while thinking it can control European foreign policy with only 13 percent of democratic Europe’s population.
Britain would like to forget its own continent from which, in former U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s words, “all our troubles came” and recreate a maritime relationship with trading hubs in Asia, forgetting the great game that lies between. Germany still clings to the belief that just because it has abandoned force as an instrument of policy, its eastern neighbors, even authoritarian Russia, must have done so as well, and that Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which bypasses Eastern Europe to supply Germany with gas directly, is just a “private sector project.”
Each figment avoids uncomfortable facts: As much as China might be the only “peer competitor” (to use the language of the U.S. Defense Department’s 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review), Russia is currently powerful enough to project power in Syria and Libya as well as destabilize Europe by sponsoring a coup in Montenegro, cutting off gas to Moldova, stirring up irredentism in Bosnia, and, of course, seizing Crimea and invading the Donbass.
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