The pessimism reflects concern that Russia may be winning a so-called hybrid war with Europe, weakening the options available to Nato war planners in the event of military conflict.
The surge in support for the populist forces in Europe’s main military states is also endangering proposals for a group of five European countries, including the UK, to take on a new coordination role as the US prepares to reduce its commitments to the conventional defence of Europe.
Defence officials, speaking at a forum convened by the Munich Security Conference (MSC), the leading security foundation, said the European public may not have the appetite for a prolonged war, requiring Nato to focus its plans on a relatively quick conflict.
One recent British cabinet member admitted the west had been “crap” at educating its public about the scale of the hybrid conflict with Russia. Another UK diplomat claimed successive British prime ministers had done nothing to explain the scale of the threat.
They said this had left ministers locked in an unenviable task of persuading unprepared voters to cut welfare spending to fund defence. “The level of the debate has been at that of a kindergarten,” the UK diplomat admitted.
I don’t think that works, as the “Flypaper” in this analogy would be better defined as the WW1 Central Powers.
Ukraine/Russia has much more in common with the European theaters of the World Wars (or the Napoleonic Wars) than the anti-colonial rebellions in their aftermath.
People keep floating this conflict as A) inevitable and B) decisively favoring Europe. But I cannot imagine a world in which any of the central European countries emerge from the conflict without suffering enormously.
Nobody actually wins in this kind of exchange.
The Battle of Dien Bien Phu used the flypaper theory in that the French attempted to draw the Viet Minh into attacking Dien Bien Phu where the French thought they could destroy them.
War between Europe and Russia would be destructive but Europe has to decide a solution to Russia’s hybrid war against it.
But they failed. And their defeat was so horrifying for the French public that the government lost its civilian support and was forced to withdraw from Indochina as a result.
If Ukraine is Europe’s Dien Bien Phu, that doesn’t look good for the Europeans.
I have no idea how Russia and the rest of Europe can reconcile after the last decade of relational decay. But I have to assume there’s some path back to peace that doesn’t run through a Ukraine-style missile exchange that stretches all the way to the Atlantic. There’s no world in which Moscow trading ballistics with Berlin, Paris, and London ends better for humanity than one without it.
The flypaper theory is correct but in the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, the French underestimated the Viet Minh. Specifically, the French didn’t believe the Viet Minh would be able to haul artillery up the surrounding mountains.
What I said was that Europe would prefer that Russia attack it rather than Ukraine. Then the combined forces of Europe would be able to defeat Russia. War might be inevitable if Russia continues to attack Ukraine and provoke Europe with hybrid war. The UK and France gave Hitler the Sudetenland hoping that this would appease him and avoid war but it didn’t.
That’s an insane thing to say, both on it’s face and based on the last four years of Europeans very strategically avoiding direct confrontation with Russia.
Napoleon on line 1. Hitler on line 2. They are both eager to discuss what you have in mind.
It wasn’t theirs to give. The Sudetenland is in Czechoslovakia, a country that didn’t even exist until 1918. It was full of Austro-Hungarians who were some of the first foreigners to explicitly align with Nazi Germany.
The UK and France weren’t in a position to stop him, any more than they were in a position to stop the proto-fascist war hero Gabriele Annunzio and a rogue force of Italian mutineers from seizing the Adriatic port city of Fiume in 1919.
Might as well claim Obama gave Putin Crimea. Or that Bush gave him South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
The Donbus had similar problems. It was populated by a large number of Russian nationals who were getting propaganda pumped into their brains from across the border. That was kicking off domestic insurgency, which Ukrainian nationalists were eager to squash.
Europeans had neither skin in the game nor influence in the region. All they were willing to do is send mercenaries and cheap military equipment over the border. And we know how that worked out.
Nobody wanted an all out war with Russia.
You have to review the context of our discussion. It concerned the solution to Russia’s hybrid war against Europe. You mistakenly thought I said use Ukraine as a fly paper. In response I said Europe would prefer that it be the fly paper.
The president of Czechoslovakia, Edouard Benes was unwilling to give the Sudetenland to Hitler and appealed to France with whom Czechoslovakia had a defensive alliance. France asked the UK for help.
The UK and France thought that letting Hitler have the Sudetenland would appease him and prevent a war. It didn’t.
I didn’t think you said that. I think Ukraine is the obvious fly paper in the analogy. Europe very clearly is not, nor does anyone outside of the continent wish that on themselves.
That’s historical revisionism.
They had no capacity to keep Germans out of Europe. This wasn’t a choice they were making, it was an excuse for their impotency.
Ukraine is not really application of the flypaper theory since Russia took the initiative in invading Ukraine. The West did not draw Russia to invade. However, to stop Russia’s hybrid attacks on Europe, Europe could supply Ukraine with more weapons such as Germany’s Taurus missile and France’s Rafale jet fighter.
It is debatable whether the UK and France had the military capability to stop Hitler or simply didn’t have the will.
Ukraine has been a playground for espionage and special operations since before the collapse of the USSR. The invasion came in the wake of a decade of civil strife following the Maidan Revolution. And that was, itself, following a decade of Russia influence on then-President Viktor Yanukovych. A man who was installed to roll back the 1996 constitutional reforms, which were imposed as part of the western Shock Doctrine model for post-Soviet state integration. And you can trace it back from there.
History didn’t begin in 2022.
The EU states were hoping to employ a combination of economic carrots and sticks to align Ukraine with its allies in Bulgaria, Romania, and Poland. The Russians - having had success in Crimea and Georgia with direct military intervention - decided to flip the chessboard and start throwing punches, after their friendly governments kept getting pushed out of power through West-friendly civil uprisings.
But the end-goal of EU interference in Ukraine was to advance the US-sponsored ring of anti-ballistic interceptor missiles inward towards Russia. And the presumption was that this would neuter Russian long-range artillery without provoking an all-out fight across the European member states. Ukraine (and Estonia and Latvia and Bulgaria) were always supposed to operate as a buffer zone to absorb any Russian ground attacks.
Ideally, it was never supposed to go this far. But to say Emmaneul Macron and Merkel / Sholtz / Merz want an air war west of Ukraine is absolute clown shoes.
Especially now that the Iranians have proved how porous and inefficient America’s anti-ballistic interceptor shield has become.
You can debate absolutely anything, sure. But post-WW1 UK/France were squarely in a Trans-Atlantic economic depression in the 1930s. Even if you want to argue they could have mustered the physical capacity and projected it east of Germany, presumably by way of… where? Fascist Italy? there was zero domestic political interest in kicking off a second European land war.
What you’re totally forgetting is 1917 Russia, where the Tzarist government had collapsed on itself and imploded into a full communist government entirely on the back of Lenin’s anti-war movement and conscripted soldier’s revolt. Meanwhile, you had Spanish Republicans in a guerrilla war with Franco’s fascist officer corpse right next door in Spain happening at the same time as Hitler pushed on the open door of Czechoslovakia.
What Western Europeans and American Atlanticists feared more than anything was domestic communist uprising. If anything, Hitler moving east and squashing Soviet parties between Germany and Russia was seen as favorable to western interests.