This post is by Adam Tooze, who is a professor at Columbia University, Director of the European Institute and nonresident scholar at Carnegie Europe. Through this and the Financial Times article mentioned, he outlines the staggering degree of waste in UK and European defence spending. It includes bloated numbers of military personnel and the expensive feather-bedding of national weapons manufacturers.
At a time when the prospects of economic and social recovery are blighted by underfunded public services, we should be demanding that the MoD get its act together, not throw even more money at it. And we should be working much more closely to co-ordinate spending with other European countries, rather than just favouring made-in-Britain.
And lets stop behaving as if we still have a global empire. Why are our forces deployed all over the world? Why, uniquely among European countries, are we part of Aukus? Do we expect to be invaded by China? The Government should implement a planned withdrawal of forces to the European theatre where the threats supposedly are.
UK warmongering epitomised in the SDR Review comprises a propagandist narrative founded on such fake and unproven premises that its absolute and successful prosecution must necessitate the suppression of all remaining democratic discussion in the UK. Welcome as the author headlines in his previous post to 1984.
What's most alarming is that I'm reminded of Ronald Reagan's successful strategy that brought down the USSR - scare them into spending so much on re-armament that they crash their economy. Whether this is a conscious strategy straight from Putin, or from Putin-via-Trump is hard to say...
Yes, Europe should re-arm. Israel is carrying out genocide and everyone has a legal responsibility to stop it, including by military force if necessary. All 27 EU member states are signatories to the genocide convention, but sit there on their cowardly arses and do nothing.
Re-arm, get into Israel, aim, fire, aim, fire, aim, fire, aim, fire, aim, fire, aim, fire...
EU already has more than enough firepower to intervene in th Middle East should members wish to.The rearmament argument is sharply targeted on the Russian threat, nothing else.
Seems the EU and UK are already intervening in the Middle East, aiding genocide in Gaza, and as if that were not bad enough, now aiding the attempted creation of a nuclear incident (effectively a dirty bomb, or more likely dirty bombs plural) in Iran.
Shouldn't this be in front of the Commons, and presumably the Lords, the UK breaking international law in the most heinous ways imaginable?
I don't remember the Labour Friends of Israel Party manifesto offering the British people the chance to perpetrate acts of pure evil on our behalf.
So Starmer has begged for the Ukay to be allowed back into the EU with no rights, only obligations, and he did not even get any commitment we can access Ursula’s €800B slush fund.
Chekhov said, "If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired".
The public in every western country must wake up to the fact that our governments are gearing up for war and will get one. If anyone is still wondering how the people of Europe missed it all in the 1930s, I think we are watching the replay now (with more dangerous and deadly weapons) and we are no more awake than the people of Europe were in the 1930s!
"Russia invaded Ukraine, the United States invaded Iraq, both alleging threats to their security".
The Russians truthfully - as anyone with the slightest understanding of military matters can easily see - and the United States insincerely and untruthfully. Iraq has absolutely nothing to do with the USA other than having a lot of oil and gas that the USA would like to steal. (And has already made a start at).
Ukraine is not only a mere 430 km (less than 300 miles) from Moscow - half an hour for even a subsonic missile - but it has always been either an integral part of Russia or a "march" (border area). Indeed, the word "Ukraine" means "border" in Russian. Virtually all Ukrainians have always been Russian speakers, sharing Russian culture and identity. (It is said that as soon as the Ukrainian cabinet in Kiev meets behind closed doors, they switch from speaking Ukrainian to Russian, with which most of them are far more comfortable).
For Ukraine to secede from Russia, as it did in 1991, is precisely analogous to Texas or California seceding from the USA. We know what happened when the southern states seceded in 1861 and formed the Confederate States of America; the US government waged a long, bitter, and very bloody war to force them back into the Union. If Texas or California were to declare independence today - as seems not altogether unlikely - would Washington handle them as gently as Moscow has the Ukraine? I doubt it.
Kievan Rus was the very first Russian state, in the 9th century AD. Approximately when King Alfred of Wessex first entertained the dream of uniting the Angles and Saxons into an "Anglaland" - which eventually became England. That's how far the intertwined roots of Russia and Ukraine go back. (About 900 years before the foundation of the USA).
Russia has merely been trying to get back what has always been its own, since the alternative is apparently to have it used as a launching pad for murderous attacks on Russia.
Apart from Ukraine, where Russia has come close to annihilating what was by far the strongest armed forces in Europe, Russia has the world's most powerful thermonuclear deterrent. All three arms of the "triad" are superior to any other nation's. Russian ICBMs are vastly more powerful and flexible than those of the USA. (While China also has some and they are very good and modern, they are still few in number). Russian air-launched missiles are hypersonic and mostly impossible to intercept, so worth far more than the USA's greater number of slow old missiles. And Russian submarines can launch ballistic and cruise missiles from anywhere in the oceans.
The US Navy has a great tradition, but most of its warships are obsolete or at best obsolescent. The carriers are nothing but huge targets. The only respectable element remains the submarine force, which is still quite dangerous.
It's hard to evaulate the Russian land forces against anyone else's, because Russian military doctrine allows the armed forces to be used only in defence of Russia (and its allies). The track record of those who invaded Russia since the 15th century has been dismal. Charles XII of Sweden, Napoleon Bonaparte, Hitler... Remember Field Marshal Lord Montgomery's three rules of war:
The Russian government has very deliberately handled the Ukraine situation with as light a touch as possible. The political goals were simple and unexceptionable: to save the Russian-speaking people of Donbass and Crimea from attempted genocide by the Kiev regime; to purge Ukraine of self-avowed neo-Nazis; and to ensure Ukraine's future neutrality. The General Staff will, like any military professionals, have prepared a sheaf of alternative plans for all contingencies, of which Mr Putin probably asked them to start with the gentlest and least harmful. Indeed, it was even conceivable - in view of the extremely nasty nature of the Kiev gang - that Ukrainians themselves would overthrow the regime given a little encouragement. Hence the tentative military approaches to Kiev in the early days.
Then it became clear that the Kiev regime was going to fight with everything it had, so the General Staff had to change up a gear and engage in full-scale combat. During 2022, the Russians and the Donbass republics were still seriously outnumbered by the Ukrainians. Throughout the Special Military Operation (SMO) and to this day, Russia has prioritised avoiding civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure, minimising Russian military casualties, and to begin with even minimising Ukrainian military casualties. All this for practical as well as moral reasons.
Gradually it became apparent that Russia was not fighting just the Kiev regime, but the whole of NATO which was sending not only mercenaries but weapon systems, munitions, and critical real-time intelligence provided by satellites, drones, and aircraft. All of the latter untouchable because belonging to NATO nations which were technically noncombatants. Essentially Russia was fighting the whole of NATO, with its hands still tied by the rules of the SMO. After all, Ukrainians were brother Slavs or even Russians, and it was desirable to harm them as little as possible. Like some horror movie where your best friend is taken over by a parasitic intelligence that wants to kill you; how do you win or even survive without killing your friend? (See Heinlein's "Puppet Masters" among others).
NATO has steadily raised the ante, sending a whole series of "Wunderwaffen", all of which burned nicely or were captured intact. Now it is running out of everything, which reveals another advantage to the Russian strategy: by affecting not to realise that it was fighting NATO, it has actually succeeded in draining NATO's stocks of weapons and ammunition as well as Ukraine's. Even the USA's.
The key point, which Westerners completely miss, is that Russia is winning comprehensively in its own chosen way. Time is on Russia's side, not the West's. The longer the SMO goes on, the more total the victory will be. Every set of peace terms Moscow offers and sees rejected, the price increases. Soon there will be little or nothing of Ukraine left, as the Russians can see that it is impossible to cleanse it of the NATO virus. But in the meantime the West is losing hopelessly, and because of its utter inability to admit defeat, its defeat becomes ever more thorough.
"For Britain to deter Russia it must develop a ’whole society’ war readiness. As the SDR puts it ‘UK must be better prepared for high intensity, protracted war ‘".
As Lord Skidelsky pointed out in a recent article, exactly the recipe for perpetual war as described in "1984".
The UK would have absolutely no chance of defeating Russia in a real war. Russia could render the UK uninhabitable within half an hour. It could also easily win any conventional war. At any moment a suitably-placed Russian submarine could destroy any chosen part(s) of London or anywhere else in the UK, with conventional explosives.
Most of the time, defense is the number one, and maybe even the only, task of a national government. Therefore, the pain of the economic consequences has to be endured. The complexity, of course, is to determine how much defense is needed and how best to achieve that. However, for the specific country, the UK, and at this specific juncture, I agree that the Britons have better places to spend their hard-earned Sterling, but not necessarily so for other European countries on the continent. Therefore, please elaborate on what "rearm" is, and how much to rearm. I also believe your thoughts imply your opinions are conditioned on the current time, place, and which countries.
The UK has the ocean protection to increase the difficulties in attacking the UK. However, if the UK had not started building warships in the early 20th century and only started by the Tangier Crisis, the UK would not have decisive advantage over the German Empire in WW1 in maintaining sea lane safety. Without maintaining those ships and building a few more, including aircraft carriers, the UK may not have survived the initial onslaught in WW2. The UK does not have an obvious enemy today to justify a naval competition, but continuing to build new ships and planes is justified. A peacock does not change into a hedgehog in one day. Yet we don't know what international crisis we would see.
For other European nations on the Continent, the British reasoning may not be applicable. Switzerland has mountains as a defense barrier. Most other countries don't have that kind of luxury. Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania need to defend against Ukraine. Other countries need to defend against Germany. Croatia and Slovenia need to defend against Italy. If we have a multi-polar world, then the probability of multiple neighborhood rascals will be higher than a single local bully. However, the fact that there remains no intelligent and powerful arbitrator for the international arena remains the same.
Lastly, how much to rearm and the impact on the economy. Suppose the UK does rearm but cuts off aid to Ukraine and illegal aliens, then the impact is not that much. The fact that the Bank of England and City of London will not terminate the Ukraine War says the problem is not rearmament per se, but the context and purpose of rearming. Germany does not have enough energy to revitalize its MIC, let alone its national manufacturing base. France is marginally better. But once it loses its cheap uranium ore from West Africa, France will face higher energy costs. From weapon system design to MIC corruption, there are too many problems to solve before the real rearmament can start. If done properly, proper maintenance of defense and periodic refresh of armament have merits to the economy.
Therefore, I think the largest reason not to rearm is not due to damage to the economic impact, but rather the lack of readiness of the government and society to proceed with the rearmament.
No European nation - least of all the UK - needs to defend itself against any foreign enemy. With the sole exception of the (literally) millions of legal and illegal immigrants who have been flooding into already overpopulated countries, with likely consequences as serious as civil war.
What on earth would Russia want with any part of that quarrelsome, ideologically subverted, resource-poor continent? Russia is already the world's largest country - about twice the area of China, Canada, or the USA - and has immense natural resources that render it almost uniquely independent of any outside trade. It counts hundreds of ethnic communities as loyal Russian citizens - why would it choose to conquer yet more disparate peoples who would not fit in so agreeably?
Of course, it is Russia's vast natural resources that account for the widespread hostility to it. Western writers and politicians have openly admitted, time after time, their insensate lust to dismember Russia and plunder its wealth.
I agree that protection is the first duty of government. How much protection, and what kind, depends on the nature and reality of threat.
The question is not whether Poland, Hungary, etc need proetction v Russia. They already have it via NATO. The question is whether the threat from Russia is so great that it justifies the doubling of Nato's defence budget. My article argued that it did not.
For now, yes. Unfortunately, human nature and history suggest that peace is rare, while invasion and resistance are the norm. A peacock can not morph into a porcupine in a day. If the Ukraine war ends in a stalemate (unlikely), then countries around Ukraine have to prepare against an invasion from Ukraine.
This post is by Adam Tooze, who is a professor at Columbia University, Director of the European Institute and nonresident scholar at Carnegie Europe. Through this and the Financial Times article mentioned, he outlines the staggering degree of waste in UK and European defence spending. It includes bloated numbers of military personnel and the expensive feather-bedding of national weapons manufacturers.
At a time when the prospects of economic and social recovery are blighted by underfunded public services, we should be demanding that the MoD get its act together, not throw even more money at it. And we should be working much more closely to co-ordinate spending with other European countries, rather than just favouring made-in-Britain.
And lets stop behaving as if we still have a global empire. Why are our forces deployed all over the world? Why, uniquely among European countries, are we part of Aukus? Do we expect to be invaded by China? The Government should implement a planned withdrawal of forces to the European theatre where the threats supposedly are.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-164786541
UK warmongering epitomised in the SDR Review comprises a propagandist narrative founded on such fake and unproven premises that its absolute and successful prosecution must necessitate the suppression of all remaining democratic discussion in the UK. Welcome as the author headlines in his previous post to 1984.
"Remorseless logic can lead to madness".
How very horribly true this has become of those who think they are in power and who let their ideology do their thinking for them.
What's most alarming is that I'm reminded of Ronald Reagan's successful strategy that brought down the USSR - scare them into spending so much on re-armament that they crash their economy. Whether this is a conscious strategy straight from Putin, or from Putin-via-Trump is hard to say...
As a vassal of the USA never!
https://diem25.org/yanis-varoufakis-the-economics-of-europes-descent-into-warmongering-and-our-duty-now/?fbclid=IwQ0xDSwK3dNpjbGNrArcAf2V4dG4DYWVtAjExAAEeLdsYWoy4VJL78bk2-8r5_ripKhaNcNmtrgh5bIrzO2eVZTQr4op3W6tDDw8_aem_tEuC7JP6Fvril15WY_YGLg
Yes, Europe should re-arm. Israel is carrying out genocide and everyone has a legal responsibility to stop it, including by military force if necessary. All 27 EU member states are signatories to the genocide convention, but sit there on their cowardly arses and do nothing.
Re-arm, get into Israel, aim, fire, aim, fire, aim, fire, aim, fire, aim, fire, aim, fire...
EU already has more than enough firepower to intervene in th Middle East should members wish to.The rearmament argument is sharply targeted on the Russian threat, nothing else.
Robert Skidelsky
Seems the EU and UK are already intervening in the Middle East, aiding genocide in Gaza, and as if that were not bad enough, now aiding the attempted creation of a nuclear incident (effectively a dirty bomb, or more likely dirty bombs plural) in Iran.
Shouldn't this be in front of the Commons, and presumably the Lords, the UK breaking international law in the most heinous ways imaginable?
I don't remember the Labour Friends of Israel Party manifesto offering the British people the chance to perpetrate acts of pure evil on our behalf.
A superb and moving article, Lord Robert.
Does the SDR not consider the Yugoslav wars state-on-state wars? Or was it written by Millennials?
SDR never mentions Yugoalavia
Robert Skidelsky
So Starmer has begged for the Ukay to be allowed back into the EU with no rights, only obligations, and he did not even get any commitment we can access Ursula’s €800B slush fund.
Accurate, Robert Skidelsky
It's perpetually 1938, and anyone who argues for diplomacy is another Neville Chamberlain, an addled appeaser.
We must rearm because Putin is "the next Hitler" (or perhaps Stalin). He can never be, well, just plain Putin.
Meanwhile, Russia is bogged down in a costly war in Ukraine, but that's supposed to be a sign of prowess rather than of weakness.
So beat those plowshares into swords and prepare to make war some more, just as the Good Book told us to do. (Sarcasm alert.)
Good ironic thrust!
Chekhov said, "If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired".
The public in every western country must wake up to the fact that our governments are gearing up for war and will get one. If anyone is still wondering how the people of Europe missed it all in the 1930s, I think we are watching the replay now (with more dangerous and deadly weapons) and we are no more awake than the people of Europe were in the 1930s!
"Russia invaded Ukraine, the United States invaded Iraq, both alleging threats to their security".
The Russians truthfully - as anyone with the slightest understanding of military matters can easily see - and the United States insincerely and untruthfully. Iraq has absolutely nothing to do with the USA other than having a lot of oil and gas that the USA would like to steal. (And has already made a start at).
Ukraine is not only a mere 430 km (less than 300 miles) from Moscow - half an hour for even a subsonic missile - but it has always been either an integral part of Russia or a "march" (border area). Indeed, the word "Ukraine" means "border" in Russian. Virtually all Ukrainians have always been Russian speakers, sharing Russian culture and identity. (It is said that as soon as the Ukrainian cabinet in Kiev meets behind closed doors, they switch from speaking Ukrainian to Russian, with which most of them are far more comfortable).
For Ukraine to secede from Russia, as it did in 1991, is precisely analogous to Texas or California seceding from the USA. We know what happened when the southern states seceded in 1861 and formed the Confederate States of America; the US government waged a long, bitter, and very bloody war to force them back into the Union. If Texas or California were to declare independence today - as seems not altogether unlikely - would Washington handle them as gently as Moscow has the Ukraine? I doubt it.
Kievan Rus was the very first Russian state, in the 9th century AD. Approximately when King Alfred of Wessex first entertained the dream of uniting the Angles and Saxons into an "Anglaland" - which eventually became England. That's how far the intertwined roots of Russia and Ukraine go back. (About 900 years before the foundation of the USA).
Russia has merely been trying to get back what has always been its own, since the alternative is apparently to have it used as a launching pad for murderous attacks on Russia.
"Today Russia must be prevented from becoming the ‘dominant military power in all of Europe’’ (Fiona Hill, quoted Guardian 7 June 2025)".
Too late! Russia is already the dominant military power, not only in Europe, but in the world.
A power that it uses only for self-defence - unlike NATO.
Don't think that's quite true. Its performance in Ukraine wasn't dominant world power quality. So what else had you in mind?
"So what else had you in mind?"
Apart from Ukraine, where Russia has come close to annihilating what was by far the strongest armed forces in Europe, Russia has the world's most powerful thermonuclear deterrent. All three arms of the "triad" are superior to any other nation's. Russian ICBMs are vastly more powerful and flexible than those of the USA. (While China also has some and they are very good and modern, they are still few in number). Russian air-launched missiles are hypersonic and mostly impossible to intercept, so worth far more than the USA's greater number of slow old missiles. And Russian submarines can launch ballistic and cruise missiles from anywhere in the oceans.
The US Navy has a great tradition, but most of its warships are obsolete or at best obsolescent. The carriers are nothing but huge targets. The only respectable element remains the submarine force, which is still quite dangerous.
It's hard to evaulate the Russian land forces against anyone else's, because Russian military doctrine allows the armed forces to be used only in defence of Russia (and its allies). The track record of those who invaded Russia since the 15th century has been dismal. Charles XII of Sweden, Napoleon Bonaparte, Hitler... Remember Field Marshal Lord Montgomery's three rules of war:
1. Never march on Moscow;
2. Never fight a land war in Asia (whoops);
3. Never march on Moscow.
The Russian government has very deliberately handled the Ukraine situation with as light a touch as possible. The political goals were simple and unexceptionable: to save the Russian-speaking people of Donbass and Crimea from attempted genocide by the Kiev regime; to purge Ukraine of self-avowed neo-Nazis; and to ensure Ukraine's future neutrality. The General Staff will, like any military professionals, have prepared a sheaf of alternative plans for all contingencies, of which Mr Putin probably asked them to start with the gentlest and least harmful. Indeed, it was even conceivable - in view of the extremely nasty nature of the Kiev gang - that Ukrainians themselves would overthrow the regime given a little encouragement. Hence the tentative military approaches to Kiev in the early days.
Then it became clear that the Kiev regime was going to fight with everything it had, so the General Staff had to change up a gear and engage in full-scale combat. During 2022, the Russians and the Donbass republics were still seriously outnumbered by the Ukrainians. Throughout the Special Military Operation (SMO) and to this day, Russia has prioritised avoiding civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure, minimising Russian military casualties, and to begin with even minimising Ukrainian military casualties. All this for practical as well as moral reasons.
Gradually it became apparent that Russia was not fighting just the Kiev regime, but the whole of NATO which was sending not only mercenaries but weapon systems, munitions, and critical real-time intelligence provided by satellites, drones, and aircraft. All of the latter untouchable because belonging to NATO nations which were technically noncombatants. Essentially Russia was fighting the whole of NATO, with its hands still tied by the rules of the SMO. After all, Ukrainians were brother Slavs or even Russians, and it was desirable to harm them as little as possible. Like some horror movie where your best friend is taken over by a parasitic intelligence that wants to kill you; how do you win or even survive without killing your friend? (See Heinlein's "Puppet Masters" among others).
NATO has steadily raised the ante, sending a whole series of "Wunderwaffen", all of which burned nicely or were captured intact. Now it is running out of everything, which reveals another advantage to the Russian strategy: by affecting not to realise that it was fighting NATO, it has actually succeeded in draining NATO's stocks of weapons and ammunition as well as Ukraine's. Even the USA's.
The key point, which Westerners completely miss, is that Russia is winning comprehensively in its own chosen way. Time is on Russia's side, not the West's. The longer the SMO goes on, the more total the victory will be. Every set of peace terms Moscow offers and sees rejected, the price increases. Soon there will be little or nothing of Ukraine left, as the Russians can see that it is impossible to cleanse it of the NATO virus. But in the meantime the West is losing hopelessly, and because of its utter inability to admit defeat, its defeat becomes ever more thorough.
"For Britain to deter Russia it must develop a ’whole society’ war readiness. As the SDR puts it ‘UK must be better prepared for high intensity, protracted war ‘".
As Lord Skidelsky pointed out in a recent article, exactly the recipe for perpetual war as described in "1984".
The UK would have absolutely no chance of defeating Russia in a real war. Russia could render the UK uninhabitable within half an hour. It could also easily win any conventional war. At any moment a suitably-placed Russian submarine could destroy any chosen part(s) of London or anywhere else in the UK, with conventional explosives.
Dear Sir:
Most of the time, defense is the number one, and maybe even the only, task of a national government. Therefore, the pain of the economic consequences has to be endured. The complexity, of course, is to determine how much defense is needed and how best to achieve that. However, for the specific country, the UK, and at this specific juncture, I agree that the Britons have better places to spend their hard-earned Sterling, but not necessarily so for other European countries on the continent. Therefore, please elaborate on what "rearm" is, and how much to rearm. I also believe your thoughts imply your opinions are conditioned on the current time, place, and which countries.
The UK has the ocean protection to increase the difficulties in attacking the UK. However, if the UK had not started building warships in the early 20th century and only started by the Tangier Crisis, the UK would not have decisive advantage over the German Empire in WW1 in maintaining sea lane safety. Without maintaining those ships and building a few more, including aircraft carriers, the UK may not have survived the initial onslaught in WW2. The UK does not have an obvious enemy today to justify a naval competition, but continuing to build new ships and planes is justified. A peacock does not change into a hedgehog in one day. Yet we don't know what international crisis we would see.
For other European nations on the Continent, the British reasoning may not be applicable. Switzerland has mountains as a defense barrier. Most other countries don't have that kind of luxury. Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania need to defend against Ukraine. Other countries need to defend against Germany. Croatia and Slovenia need to defend against Italy. If we have a multi-polar world, then the probability of multiple neighborhood rascals will be higher than a single local bully. However, the fact that there remains no intelligent and powerful arbitrator for the international arena remains the same.
Lastly, how much to rearm and the impact on the economy. Suppose the UK does rearm but cuts off aid to Ukraine and illegal aliens, then the impact is not that much. The fact that the Bank of England and City of London will not terminate the Ukraine War says the problem is not rearmament per se, but the context and purpose of rearming. Germany does not have enough energy to revitalize its MIC, let alone its national manufacturing base. France is marginally better. But once it loses its cheap uranium ore from West Africa, France will face higher energy costs. From weapon system design to MIC corruption, there are too many problems to solve before the real rearmament can start. If done properly, proper maintenance of defense and periodic refresh of armament have merits to the economy.
Therefore, I think the largest reason not to rearm is not due to damage to the economic impact, but rather the lack of readiness of the government and society to proceed with the rearmament.
No European nation - least of all the UK - needs to defend itself against any foreign enemy. With the sole exception of the (literally) millions of legal and illegal immigrants who have been flooding into already overpopulated countries, with likely consequences as serious as civil war.
What on earth would Russia want with any part of that quarrelsome, ideologically subverted, resource-poor continent? Russia is already the world's largest country - about twice the area of China, Canada, or the USA - and has immense natural resources that render it almost uniquely independent of any outside trade. It counts hundreds of ethnic communities as loyal Russian citizens - why would it choose to conquer yet more disparate peoples who would not fit in so agreeably?
Of course, it is Russia's vast natural resources that account for the widespread hostility to it. Western writers and politicians have openly admitted, time after time, their insensate lust to dismember Russia and plunder its wealth.
But that is not going to happen.
https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-bU38dS0HqM8/VhaFf0QnGBI/AAAAAAAABNU/pLl8Sfw6ALY/s1600/10645334_10152875631295797_4795442700649030385_n.jpg
I agree that protection is the first duty of government. How much protection, and what kind, depends on the nature and reality of threat.
The question is not whether Poland, Hungary, etc need proetction v Russia. They already have it via NATO. The question is whether the threat from Russia is so great that it justifies the doubling of Nato's defence budget. My article argued that it did not.
For now, yes. Unfortunately, human nature and history suggest that peace is rare, while invasion and resistance are the norm. A peacock can not morph into a porcupine in a day. If the Ukraine war ends in a stalemate (unlikely), then countries around Ukraine have to prepare against an invasion from Ukraine.