THE FREE PRESS
Why Is War Fever Spreading in Europe?
| By Martin Gurri | PREVIEW |
Warnings about an approaching war with Russia have swept through Europe during recent weeks, propagated by presidents, opposition figures, and the news media alike. The tone has been strident, almost panicked, conveying a sense of utmost urgency.
Let’s start with Great Britain.
Let’s start with Great Britain.
Sir Richard Knighton, chief of the defense staff, proclaimed this to be “the most dangerous period that I have known,” adding: “The war in Ukraine shows Putin’s willingness to target neighboring states . . . [which] threatens the whole of NATO, including the UK.”
Armed Forces Minister Al Carns, mixing his metaphors, asserted that “the shadow of war is knocking on Europe’s door.”
Sir Richard Shirreff, former deputy supreme allied commander of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), warned that without stronger European deterrence, “your sons and grandchildren and daughters are going to be facing a war with Russia. And a lot of them are not going to come home from it.” In a prophetic vision, Shirreff foresaw “white Commonwealth war graves . . .covering large amounts of Eastern Europe.”
Tory gadfly Jacob Rees-Mogg urged Britons to “do their duty” in case of war, even if some of them “have to die.” “If people aren’t willing to do their duty,” he explained, “then the country will be taken over by another country.”
BBC joined the war-talk frenzy with this astonishing headline: “War may be coming. Are we psychologically ready?”
In Germany, the largest economy in Europe and a bulwark of pacifism until the Ukraine war, the tone now sounds strikingly similar.
After calling Vladimir Putin “perhaps the worst war criminal of our time,” Chancellor Friedrich Merz stated flatly that “we are already under attack by Russia.” He was responding to a range of suspected attacks, such as Russia’s alleged destruction of an undersea cable. Since then, things have escalated further, with Merz accusing Russia of attempting a drone attack against Ukrainian transport planes on German soil.
Other German officials are toeing the same line. Christian Freuding, Germany’s army chief, invoked a possible Russian invasion of Europe and said, “We must be ready to fight.” Foreign minister Johann Wadephul has declared that “Russia directly threatens our peaceful and free life in Germany.” Deutsche Welle, the German equivalent of BBC, has produced this useful video: “War lessons from Ukraine. How to fight Russia.”
And as always when it comes to fashionable trends, the French refuse to be left behind.
On September 18, President Emmanuel Macron held a highly publicized emergency meeting in which top French political figures were briefed by the intelligence services on the danger of Russian aggression. “In recent weeks, the threat—particularly the Russian hybrid threat—facing Europeans and France has intensified,” Macron told reporters after the meeting. His grim assessment: “No one is safe.”
Macron’s foreign minister, Jean-Noel Barrot, has observed that France is “the target of the increased aggressiveness of Vladimir Putin” while his chief of the defense staff, Fabien Mandon, chastised the present-day French for lacking “the strength of spirit to accept that we will suffer to protect who we are.”
I could summon a multitude of similar statements from across the continent without trying very hard. It’s fair to ask: What’s going on?
There are, of course, plenty of legitimate reasons for Europeans to worry about Russia’s intentions. Europe has either provided or subsidized vast amounts of war materiel to Ukraine, which the latter has used to destroy targets deep inside Russian territory, including energy infrastructure around Moscow. That hasn’t gone unnoticed in Moscow. Putin now contends that he is at war not just with Ukraine but with NATO—it makes it easier to explain to Russians why he isn’t winning.
The Russian dictator’s methods haven’t been subtle or scrupulous. The explosives recovered in the failed drone attack in Germany were in fact traced to Russian nationals. On September 20, the Russian government declared a “temporary” curfew that essentially prohibited Estonian citizens from engaging in any activities on their side of the border. On September 22, three Russian fighters were intercepted by NATO aircraft in Estonian airspace over the Baltic Sea. At least one European military expert has predicted that the weak Baltic republics, and Estonia in particular, will be the first domino to fall in a coming invasion. And with an unfriendly Donald Trump in the White House, the Europeans believe they are on their own.
But the fact of Russian aggression, even if it has intensified in recent weeks, seems insufficient to explain the war alarm in Europe. After all, the slow-motion invasion of Ukraine has passed its fourth year. Putin is stuck in the muck there; why would he seek another war he knows perfectly well he can’t win? The Russian economy is smaller than Italy’s—what resources could Putin deploy to open a second front against NATO? Putin has always used bullying as a tactic, and has always pretended to rule over a great superpower rather than a declining petrodollar-addicted nation. But he understands the real correlation of forces with more clarity than the Europeans do.
Europe is utterly unprepared for a war that
probably won’t happen in any case.
The martial music blaring over Europe appears even more inexplicable when one recalls that the continent has pursued a virtual pacifist policy since the end of the Cold War. Defense spending has declined sharply. The German army is one-fifth the size it was in 1970, though it must defend 20 million more Germans. When the U.S. and Israel launched their war with Iran, the once-proud British Navy had trouble finding a single capital ship to protect Britain’s base in Cyprus.
Disinterest in military strength has been accompanied by geopolitical withdrawal. Macron gave up control over Sahel, which the French had dominated for half a century after the African nations there became nominally independent. The current Labor government in London seems intent on surrendering the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. Under Angela Merkel, Germany pursued a policy of intentional dependence on Russian natural gas, in the curious belief that trade would somehow soften Putin’s heart.
In brief, Europe is utterly unprepared for a war that probably won’t happen in any case. For decades, its elites have preferred virtue projects like “decarbonization” to the old, morally tainted game of power politics. So we should pose the question again: Why the sudden change in rhetoric?
The first step to unraveling the mystery is to grasp the kind of conflict European leaders have in mind: “hybrid” war. The shooting war—the actual invasion—has been projected to the near but indefinite future, maybe 2028, maybe 2030. Hybrid war, however, is being waged right now inside the borders of every nation Putin dislikes. Defining what that means can fade off into vagueness, but it’s said to involve the use of drones, hacking, and terrorist proxies to carry out assassinations and attacks on military or industrial facilities. Crucially for Europe’s ruling elites, hybrid war, as they define it, can also be blamed for attempts to sow confusion in democratic societies by means of propaganda and disinformation.
The Euro-elites are in a precarious position. Their political parties seem headed for extinction. The institutional order over which they have long presided has lapsed into crisis. Too much space was vacated on the left and right, and it has taken an enormous amount of effort to cobble together governments out of the remnants of vanishing elite tribes. Populists are now everywhere on the march. Marine Le Pen is the front-runner in the French presidential race. Reform, led by the anti-globalist Nigel Farage, is currently the most popular party in Britain. Germany’s Christian Democrats rule in Berlin but barely received 5 percent of the vote in a recent local election. The disaster extends beyond parties to personalities. Merz’s approval rate stands at 13 percent; Macron’s at 17 percent. British prime minister Andy Burnham, enjoying a “honeymoon” moment, does better, but his government’s approval rating remains at 22 percent.
These leaders crave a new principle of legitimacy and control. The Russian threat provides that. Russia is the new Covid—a crisis so dire that the state must be allowed to trample at will on individual rights to prevent the overthrow of civilized society. The call to protect the fatherland from external danger has been a typical recourse of desperate politicians—but this is more insidious. Populist critics of the system have been tagged as Putin’s stooges. Political “firewalls” have been erected so these supposed traitors can never participate in government.
Public criticism of elected officials has been declared subversive, to be punished with midnight visits by the police, fines, and jail time. A Bavarian pensioner, for example, had his home raided at dawn by the police for the online characterization of a minister as a “moron”; he eventually was forced to pay a substantial fine. A 60 Minutes segment aired in February 2025 showed German police conducting night raids on digital offenders, with one unit alone claiming it handled 3,500 such cases each year. A July 2025 House of Lords report counted more than 12,000 arrests for online crimes in Britain, with over 1,000 defendants sentenced—some to fines and a smaller subset to prison time.
At least one election, a populist victory in Romania, has been nullified on the extraordinary grounds that Russians had boosted the winning candidate through TikTok propaganda. In Britain, Burnham is setting up a “National Center for Information Defense” to counterattack the “poisonous tide” of undesirable content. The untrammeled Babel that is the internet, so full of casual falsehoods and dangerous opinions, must be disciplined into responsibility by the whip of the wartime state.
None of this necessarily entails insincerity on the part of Burnham, Merz, or Macron. It’s a human weakness to confound wish with truth, and this particular elite crowd has often displayed a mystic faith in constructed worlds.
Other motives, we may conjecture, are also at play.
Europe is enmeshed—almost strangled—in its own history. These were once the mightiest nations on earth—empire-takers, event-makers—before whom the world could only tremble and envy. Today’s leaders follow a direct line from Churchill, Bismarck, Napoleon. Under the colossal shadow of the past, they feel shriveled and impotent. The societies they misgovern wallow in hedonism and delusion. There is, I suspect, a hunger for existential purpose—for a great war that will return these mediocrities and their peoples to the heights of history and restore the epic dimension to everyday life. Russia and Putin, the ancient foe and the perfect villain, may fulfill this primal need.
The danger in all this is that the wish may come true. In Anton Chekhov’s play Three Sisters, a character stuck in the provinces of tsarist Russia complains about pervasive laziness and boredom, before uttering this prophecy: “The time is at hand, an avalanche is moving down upon us, a mighty clearing storm which is coming, is already near and will soon blow the laziness, the indifference, the distaste for work, the rotten boredom out of our society.” That was written in 1900. By 1914, the avalanche had arrived in the form of World War I. The boredom was indeed swept away, along with much of European civilization. Constant predictions of war, whether sincere or cynical, may give war a certain inevitability when hard decisions are faced.
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