There is a peculiar, almost touching vanity in the European military imagination, which, having outsourced its actual security to an increasingly distracted Washington for the better part of a century, now occupies its time preparing for triumphs it has done nothing to bring about. News that thousands of European troops are assembling to rehearse their eventual deployment as peacekeepers in a post-conflict Ukraine belongs less to the realm of high strategy than to that of the theatre of the absurd. One can only marvel at the bureaucratic confidence required to practice the delicate choreography of the victory lap while the track itself remains entirely consumed by fire.
The conceit, of course, is that peace is an administrative eventuality rather than a political condition dictated by the grim arithmetic of the trenches. In Brussels and Paris, where the illusion of strategic autonomy is maintained through a dizzying rotation of white papers and joint declarations, it is evidently comforting to imagine that Moscow, having committed its entire economy and half a million casualties to an existential war of attrition, will simply acquiesce to the presence of French and German battalions guarding the perimeter of its ambitions. It is an exercise in pure wish-fulfilment, designed to flatter the vanity of politicians who are constitutionally incapable of producing the artillery shells required to make such a peace possible in the first place.
We inhabit a world where institutions prefer the mimicry of order to its difficult enforcement. Consider the other dispatches crossing the desk this week: in Pyongyang, an impoverished tyranny whose digital cutpurses have reportedly absconded with billions in cryptocurrency issues straight-faced denials, knowing full well that modern financial borders are as porous as Western resolve; in Pretoria, the mundane, petty embarrassment of illicit cash stashed in farm furniture reminds us of how thoroughly the post-colonial state has been reduced to an administrative hustle; and in Canberra, a government unable to protect political volunteers from baseball bats attempts instead to wall off the digital public square from its own youth, confusing authoritarian gesture for governance.
Against this background of domestic decay and global piracy, the European military rehearsals take on the distinct pallor of farce. What, precisely, are these soldiers being trained to do? If the exercise is to monitor a genuine armistice, it presumes a Russian defeat or exhaustion that the current rate of European industrial output does nothing to guarantee. If it is merely a signal of intent, it is one so faint that it borders on the provocative without being remotely deterrent. The modern European state, whose concept of deterrence has long resembled a committee meeting chaired by an insurance actuary, fundamentally misunderstands the nature of the adversary it faces. Vladimir Putin does not fear a peacekeeping force that requires fourteen multilateral approvals simply to refuel its logistics trucks.
What we are witnessing is the displacement activity of an exhausted elite. Rehearsing peacekeeping operations allows European leaders to feel deeply consequential without having to confront their electorates with the actual cost of victory. It is far easier to stage a photo opportunity featuring well-drilled peacekeepers in Bavaria than it is to convert automotive plants into ammunition factories or tell suburban voters that the age of effortless prosperity has come to an end. It is a pantomime of resolve, staged for an audience of one: the reflection in the European policy-maker's bathroom mirror.
Earlier this week, scientists announced the discovery of intact red blood cells preserved within a hundred-and-fifteen-million-year-old dinosaur fossil. One cannot help but admire the stone’s capacity to retain the essential vital fluids of an extinct beast across geological epochs. It is a resilience that the North Atlantic order might envy. For while our institutions retain the external skeletal structure of a great civilisational alliance, the marrow within has withered, leaving us with armies that drill for the calm after a storm they have neither the will nor the weapons to weather.
Rupert Halloway