Europe appears to be sleepwalking into another global war

Silicon Curtain’s Jonathan Fink interviews Keir Giles about his forthcoming book “Who Will Defend Europe? An Awakened Russia and a Sleeping Continent”.

This is an abridged transcript of the interview.

Jonathan Fink: The war in Ukraine is just the latest manifestation of extreme aggression by Russia, in a pattern of expansion and coercion of its neighbors that goes back centuries. In this interview, Keir Giles explains the outline of future threats, future wars and whether it’s possible to deter the Kremlin from returning Europe to a state of perpetual warfare. Is containing a revanchist Russia the best we can hope for? Or are there political, social, and structural problems that may prevent Europe from mounting an adequate defense? Are we in a race against time where direct conflict with Russia is practically unavoidable, and the stakes higher than we can possibly imagine?

Keir Giles spent his career watching, studying, and explaining Russia.... He is a senior Consulting Fellow at the UK’s Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House, and also works with the Conflict Studies Research Centre. He is a regular contributor as well to research projects on Russian security issues in the US, UK and Europe and has a fantastic new book out which I highly recommend. Keir, welcome back.

Keir Giles: Hello again, Jonathan. Thank you for having me back.... There’s a bit of a depressing pattern, it seems, with each of my books. Each of them says at intervals of 2 or 3 years: “Here is a problem with Russia. If it is not addressed, it is going to get worse and more dangerous.” And then in due course it is not addressed, and it duly gets worse and more dangerous.... What I hope is that in this next book that comes out on the 24th of October, I’m actually going to be wrong for a change because that is about the next stage in this process. It’s about Russia gathering its forces to launch the next attack beyond Ukraine.

Now, one of the first things people respond to that suggestion is, quite naturally enough, well, how can Russia do that if they’ve been fought to a standstill in Ukraine? How can they possibly have ambitions beyond that? But there are three problems that play into the realism of that threat from Russia.

The first is that although Russia’s land forces were eviscerated in the early stages of the campaign in Ukraine, they’ve been built back. They’ve been built back not as well equipped, not as well trained, but certainly larger than they were previously. And of course, the rest of the Russian armed forces, the Air force, the Navy, in particular the nuclear forces have in relative terms been unscathed. There have been naval losses in the Black Sea, but the rest of Russia’s fleets, for example, are untouched and can still launch missiles from hundreds of kilometers away against European cities.

Whatever you call it, the cease fire agreement, the negotiated settlement, anything that resolves the crisis will free Russia’s forces up for their next adventure.

The second thing is the way in which the fighting in Ukraine might potentially come to an end one way or another. Whatever you call it, the cease fire agreement, the negotiated settlement, anything that resolves the crisis there will free Russia’s forces up for their next adventure at the same time as stopping the process whereby Ukraine is destroying Russia’s military reconstitution almost as fast as it can progress. And so Russia would find it far easier to rebuild those forces in a way which defense chiefs and defense intelligence chiefs across Europe have said is preparing for the next attack on NATO.

And the third problem, and potentially the biggest one that makes Russian intervention even more likely, is the way in which we’ve seen the United States grow progressively less engaged in providing for security in Europe, which, again, is counterintuitive. When most people hear about it, they think about the constraints that the United States has put on Ukraine in terms of striking into Russia. But then you have to look at the step beyond that, because those exact same reasons why the US holds Ukraine back from using the weapon systems that have been provided to it to their full extent, would apply if another neighbor of Russia were also under attack. And that, of course, is even before we get to the wild card of November and who exactly is going to be sitting in the white House after that.

JF: Many people will say, well, hang on a second. Russia has clearly demonstrated that it has taken, what, two and a half years to take, Vuhledar or Pokrovsk.... How on earth can we envisage them taking NATO territory?

KG: It’s a key element of this consensus that I was talking about across defense services across Europe and in fact, in North America as well, that the plan now is to challenge NATO. The biggest problem is we have the United States as the core, as the linchpin of NATO unity, now under question in terms of its commitment to how it might actually provide for that essential backbone of security for Europe. You also have the resurgence of these scenarios, under which Russia could challenge NATO unity directly by a very small and limited attack on a NATO member state, and then indirectly explode the alliance by showing that its commitments to each other are not as valid as has been taken as an article of faith over the last 40 plus years. So you’ve got a range of different circumstances under which there are opportunities for Russia, and Russia is gathering its forces to make the most of those opportunities....

It takes an extra effort of mind to recognize that we should be thinking of the decision-making processes that pertain in the Kremlin and in Russian society as something which is from outside our place and outside our time.... You have the re-emergence of 19th century attitudes, both at home and abroad, which are bursting onto an unsuspecting Europe, which is one of the reasons why we have this complete mismatch of understanding of how interstate relationships work....

Another thing that has survived untouched over the course of the last hundred years is the mental geography that’s held not just by President Putin, but also by a large number of ordinary Russians, where the normal natural frontiers for Russian power that occur to them are not the political map that we see today. Instead, it’s the boundaries of the former Russian Empire, or as it was preserved for some time as the Soviet Union. That is the map that Putin is referring to when he talks about correcting the mistakes of the early Bolsheviks 100 years ago, when they set up these constituent Republics on the territory of the former USSR, more or less corresponding to the ethnicity of the people who lived there. That, he said, was the reason why these independent sovereign nations around Russia’s periphery exist today. It’s an error and it should be corrected, starting with Ukraine. All of this was in a speech that he gave immediately before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine....

JF: How true is it to say that after 20 years of doing this, you have a certain amount of intense frustration?...

KG: Yes, it has been 20 years, in fact, slightly more than 20 years. And one of the kind endorsements for [Keir Giles’ book Moskow Rules] was by Thomas Ilves, the former president of Estonia, who said that for 20 years Keir Giles has been getting it right about Russia, but nobody in the West wanted to listen. We hope they listen now. And the problem that you pointed to is the way in which in some countries, in some political systems, you can be open and honest about the nature of the Russian threat. And in others it is far harder for a variety of different reasons. And again, the gradient is the normal one. The closer you are to Russia, the easier it is to have a frank conversation about what the problem is. The further away, the less immediate, the less direct the threat appears to be.... And for that reason, as well as organizational and cultural ones, the message that is clearly understood by the people who look at this specific issue doesn’t actually permeate through into the public domain....

If there were to be a freezing of the conflict in Ukraine, as I mentioned earlier, that leaves Russia free to reconstitute its forces. And of course, they will do so very much faster. And just to illustrate what that might mean in practice — I mentioned this consensus across defense chiefs and intelligence chiefs in Europe about Russia getting ready to mount its next attack, potentially on a NATO state — where the differences arise is in estimates of how long that will take. Most of the estimates come in between 3 and 5 years. In other words, Russia will be ready towards the end of this decade. And if you look at what the Estonian outgoing chief of defense, Martin Herem, says, that changes if Ukraine stops destroying the Russian armed forces at the rate that it does. If they stop, he says, Russia would be ready to do “something nasty in our direction” in one year, not 3 to 5. So it massively accelerates the problem that we face.

At the same time, as the book’s subtitle suggests, most Western European defense economies and political systems have just not woken up to the threat or if they have, are not actually doing anything about it....

We have now, for now, a loose coalition of powers that is challenging the West. It is Russia, China, North Korea, Iran all cooperating because they have a shared interest in challenging us. And you have all of the precursors for a major European war in precisely the same way as we did in the late 1930s, but with one crucial difference, which is that countries like the UK, like Germany, are not rearming rapidly for it. They are not preparing for this. It is only, again, the front-line states that are taking the threat sufficiently seriously to actually get their act in order to either deter or, if absolutely necessary, withstand what is coming. That’s the reason why, for example, you have Poland, with its massive increases in its defense budget, throwing pitchfork loads of cash at buying arms wherever they can because they know the potential alternative is catastrophic....

So we have a situation where there’s a huge mismatch between the estimate of the threat that has been publicly made and how disastrous this could be, and, on the other hand, the willingness to actually do anything about it. It seems that in the UK, for example, the current government has decided that the risk of adjusting spending priorities in the government budgets is greater than the risk of catastrophic defeat that will blight the country for generations to come.

JF: What is your view of America? You devote a whole chapter to this, about America that is distracted and divided.

KG: If you read the works of people like Yuri Bezmenov about how they planned to target US society and US thinking over the long term, it makes very depressing reading and listening now, because of course you can see all of those projects coming to fruition. Even if the United States is not under a Trump presidency after November, even if the US is acting as a rational actor, which is protecting its own interests around the world, we still have a problem in Europe. Not just because the reasons why the United States puts limits on how this vast quantity of aid that is poured into Ukraine can be used, would also apply to European allies, but also because the situation has got even worse. It is not just the fear of escalation. It is also now the fact that the United States is being pulled in so many different directions, so many different global priorities which seem to the assessment in DC higher than the challenge to Europe.

There is the US Navy saying it has to be ready for war with China by 2027. There is Israel, and the United States has shown very clearly that it places a much higher priority on protecting Israel and Israeli civilians than it does on Ukraine and people living there, because it will protect Israel in a way that has been consistently refused to Ukraine, even in terms as simple as keeping waterways open, keeping sea lines of communication open, which was an immediate priority when the Red sea was challenged, but for which Ukraine was left in its own when it came to the Black Sea. There’s a clear example time and again, of the United States demonstrating where its priorities lie. And they’re not in Europe.

Take another very straightforward demonstration of that principle. When Iranian drones were first used against Israel, they were immediate US sanctions against the drone manufacturers, despite the fact that they had been used for over a year previously against Ukraine. The only possible conclusion from that is that the United States is content for Iranian drones to kill people as long as they’re in Ukraine and not in Israel.

So you have a number of different challenges around the world, which means that the people who are looking after US interests through military power around the world are competing between themselves in DC for resources and attention. And the assessment seems to be that Europe is not the biggest and most urgent problem at the moment, so you can continue to bleed Russia and to slowly exhaust it, as opposed to actually planning to defeat it. Of course, the problem with that is it also bleeds Ukraine white and will eventually destroy the country if nothing changes.

JF: That also leads to a rather alarmist thought, because whereas it’s almost inconceivable for Russia to take over the entirety of Ukraine, and if it did, we would see genocide on a phenomenal scale. We would see a refugee exodus again on an unprecedented scale. But some people would be left and infrastructure would be left. Ukraine is developing one of the most advanced military manufacturing industrial complexes in the world, and it has a lot of capable experts. Once the initial sort of bloodletting of conquest has passed, one can see Russia turning the territory of Ukraine into a frighteningly effective forward base for further conquest in Europe. Is that something that is on the minds of the experts that you speak to?

KG: It depends which experts. To some people, this is very clear. To other people, this seems to come as a revelation. But it is unimaginable that Russia would not do this in that situation. Because if you look at not only the pattern of past history, but also what’s happening in the occupied territories in the East now, you will not see Russia not taking advantage of the fact that it acquires a whole new industrial base, a whole new population from which it can conscript people to carry on its wars. The economy, the agricultural exports, all of these things, if they fall into Russia’s hands, will make Russia immensely stronger for carrying out its next attack against Europe....

You only have to look at the difference between what is happening in this gradient across Europe and what happens in the front-line states when you talk about the idea that you might, in fact, have to defend your country and defend your way of life because it is under attack. The notion that people will have to stand up and fight is something which is not a hard sell in Finland, even in countries like Sweden, where the new Crisis or War Preparedness booklet, which is about to be distributed, repeats that there will never be a call for surrender from the central authorities.

Contrast that with the calls you heard towards the end of the previous government here in the UK.... Some kind of commitment of citizens to sustaining their own country — with this recognition that freedom does not come for free and values do need to be defended — was not only roundly hooted at by the left-wing media like the BBC and the Guardian, but also completely misunderstood by people who you think might have been in favor of this because they recognized the threat and the challenge. And that is a symptom of that enormous gap that we have had since the last time there was a credible threat to our way of life....

JF: Let’s turn to Europe and the chapter that you call “Half promises and broken pledges.” One of the really big concerns, to my mind here, is the persistence of the import of hydrocarbons. There’s the enabling of Russia’s grey fleet. There’s the huge trade in tech components and dual use components, as well as the vast amount of consumer goods that were not directly shipped to Russia after the full-scale war began, but various intermediary companies and countries saw a huge uptick in these. None of that has been stemmed. None of it has really been tackled in a way that recognizes that we are essentially in a state of hostility with Russia, and it’s a form, to my mind, of appeasement. Do you think this is one of the problems here as well, that Russia is getting extremely mixed signals, but also still a lot of material support from Europe?

KG: I think it’s possibly going a little far to say that none of this has been tackled. There have been substantial efforts across Europe, even in some of the most Russia-friendly countries like Germany, to tackle some of these problems to some extent. But the problem, of course, is that a sanctions regime is only as good as its enforcement and its agility because it has to adapt at the pace at which sanctions evaders will adapt. And the spikes in third country exports to Russia through countries like the UAE, through Kyrgyzstan, for example, are a demonstration that it has not evolved with sufficient agility to keep up with the ways that people work around sanctions to carry on all the processes that you’re talking about.

Plus, of course, you have the immense role of China as a supporter of Russia’s defense industry and thus of Russia’s war effort, even if it is not necessarily directly shipping munitions in the way that Iran and North Korea are. So, yes, a lot of these things are ongoing, in part because there is not that immediate sense of threat and immediate sense of urgency, and the understanding that the ways in which Russia rebuilds its war economy and reconstitutes its armed forces are actually a direct threat to us in Europe, if not today, then certainly tomorrow. If there were that understanding, then the logical outcome would be greater efforts to try to interdict all of those means by which Russia is actually rebuilding this machine....

You have a country [Russia] which, as we discussed earlier on, is reverting to type. It’s going back to a more primitive society, a feudal system of parceling out parts of the economy, and of course, a war economy, something that is being driven by conflict and conquest in the same way that Russia has been so many times throughout the centuries....

JF: How significant is it, Russia’s (what now seems an) almost relentless advance to militarization of the economy, media, education? At the same time, it’s going from a rogue state to creating a rogue axis around the world, trying to create a sort of different basis for world or international politics based on informal power networks, as opposed to rule of law. It has shown itself able to corrupt international institutions such as the UN and many others, using in many cases coercion, corruption and also this realignment where certain countries will look at Western power waning and they’ll basically align with the largest bully in the playground. What comes next?

KG: Well, I think you’ve summed up the challenge very well. But as so often what comes next is an open question, because it depends not on Russia’s intent and of those that are aligning themselves with Russia, but on how the rest of the world responds to it, and in particular how Europe and if possible, if at all possible, the United States responds, particularly now, to this direct challenge on the international order that we’re seeing playing out in Europe instead. And that is why the crunch point for decisions for Western European states is, I would say now — actually, it was several years ago when they should have started preparing for the problem we see now — but when the challenge is thrown down, it’s a race against time for whether in fact Western European countries in particular will be ready. Until then the answer to that question in the book that we’re talking about — Who will defend Europe? — is for the time being the front-line states, primarily Finland and Poland. They are the ones that have shown the sense of urgency and the preparations, in some cases decades long preparations for the challenge that we’re seeing now. But they are not receiving that support from the west of Europe that they deserve and they need....

JF: I would say you’ve almost got a rot setting in, and Russia is very capable of using it. It’s very capable of dividing and conquering. You’ve got Austria, you’ve got eastern Germany, you have Serbia and Hungary. This is the sort of rotten wood which, if pressed, would crumble, I think, in an instant and surrender itself to Russian occupation if [Russia] was to break through the hard crust or the bark of the tree, which is the frontline states you’ve described.

KG: We shouldn’t necessarily assume that they will crumble despite the wishes of their temporary political leaders in each of these cases. But what you’ve just outlined illustrates the problem that, of course, the threat from Russia is not just a military one. There are other means by which Russia can extend its control and indeed has done. What we’ve seen in the case of Belarus, for example, is not military conquest, it is Russia exerting other levers of power....

JF: And of course, Georgia is undergoing that similar process of state capture. And it has been argued that if Yanukovych had stayed and Maidan had failed, then that process of state capture would not have required a full-scale invasion.

KG: Well, yes, certainly, Putin assumed, and those who were advising him assumed that the process of state capture in Ukraine was sufficiently advanced that an open war on full scale would not actually be required, which was why Russia was so massively unprepared for it when it happened. But the problem there, of course, is that Russia can continue to get it wrong, but the consequences are still just as devastating. If we think about the extent to which Russia has prepared itself for a military attack on a NATO nation, they might once again convince themselves that their forces are sufficient and adequate and competent to carry out the mission. It doesn’t matter if that is correct or if they are spectacularly wrong, because the devastating that they will wreak is precisely the same.