Europe Is Still Trying to Pretend Putin’s Threat Isn’t Real

Who Will Defend Europe?: An Awakened Russia and a Sleeping Continent, Keir Giles, Hurst, 280 pp., $29.99, December 2024

Yet European governments failed to take heed of the moment. They appeased Putin, despite numerous warnings of his goals to claim more territory and roll back NATO borders. The result: Russia’s full-scale land invasion of Ukraine in 2022, making it the frontline in the West’s battle with Moscow.

The question of what happens to European security in a post-Ukraine—and potentially post-United States—world is central to a new book by Keir Giles, a leading analyst on European defense and Russia at Chatham House in London. In his book, Who Will Defend Europe?: An Awakened Russia and a Sleeping Continent, he elegantly weaves together isolationism in the United States, failures of Europe’s leadership, and the collective naivete of the West in understanding the imperialist threat of Putin’s Russia.

Giles argues that many in Europe deluded themselves as to the true danger of Putin’s Russia. “For some people it is hard to imagine that in the twenty-first century, Europe is once again threatened by a megalomaniac dictator. … After all, figures like Hitler and Napoleon are supposed to be the stuff of history,” he writes. But as Giles explains, Russia has spent much of the past decade building up its armed forces, and “Putin’s intention to take what he (and many Russians) see as rightfully theirs has never been clearer.”

He concludes: “Even when Russia’s war on Ukraine ends, there will be no simple return to the notional state of peace that much of Europe liked to think it enjoyed before 2022. … We are once again living in an era where brute military force will determine the lives and futures of millions of people across the continent.”

Assessing the true risk of Russia to mainland Europe is complicated. Much of the continent is protected by NATO’s Article 5. Russia is making only grinding, bloody progress against Ukraine, a country a fraction of its size. In the event of an all-out war between the alliance and Russia, Putin would almost certainly lose. Even so, Giles argues, the Russian threat to Europe is very real.

Putin’s calculation on whether to launch a full-scale attack on NATO allies, Giles says, boils down to two factors: if “Russia has the means to carry out such attacks” and “what would drive Moscow to do so. In other words, the threat is as ever a product of capability and intent.” He concludes: “There is no doubt as to the intent, and there is a strong risk that Russia might persuade itself it has the capability too.”

Starting with the intent, Putin’s long-term goal of supremacy in his sphere of influence—particularly former Soviet territory—and hostility to push back NATO is well known.

Why Russia might convince itself it has sufficient power to widen its focus deeper into Europe is more complicated, and perhaps best explained through the West’s lopsided view of Putin’s true threat.

Russian President Vladimir Putin visits the aviation training center in Torzhok, Russia, on March 27, 2024. Mikhail Metzel/POOL/AFP via Getty Images

Giles says that Western governments have both overestimated and underestimated Russia’s might in Ukraine. Before the conflict, “it was widely assumed that Russian military strength meant [the war’s] outcome was a foregone conclusion,” and that Ukraine would be rolled over quickly. However, Ukraine’s resistance and Russia’s huge losses led to a quick swing in the other direction: “Russia’s forces were broken and could be on the verge of total collapse.”

Both assessments, Giles says, fundamentally misunderstand Russia’s two-pronged military strategy.

The first prong is the immediate, unsophisticated war in Ukraine. The past three years have revealed Putin’s willingness to “throw untrained and inexperienced soldiers forward to soak up Ukrainian bullets with ‘meat wave’ tactics.” This goes hand-in-hand with Russia “digging deep into its Soviet-era weapons stockpiles and vehicle parks.” The unsophisticated approach might not be as much of a threat to NATO as it is to Ukraine, but it would doubtless still lead to a huge loss of life were an all-out war to occur.

The second prong is a methodical rebuilding of Russia’s armed forces to prepare the country for a war with NATO. In April 2024, the U.S. Congress heard that the Russian army was 15% larger than it was at the start of the full-scale invasion and, according to multiple sources, was continuing to recruit about 30,000 new soldiers each month. Giles notes that, in 2023, the United Kingdom “assessed that it will likely take Russia five to ten years to rebuild a cohort of highly trained and experienced military units.”

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A war with NATO resulting in Russia’s convincing defeat will still be a catastrophe for Europe—the loss of lives, the drain on resources, the economic disruption, and much more. Which raises the question: Why is Europe so unprepared?

European security has for the best part of two decades been underpinned by U.S. largesse. The principle of NATO’s Article 5—an attack on one is an attack on all—gave many European countries cover to spend well below the alliance target (2% of GDP) on defense, safe in the knowledge that the world’s most powerful military had their back.

However, Giles argues that Article 5 is in reality wishful thinking that could come unstuck if there were insufficient political will among allies to comprehensively attack Russia. “Putin and Russia understand that they can’t defeat NATO militarily; but they may believe they can defeat NATO politically, by effectively making Article 5 redundant.” That’s to say nothing of Trump’s lukewarm commitment to NATO—making it unclear if the United States would act were Article 5 invoked by another ally.

The lack of political will for Europeans to defend themselves is perplexing to those in countries that suffered under Moscow’s boot in living memory. Giles puts it down to Europe’s divisions “between those countries with historical experience of Russian domination, and those who have no knowledge of what that entails.”

While frontier countries like Poland, Finland, the Baltic countries, and other former Soviet states have repeatedly sounded the alarm, leaders of wealthier Western European nations have dragged their feet and seemed in denial about the true scale of the threat. This has been true since 2022.

Lithuanian Army members take a cigarette break during training at a military site near Rudninkai, Lithuania, on May 28, 2024. The site, located near the border with Belarus, is a former Soviet military training ground. Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Giles highlights Europe’s timidity in appointing key roles to the European Union and NATO. When former Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas was proposed for NATO secretary general, leading European figures objected for what Giles calls “nonsensical reasons,” including that she came from “a country that is on the border with Russia,” as leading eurocrat Frans Timmermans said.

The book also takes aim at German Chancellor Olaf Scholz attempting to block the reelection of Ursula von Der Leyen as European Commission president because she was, as Giles puts it, “too critical towards Moscow.”

So why are Europeans so timid? Many countries have relied on Russian gas and have other economic interests that they don’t want disrupted. There is not much appetite to return to anything resembling the Cold War for a continent that likes to believe those dark days are in the past. It could also be that as European politics has shifted to the right, national priorities trump all else. Whatever the reason, Giles argues that by “repeatedly announcing what they will not do to protect allies instead of what they will,” Europe implicitly undermines the Article 5 deterrent to Moscow.

The potential consequences of this should be intolerable. If, as many suspect, Putin is lost in a fantasy of Russian power, this could in time have real territorial implications. He has written extensively about the historic Russian territory and described the collapse of the Soviet Union as a tragedy.

“If the spirit of Article 5 is tested and fails, NATO’s raison d’être immediately disappears,” says Giles. He cites an alarming example, commonly used by security officials, of Putin moving troops into a Baltic state and threatening to use nuclear weapons. “If NATO allies are persuaded they have a choice between surrender and nuclear war, Russia has achieved its objective.”

Of course, the biggest factor in NATO’s effectiveness comes from its most powerful ally: the United States. As the world braces for the second Trump presidency, Europeans must now spin two calculations at once: how best to be self-sufficient in defending themselves, but also how to persuade Trump he must stay at the table and retain interest in Europe.

The United States’ role in all of this is simultaneously the most important and the least complicated.

On top of the physical presence of U.S. troops in Europe, which is still significant, the United States’ capabilities extend, Giles notes, “beyond the reach of many European allies, such as signals intelligence, surveillance, space-based assets for communication and intelligence gathering, and strategic air transport.”

Giles argues that even if Europe, with the right political will, could build up its own capabilities, it would take a long time—something the continent doesn’t have.

The United States’ historical protection of Europe has not been an act of charity, but a way of defending its own strategic interests. The United States undeniably benefits from a thriving and stable European economy, and if it sees Russia as a marginal geopolitical concern compared to China or Iran, it should, Giles argues, understand that “stopping and punishing overt Russian aggression now is the best way to deter Chinese aggression in the future.”

The challenge Europe faces is explaining this to an incoming U.S. president who is likely to spend the next four years more focused on score settling at home than the international order.

Giles concludes that it may not be too late for Europe. However, he warns that politicians need to find ways to tell the public how desperate the global situation is and why commitments to allies in faraway lands matter to us all.

“Sadly, in the Western Europe of the twenty-first century, honesty about how much protecting a country’s freedom against a determined invader actually costs doesn’t win elections,” he writes.

Who Will Defend Europe sells its case well, but it may be preaching to the converted. Readers may nod along furiously to Giles’ brutal analysis of the irresponsible head-in-sand politics in Europe and how the West collectively ignored Putin’s repeated statements and actions.

Foreign policy, however, is not a top priority for European citizens, for whom much of what Giles writes will be a revelation. The good news is that support for Ukraine has remained strong among European populations, as has support for bolstering the continent’s security.

The public deserves to know the truth about Russia’s threat, however uncomfortable it may be. And if voters’ response to Ukraine has told us anything, it’s that when the stakes are explained, they are disposed to do the right things, even at enormous costs to themselves.