European elites appear to be preparing for war with Russia. Lots of new military spending, lots of anti-Russia rhetoric, willingness to let Ukraine launch drones from their territory and plenty of provocations like seizing tankers. They’re pretty open about preparing for war.
So, can they win such a war, starting in say 2030?
On paper it shouldn’t be much of a contest. Europe’s GDP is about 8x larger and its population is 3x larger. In principle, Russia should be smoked. Nor does history support “you can never beat Russia”, Germany lost in WWII, yes, but it won in World War one, nor was all of Europe fighting with it.
I’m gong to keep this simple. It isn’t GDP that matters, it’s resources and the ability to turn them into war materials, plus the willingness of the population to fight and die in large numbers.
Right now Russia alone produces more of the type of armaments that matter than all of Europe. Missiles, artillery, drones, glide bombs and so on. It has more oil and more minerals. It does have less population, but Russia’s historically been willing to absorb massive losses to defend the motherland.
Then we come to allies: Europe might have America, Russia might have China.
China is stronger. A lot stronger. Everything that Russia can’t make itself China can provide. Everything Russia needs that it can’t grow or dig up itself can be sent thru China to Russia from China’s African and Asian allies and there is no way for either the US or Europe to intercept all of that.
Nor is there any possibility that China will let Russia lose in any big way to Europe. Europe wants Russia broken up and subordinate to America and Europe. That would be an existential threat to China, and they know it. America can lose Europe and it will suck, but it isn’t existential.
This is how I predicted that Western sanctions would not work on Russia. I predicted it when the war started. Again, because everything Russia needed they could either produce themselves or get from China and even then Western elites were clear that the idea was to break up Russia and that China was the ultimate enemy.
The Chinese would have to be morons not to give Russia whatever support they needed, and unlike the West, China is not ruled by idiots or fools.
Europe can fight a very nasty war with Russia which wrecks both of them. But it can’t win in any meaningful fashion. European elites selling war or genuinely planning on war are either liars or fools or both. Europe’s problems cannot be fixed by war. Keynesian war stimulus will not fix their economic problems which are a result of the fact that they’re falling behind technologically and losing their industry to high input costs, including energy. They have less and less manufactured goods to sell to the rest of the world, can’t force the rest of the world to give them what they want or sell it below cost any more, and have no significant natural resources to sell to the rest of the world. Nor are they big leaders culturally any more, especially as China’s cultural sector takes on the standard great power glow—tons of money and people to work on it, and it must be great because China is great.
If Europe fights a real war with Russia all it will do is drive itself into the ground so it can go back to what it was for most of history: a barbaric backwater irrelevant to most of the rest of the world.
They need to fix their society and economy, and starting wars they can no longer win won’t do that.
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Jan Wiklund
Now I suspect that the European political class isn’t all morons. Quite a lot of them must understand what you write about, it’s not that complicated. And even if they are somewhat over-self-confident they must understand that a war would in any case be extremely devastating, probably killing a decent part of the political class itself. They can not all hide, with spouses and children, in a control room deep down in the bedrock.
So I wonder why they run all this war nonsense.
Perhaps they are not aiming at a war at all. Perhaps they are just running some war keynesianism. After all, some of them (Macron, for one) understand by now that public investments are necessary not to be left behind in the international development game. But, as Keynes despondently remarked in an interview in 1939, the onle public investments the bourgeoisie can accept are investment in armaments. And they possibly calculate that some of these war investments would give other spin-offs too.
And they know that the public would not let them spend a lot of money on guns if there is not a war craze in the air.
Now, of course, economic historians have identified something called protection rent. This is a sum you must spend on protection against enemies and for that reason can’t spend on profitable investments. A reason why the US was so profitable in the 19th century was that its protection rent was low, it had no enemies close. And a reason why Germany and Japan were so profitable post-WWII was that they were not allowed to pay any protection rent. And a reason why the US is up over their ears in debt now is that they pay a protection rent it can not afford.
So why should the European political class want to go down the same drain as the US?
That is a riddle. Another is why nobody takes on himself to speak it out.