NATO and the illusion of safety

Under the shadow of the Russian bear, no one is truly safe. Britain has the luxury of distance between itself and Russia, but what of the rest of mainland Europe? What about Finland and the Baltic states? Where do they turn when Russian aggression boils up? They turn to NATO of course.

NATO is an alliance originally set up to safeguard Western European nations against Soviet aggression by preventing Russia from goose stepping into West Germany and the rest of the continent. Back then, the alliance probably could have held off the Soviet onslaught rather respectively, yet I despair to see the weakness of our alliance today.

At present, NATO is currently conducting one of its largest exercises for the best part of a decade, named Trident Juncture. It is currently taking place in the western Mediterranean where they are making a great song and dance about the whole thing and saying that it shows the strength and willingness of NATO to fight any aggression that may be targeted at its weaker partners.

This is however, total cods-wallop. The central command are very pleased with themselves for being able to gather 36,000 troops and around 30 maritime assets for this exercise, attempting to delude us that this will be enough should an attack come. To believe such lies is a sure fire symptom of idiocy. At the enemy’s disposal are over 1,000 attack aircraft, a standing army of over 400,000 with around 10,000 tanks at its disposal, and a navy numbering some 280 ships.

These numbers are colossal and NATO in its present form could not hope to match them. Should Russia choose to invade Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania or Finland with even a quarter of this force, our armies would not even be able to muster a credible defence before Putin was taking in the sights of Riga.

Now those optimists amongst you will say that I am wrong, that Putin would never try such a thing and that another European war is completely impossible in today’s day and age. Well, to you I say, read up on recent European history.

After the Holocaust, people imagined that another European genocide was impossible and then, just 20 years ago, the Srebrenica massacre occurred. If you had said to someone 10 years ago that Russia would go on to invade and annex parts of Georgia and Ukraine, while NATO sat by and watched, they would have laughed at you.

All of this has come to fruition and it has all happened because we have become naïve in believing that we live in a world where we can all sit around a campfire and sing kumbaya, holding hands and existing in a world of mutually cooperative nation states.

Russia is on the march. They rolled over Georgia to take South Ossetia and Abkhazia without so much as batting an eye. They moved onto even bigger game when they seized Crimea without a skirmish. It is only right to assume that Putin is now looking to one up himself and this time seize a whole country predicting that NATO will do absolutely nothing. It neither has the stomach nor the resources to fight a European land war or fight at sea.

The Americans have become tired of Europe constantly slashing its defence budgets safe in the knowledge that big brother America will protect them. They are fed up, and would not bare to lose thousands of troops in defence of another foreign land. Britain has trimmed its armed forces to such a shamefully small size that we could not even hope to hold the Russians off in the North sea.

We hear ever increasing reports of bombers flying ever closer and closer to British airspace and Russian ships skirting the south coast yet we do not increase our number of jets. Germany is reliant on Russia for energy and fuel while its minuscule military is plagued by inefficiencies and failings while the French cannot be relied upon.

NATO has signalled its weakness by thinking diplomacy will be the answer. The diplomatic solution, however, died when the west failed to uphold the terms of a treaty which said they would protect the territorial integrity of Ukraine. No troops have been sent to fight the “rebels” to help keep Ukraine intact, and why is this? It is because no one powerful in NATO has the balls to do so.

America is currently facing serious pressures in the South China Sea and the Middle East. Britain’s defence spending should match Americans at 3.5 per cent of GDP, yet we languish at 2 per cent. The Germans won’t fight, the French are unreliable and the Spanish and Italians lack power projection.

The only NATO member really stepping up to the plate is Poland but, being so small, one doubts their ability so significantly halt any concerted Russian advance into the Baltics.

So, fellow students, what is the answer? Some will say more diplomacy, some will say to withdraw from NATO and abandon the smaller nations to the mercy of the Russian bear. But I say there is a different answer.

It is time that we as students stopped harping on about cultural appropriation, lad culture on campus and censoring speakers. Instead, we should be demanding that our government be able to defend our rights and liberties as well as those of our fellow students in weaker nations who might not be able to defend these freedoms themselves.

Think of the peoples of eastern Europe to whom democracy is only a couple of decades old. Democracy which now is at risk from the autocratic rule of Vladimir Putin and his Kremlin cronies. Russia must be stopped, and an increase in military spending across NATO and regaining a willingness to fight is the only way to deter Mother Russia from launching another European expedition.