NATO

For a century, the way to measure a military was to count. Count the tanks, the hulls, the airframes, the warheads; add up the budgets; weigh the tonnage; and from that arithmetic of mass deduce who would win. The bigger arsenal beat the smaller one. The richer state, able to buy more and heavier machines, dictated terms to the poorer. It was a comfortable assumption, because it was simple, and because for a long time it was roughly true. It is now false. A revolution in the character of war has already happened — not on a drawing board, but in the field, in front of everyone — and most of the world’s arsenals have not yet understood that they are obsolete. The cheap, mass-produced drone has quietly dethroned the expensive legacy platform. A machine that costs a few hundred dollars now routinely destroys a machine that costs millions, and the side that can out-produce and out-think its enemy in cheap precision is the side that wins. War has stopped being a contest of brute mass. It has become a contest of technologies and of production arithmetic — and a great many generals, ministries and states are still preparing, at enormous expense, for the last war. ...

When people search the map for the force that will ultimately stop Vladimir Putin, their eyes drift to the obvious places. To Washington, where the most powerful military on earth could in theory end the war with a stroke of the pen. To Beijing, the rising giant some imagine might one day inherit America’s role. To the negotiating tables in Istanbul and the choreographed summits where diplomats perform the rituals of peace. I want to argue that all of these are the wrong places to look. The real growth-point of resistance — the place where the future is actually being decided, quietly and unglamorously — is Europe. Not the flashy Europe of communiqués and photo opportunities, but the Europe that is, brick by brick, building an iron hedgehog against which the Putin regime will eventually break itself. ...

There is a word that historians reach for whenever a great power decides it would rather feed an aggressor than fight one, and the word is Munich. In 1938 the leaders of Britain and France handed a slice of a sovereign country to a dictator in exchange for a promise of peace that was worthless before the ink had dried, and they came home waving paper and calling it triumph. We learned, supposedly, what that paper cost. And yet I find myself watching the present moment and reaching for the same word, with one unsettling difference. What is happening to Ukraine is not a single conference, not one signature on one afternoon. It is a betrayal in slow motion. It arrives not as an event but as a fact, accumulating quietly while everyone insists that nothing of the kind is taking place. This is a creeping Munich, and the most important thing to understand about it is that it cannot be finished. ...

There are years that the textbooks compress into a single date because everything that mattered happened at once. Nineteen forty-five, when the unconditional surrender of Germany was signed in a Berlin suburb and a bipolar order settled over the world for the next four decades. Nineteen ninety-one, when the Soviet Union dissolved and an interim, improvised order took its place. I have come to believe we are living through a third such date right now, in real time, without the comfort of hindsight. The transatlantic order assembled after the Second World War — built largely by the United States, with the United States at its center — is coming apart in front of us. This is not a crisis within the order. It is the dissolution of the order itself, a tectonic shift on the scale of the two that preceded it. And the most important thing to understand about it is that despair is the wrong response. What is ending was always going to end someday; what matters now is what we choose to build in its place. ...

There is a comforting fiction that animates almost every round of diplomacy over this war: the idea that peace is something one assembles at a table, by leaning on both sides until they meet somewhere in the middle. Pressure Kyiv to give a little, pressure Moscow to give a little, and the killing stops. It is a tidy theory. It is also, I am convinced, a delusion — one that has cost a great many lives and will cost more before it is finally abandoned. This war does not have a diplomatic solution that anyone in Kyiv could accept and survive. It has a military solution, and the sooner that truth is spoken plainly, the sooner the war can actually end — on the battlefield, in Ukraine’s favor. ...

There is a comforting boundary that most Europeans have drawn around this war, and it runs along Ukraine’s borders. On one side, they tell themselves, is the killing field — terrible, but contained, a tragedy happening to someone else, in a country that is not in the alliance and therefore not quite the alliance’s problem. On the other side is Europe proper, safe beneath the umbrella, protected by the most powerful military pact in history and by the four words every schoolchild can recite: an attack on one is an attack on all. It is a soothing geography. It is also a fiction, and the people who govern Russia have been saying so out loud, on television and from official podiums, for some time now. The war was never only about Ukraine. Ukraine is the front line of something larger, and the comfortable assumption that the danger stops at a particular river is the most dangerous assumption Europe currently holds. ...