Questions in the YouGov daily chat are invariably manipulative, but today there was one that was ludicrous.

In the event of a wider war in Europe, involving the UK, how do you think you would cope? Well? Badly? Other?

My response was, as a wider war in Europe, involving the UK couldn’t help but go nuclear, we’d all be dead. FFS get real! I normally keep polite on these polls, but really!

We are now, of course, in an extraordinarily dangerous situation in which a drive towards war is being presented as an attempt to secure peace and all right thinking people across all mainstream parties and media are agreed on it.

Discussions in the media are framed within the presumption of a Russian threat. No one questions the premise, largely because its false and s doesn’t stand up under the remotest scrutiny.

The same programmes sometimes have military speakers like Lord Dannat who assert that “Russia’s military is on its last legs”, as a way to argue that sustaining the war, in the way that the US is no longer willing to do, would soon lead to a NATO win, presumably with one last heave.

The incompatibility of this wishful thinking with the otherwise dominant line that a peace deal in Ukraine would lead to the Russians steamrollering across Europe is never noticed. Its almost as if they are doing it on purpose.

Without making any false assumption of an impending Russian collapse, lets look at the actual balance of forces between Russia and the European NATO powers.

According to GFP – strength in numbers, the leading annual global defense review since 2005 (in their own words) the European members of NATO, excluding the USA and Canada, are spending $445.7 billion on their militaries this year,

Russia is spending $126 billion. So, the FT assertion that Russia is spending three times as much as “Europe” is the opposite of the truth.

That means that without the USA and Canada, European NATO countries are already outspending the Russians by 3.5 to 1 on their militaries.

Add Ukraines $54 billion and the ratio gets to 4 to 1. That looks like this.

Put teeth on this and it looks like Pacman.

Add the USA and Canada’s $936 billion and it gets to just over 11 to 1, but even without them, given this imbalance, it is patently ludicrous to argue that the Russians, already outspent on this scale, have any capacity to attack NATO countries in Europe, even if they wanted to, which they have repeatedly pointed out that they do not.

Therefore, if the aim is “peace” and “defence”, even assuming a continued hostile stance between the EU and Russia, with no attempts to reset the relationship, reduce tensions and find a mutually acceptable modus operandi that would ensure a lasting peace, rather than a pause to tool up for Round Two, there is no need for increased arms spending. The orthodox militray presumption is that a succesful military attack require the attackers to have a 4:1 superiority. That leaves aside the political issue that an attacking power would have to have some degree of popular support to sustain an occupation. As the US and its allies found out in Iraq, even a crushing technological and military superiority is not enough to sustain a grip on a country if the people you are occupying hate your guts and want you to leave.

The current balance in military material is shown by this graphic from Germany, which shows an upward trend in spending from 2014 onwards, and also the greater NATO force in every form of weaponry, even if the US is removed from the equation. The only area in which Russia has more material that European NATO is in satellites and, narrowly, short range rockets; in military personnel, artillery, tanks and other AFVs, ships, aircrafyt and combat helicopters, Euro NATO already has a very powerful advantage; with a million more soldiers, three times as much artillery and attack helicopters, five times as many tanks and six times as many ships.

So, the proposed increases in military spending are not about “defence”.

Particularly not the massive EU military spending pledge by Ursula Von Der Leyen today. 800 billion Euros. Thats $860 billion. Add that to the current spending and you get to $1360 billion.

Compare that to current Russian military spend and you get this.

This is not preparation for defence, it is preparation for war; a war that, with Russia prepared to use nuclear weapons to defend itself, would kill all of us if it were to be engaged in. With the current UK “defence review” arguing that we are in a “pre war situation”, we should take the insanity of those that rule us sufficiently seriously to oppose them.

Post script: the state of public opinion

A YouGov poll reported in the Guardian (7/3/25) shows that the propaganda is working, up to a point.

• 60% of respondents in the UK thought – falsely -that Russia would attack other European countries within the next ten years. The figures for France and Germany were more sceptical, Italy even more so. Rather important therefore for the reality of the actual balance of forces to be kept from them.
• Even with this view however, only 24% of respondents in the UK thought that the current level of military support to Ukraine (£3 billion) should be increased and, despite the avalanche of emotive coverage in the last week or two, fewer than half in the UK support an increase in “defence” spending; which will mean increasing resistance to doing so as the cuts needed to sustain it start to bite. Support for increases is also a minority view in France, Spain and, especially, Italy.
• Only between a quarter and a third in each country believe that the European powers can substitute for the US, which makes the other positions a Potemkin village of a posture with nothing behind it.
• There is now a lot of hostility to the US within European populations; with 58% -78% now considering it to be “a big or fairly big threat to peace and security in Europe”.