A French friend of mine was one of the last conscripts stationed in 1980s West Germany. Their only conflicts were with Germans or other western armies, typically over women. After one row, a French commander had to be dissuaded from sending a tank down the local high street to show his rival who was boss.
Something of that era will return as the west remilitarises. “We face the most serious security situation in decades,” Nato’s secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg told the alliance’s Madrid summit last week. He promised a nearly eightfold expansion in forces on high alert to 300,000, though some Nato members confided they had no idea where he’d got that number. Member countries are also hiking defence spending: 2 per cent of GDP “is increasingly considered a floor, not a ceiling”, he said. But wandering around the Madrid summit, I wondered: even given Vladimir Putin’s malevolence, do we need to militarise? Will we? And how would remilitarisation change our societies?
Do we need to? Russia’s military spending in 2021 hit $66bn, says the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. But even then, the US was spending $801bn a year, and other Nato members about $363bn. If half the US’s outlay had no relevance to Europe, then Nato would still be outspending Russia’s military by about 10 to one in the region, notes Dan Plesch of SOAS, University of London. If the US abandons Europe after 2024, other Nato states would outspend Russia more than sixfold.