Eamon Dyas

The main development we should be watching is not the ‘coalition of the willing’ versus Russia.

Rather, it is the emerging battle between the commission and the nation states of Europe.

Where will Germany be in that battle?

When a group of states unite in forming what is effectively a military alliance with the intention of going to war and that war will inevitably have direct implications for members of the European Union this surely is something that will exercise the minds of the citizens of those countries in a way that can influence the march to war. 

That’s what we’d like to believe. But I know of no incident where democracies have responded in that way. When democracies go to war there is no consultation with the demos. The decisions are made by the leaders of the centres of power. 

Elements of the demos that possess local power like the trade unions or components of the citizenry may express dissent but they are inevitably ignored once the planning has been handed over to the military. According to the BBC this will happen as soon as an inventory of the forces being made available by the “coalition of the willing” becomes apparent. 

The current situation is particularly ominous because we have an unnatural power base at the centre of all of this in the form of the European Commission. This aberration has served to stultify the normal impulses of nations when assessing a perceived threat. It has done this by imposing its own perception of a threat and uses its powerful influence over significant parts of a European media already primed to a globalist agenda to do this. But it has also used its economic and political influence to maintain its hold over nation states and has shown itself willing to use these levers to keep political dissent in check even if in doing so it damages the concept of democracy itself as it has done in the case of Romania and Serbia.

As to the new U.S. administration keeping these forces in check. But the primary objective of the U.S. wasn’t intrinsically tied to the objective of bringing peace to Ukraine. It was to compel Europe to assume responsibility for its own defence. Ideally, that would have been achieved in tandem with forcing Europe to accept a peace in Ukraine but the two were not intrinsically connected. No doubt Trump would prefer to have the competitive capacity of the EU’s economy shackled by the weight of a more expensive military commitment while retaining the European supply and distribution chains for US products but if he was to choose he was never going to use the economic weight of the U.S. to impose peace on Europe even if there was a consensus in the U.S. for doing that and there never was such a consensus. 

As to where we go from here. Well we have an over-arching EU whose view of the world has been largely fashioned by the political paranoia of the Baltics and a perennial capacity to defer to the British, a Britain that has never really discarded its view of itself as forever tied to the glory and leadership of empire, a France that has a similar instinct and a small group of EU dissenting EU states that has somehow retained an independent sense of themselves. We also have Canada which has found itself knitted into the anti-Russian narrative woven by the influential Ukrainian diaspora in the country. 

On the bright side there is always the possibility that many of the components of the “coalition of the willing” are viewing this as simply theatre in order to put pressure on Russia and that theatre is being given the appearance of substance by Starmer’s undoubted earnestness. If that is the case then there will be a line that they will draw back from if push comes to shove and at that point Starmer will share the fate of the Duke of York. Now wouldn’t that be a sight worth waiting for.