"Like, in Europe we already live in a completely safe society in historical and geographic terms"
Russia. Putin.
At one time the US thought we could end the Cold War by waving a bigger stick. But Proud Prophet [1] was an extremely elaborate war game played out in the 80s that demonstrated that literally every single aggressive strategy, regardless of how innocuous, invariably spiraled rapidly towards nuclear war and the depopulation of the Northern Hemisphere.
This led the US to sharply scale back rhetoric against the USSR, drop ideas of successfully fighting a nuclear war, and a sharp shift towards de-escalation and away from strong-arming. 7 years later the first McDonalds would open in the USSR. The next year, the USSR would collapse.
Let's review.
Russia shot down a civilian airliner, killing all 298 people onboard, mostly Dutch nationals.
Russia performed a radioactive poisoning attack on British territory, contaminating British civilian areas and
Russia also used a deadly nerve agent twice within a few months on British territory, including poisoning two non-Russian British nationals, killing one and injuring the other.
And they actively fund far right and white supremacist organizations in western European countries and blatantly interfere in local politics, and also run active bot farms for the purpose of undermining social solidarity and democratic governance.
Those are just a few things we know about.
The threat from Russia is not external or invasive. It is internal and ongoing.
The fact that they haven't nuked and won't nuke the entire western hemisphere is a bit of a strange bar to set.
It would depend on the UK, France, and the US to back them with nuclear weapons. Would the UK electorate be willing to trade their existence -- potential nuclear holocaust -- for Latvia?
And the US is under Putin's puppet, so they're not launching nukes.
Would Britain and France go to war over an invasion of Poland? They did once, and didn't have a great time...
The second is that the leaders of these countries are very unpopular. Starmer has an approval rating of 22% which is somehow twice as high as that of Macron who has reached a simply impressive 11% approval rating. Politicians love nothing more than war when they're unpopular, because it gives the electorate something to focus on outside of their own internal problems -- Diversionary War Theory. Also I certainly disagree regarding our insecure 'peace president' who has an affinity for bombs and a trend towards megalomania.
And finally there is the wargaming results. Some of the actions that led to nuclear holocaust were relatively innocuous, including performative nuclear strikes intended to 'send a message' rather than actually cause much real damage. It doesn't even sound like a bad idea, at first. Make it clear that you're serious and this is the path we're going down.
But it fails to consider the most probable response. You want to send me a message? Okay, here's your answer. How do you like my message? And of course you can't let such a provocation then go unmet. It's easy to see how what sounds like a reasonable idea is in reality a very bad one, but modern political leaders in the West make endless poor decisions with predictably poor results. You've gotta be something special to have an approval rating of 11%. Were such things measured in the past, even Caligula would probably be looking down at you!
