A Gallup poll in 2024 revealed that around a third of Europeans would be unwilling to fight if their own country were attacked. My own country, Italy, was at the bottom of the pack, with a whopping 78% saying they would refuse.
These figures reveal several things at once. Worryingly, they show the growing strength of far-right and far-left forces [and anyone rational who doesn’t want a suicidal war with a superpower with the world’s largest nuclear arsenal] openly sympathetic to Russia and susceptible to its propaganda demonising Europe’s rearmament.
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One way to toughen up populations is to put boots on the ground in Ukraine. For months, a European coalition of the willing has drawn up plans to deploy a “reassurance force” to Ukraine after a ceasefire. These discussions have not led anywhere because a truce is not in sight. Their aim was mainly political: to show European solidarity with Ukraine and encourage American engagement. But Ukraine is under no illusions about the fact that deploying a few thousand European soldiers far from the front line in a hypothetical post-ceasefire scenario would make no difference to its defence.
A European reassurance force would, then, do little for Ukraine. But deploying it now, before a hypothetical ceasefire, could benefit Europe, encouraging citizens to develop a mindset that would better prepare them for war. Yes, it would put European soldiers in harm’s way—any such move would infuriate the Kremlin—but the continent is already in a hybrid conflict, even if many refuse to recognise it. Were European soldiers to be stationed in Ukraine, it would bring reality closer to home [i.e. it would bring bodies in coffins home]. And perhaps a fraction of Ukraine’s courage, humility and creativity [and psychosis and hatred and acceptance of forced conscription and totalitarian dictatorship] could infect other European societies. European troops would not be put in harm’s way out of sheer generosity, but to help prepare for war—
These people are clinically insane.