This – Europe’s perpetual weakness and almost willful refusal to adapt to handle regional, mid-sized crises – is the real lesson here, because Russia is too weak to pose the massive threat to European security which Anglo-American media are is hyping it as. Russia is not a continental imperialist; it is not Napoleon or Hitler. Russia will struggle even to occupy Ukraine at length should it choose to invade. Its economy is too small (now tinier than South Korea’s); its population is too small, and its institutions are too corrupt. And Ukraine is a mid-sized country of 50 million, now-mobilized, nationalistic people, who will almost certainly resist even if their military is defeated on the battlefield. The looming threat for Russia is a re-run of its disastrous counterinsurgency in Afghanistan in the 1980s. So yes, Russia is a threat, but not one the EU could not handle if it would just get its act together.
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