Of The Willing?

Oh, for pity's sake, Mark Rutte, will your generation never get over having missed the Second World War? The country that has taken nearly four years to capture 20 per cent of Ukraine is not going to be parking its tanks on anyone's Atlantic coast anytime soon even it wanted to, and that is not an aspiration that Russia has ever expressed by any means. Yet even the British Government can no longer pretend that the Parachute Regiment might not already be in Ukraine.

Ignore anyone who advocated a military intervention unless you could imagine that person as an 18-year-old in battle. Can you imagine Rutte as an 18-year-old in battle? Or Keir Starmer? Or Friedrich Merz? Or Emmanuel Macron? The call for war always comes primarily from their liberal bourgeoisie. That is the class least likely to join the Armed Forces voluntarily, or to see combat even in periods of conscription. 

Operationally, that is of course just as well. Yet if there is not a strong enough case for conscription, then there is not a strong enough case for war. Unless a country needed to mobilise its entire healthy and able-bodied male population of fighting age, then it is not under sufficient threat to justify going to war at all. But arms companies are generous donors to politicians, and willing employers of them and of the military and civil service top brass in a retirement in which they would have been very comfortable but which they were too greedy to enjoy.