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European political and military leaders are ushering in 2026 with bellicose speeches that recall 1914, greeting the prospect of military conflict with Russia with a lack of trepidation amounting at times to relish.

“If our country wavers because it is not ready to lose its children,” warned the new French army chief of staff General Fabien Mandon, “then we are indeed at risk.” His call to arms was echoed by UK Chief of the Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, who called on the “whole of society” to be ready “to fight” with the understanding that “more families will know what sacrifice for our nation means”.

Politicians vie with each other in ratcheting up war fever. Nato Secretary-General Mark Rutte predicts that Russia may attack the alliance within five years, when “we must be prepared for the scale of war our grandparents or great grandparents endured”. He is clearly talking about the First and Second World Wars, but German defence minister Boris Pistorius goes an alarming step further, claiming that Russia might attack in 2028 or earlier, and “we may already have lived through our last peaceful summer”.

Chilling words like these come not from hysterical jingoistic outliers, but from senior political and defence chiefs of the most powerful countries in Europe – Germany, UK and France – and from the heads of the European Union and Nato. They show astoundingly little concern about the prospect of a war on the scale of 1914-18 and 1939-45. The enemy this time around will be Russia, which has 5,500 nuclear warheads, the largest such arsenal in the world, and the means to deliver them.

Why do European leaders blithely predict a near imminent Russian attack, apparently inescapable without full-scale European remilitarisation? The most obvious reason is that they believe what they say about Vladimir Putin being an updated version of Kaiser Wilhelm II or Hitler, a warlord who is planning a wider assault against the rest of Europe. They cite his invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 as proof of his aggressive intentions towards Europe as a whole.

Putin does indeed share some traits with the Kaiser, notably hubris and poor judgement. In reality, the Ukraine war is proof of Russian weakness rather than strength, aside from its nuclear weapons. The initial invasion of Ukraine was a fiasco and nearly four years on the Russian front line has scarcely advanced. The war has proved a strategic calamity for Russia.

What other explanations could there be for the explosion of warmongering among European elites, a response so much in excess of real evidence for a Russian attack? EU and Nato policy is certainly skewed by east European states with a visceral hatred of Moscow born out of Soviet and Tsarist occupation. Former Estonian prime minister Kaja Kallas, now EU foreign policy chief, is notorious for her anti-Russian outbursts, having to row back on her suggestion that a defeated Russia should be broken up into separate........

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