Putin's aggression is the price of western weakness

One cannot legislate for a quiet world. When a former Princeton University college professor was elected president of the United States, he joked before his inauguration that ‘it would be the irony of fate if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs’. That was Woodrow Wilson, speaking in March 1913. Similarly, the Hawaiian-born Barack Obama came to office with little interest in what lay over the Atlantic. He wanted to be the Pacific president, more concerned with Asia than the squabbles of the old world.

Fate, it turned out, had other plans. This week Obama has found his visit to Europe dominated by talk of Russian militarism — and has ended up almost begging his Nato allies to do more to address the problem on their doorstep in Ukraine. Fat chance. Debt-addled Europe has neither the money nor the stomach for confrontation — it must rely, as always, on Uncle Sam. Even the more hawkish European leaders, David Cameron among them, will not go so far as to spend more money on the military. The Defence Reform Bill making its way through Parliament this week proposes to reduce our army to its smallest size since the Napoleonic wars.

Over the past two decades Britain has become a country that likes to speak in bold, even swashbuckling terms about the need to shape the world rather than be shaped by it. But to have a military capable of doing so? Well, that is another issue entirely. The army was, in effect, defeated in Basra by a ragtag group of Iran-backed Shiite militias, in whose hands we left the city and its people. The subsequent reign of jihadist terror was ended only when the Iraqi army re-invaded. This sorry episode spoke volumes about how Britain’s shrinking military is losing the ability to win.