Bumping up against solid reality

Pourquoi mourir pour Donetsk? Britain's young might well wonder

Playing in the park with my son and nephew on Sunday, I spotted the military helicopters making their way across north London and told them to wave at President Zelensky. It was quite far up but, who knows, maybe the Ukrainian leader saw the two English boys wishing him well and felt some encouragement.

I think that many American conservatives, expressing a scepticism about Zelensky that is often selective (as scepticism tends to be), underestimate how much of a hero he is to most Europeans. He is, in many ways, the Last European Hero, engaged in the sort of struggle so many of our ancestors once endured but which we have been mercifully spared. In Britain as in the US, support for Ukraine tends to correlate with voting for more centrist parties, but the British public is so overwhelmingly pro-Ukrainian that even Reform Party members blame Russia for the conflict by a huge margin.

That is why last weekend’s almost reality TV-like row with Donald Trump and JD Vance was so shocking here. We admire and respect Zelensky - we just don’t want to risk war with Russia on Ukraine’s behalf, nor take on the huge financial cost of re-armament. Nevertheless, we no longer have much of a choice.

That western schism means Britain becoming part of a new ‘Coalition of the Willing’, Prime Minister Keir Starmer using the same phrase last heard in the lead up to the disastrous Iraq invasion (although it has been invoked a number of times). This would mean Britain and France putting troops and planes on Ukrainian soil after a cease fire, and defence analysts even talk of a British Army of the Dnieper, though our military is woefully underfunded; even the fleet of helicopters which took Zelensky to the airport is apparently set to be scraped, with no replacements.

The reality is that Europe does not have the manufacturing capabilities to arm Ukraine; even the United States struggles to do so, because it has outsourced so much industry, something Vance and the Trumpist intellectuals understand and worry about when they think about a coming confrontation with China.

But with Donald Trump’s increasingly Russophile foreign policy, European nations can no longer avoid the necessity of rearming - the ‘paradise of fools’ is coming to an end. For too long, American military backing has infantilised the continent, whose leaders have become too fond of making empty gestures; now comes the first real test of European solidarity, and it will be unpopular with voters.

The atmosphere in British politics, meanwhile, gives us a little taste of what it must have been like in 1914, with anyone sees as insufficiently pro-war accused of being a traitor. There also seems to be a particular type of middle-aged British journalist who longs for the heroism of the past, a chance to recreate the great moments of Churchill.

Young people, on the other hand, are not hugely enthusiastic about dying in this war, and one can see why. It’s not just that Europe’s militaries have been downgraded, and their economies and manufacturing capacity weakened, but that countries like Britain have spent decades diminishing the strength of national identity, the very thing necessary for self-sacrifice.

No one will die for ‘British values’, risk their lives for a ruling class hostile to our history and dismissive of our ancestors, and for a cultural elite which gives the impression of despising Britain. Most young people would not fight for a country which they have been taught to dislike and which hardly offers them much in return.