There is a lot of war fever about. In January, Grant Shapps, Britain’s tiggerish defence secretary, said the UK was in a ‘pre-war’ period. The West’s adversaries in China, Russia, Iran and North Korea are mobilising, he said. Not wanting to be outdone, Shapps’s Labour shadow John Healey wrote in the Daily Telegraph: ‘If Putin wins, he will not stop at Ukraine.’ Timescales for when this conflict will come vary. Shapps said it could come within the next five years, whereas the estimates of European politicians range from three to eight years. Nato’s top military official warned that Europeans must be ready for a conflict with Russia within two decades. An Estonian military officer told Sky News that war with Russia was a matter of ‘when, not if.’

The fatalists give several reasons for their thinking. There will be a ‘domino effect’ should Russia’s wicked invasion of Ukraine succeed, they say. Putin has hugely increased defence spending, mobilised Russian industry behind his war effort, and shows a shrill militarism. Some others note that after 30 years of relative peace, Europe’s military and people are unprepared for war, our politicians are weak, and we’re not ready for the potential return of Donald Trump as US president. More parochially, a Russian threat is used to lobby for Britain’s national rearmament, placing troops on Nato’s eastern flank, bigger armed forces, tactical nuclear weapons and national service, or it is framed within a wearying discourse of inexorable national decline. Tenuous historical parallels are drawn with allied failure to deter Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

Going against this relentless ‘Nato is next’ narrative is Britain’s Chief of the Defence Staff, Admiral Sir Tony Radakin. In a recent speech at Chatham House, a London think tank, he provided a welcome tonic. Radakin chided the recent ‘confused’ and ‘alarmist’ public debate. He challenged some doom-mongers, saying: ‘we are not on the cusp of war with Russia. We are not about to be invaded. No one in the Ministry of Defence is talking about conscription in any traditional sense of the term. Britain is safe.’ Radakin highlighted Nato’s extensive nuclear and conventional capabilities, and its considerable economic, technological and demographic advantages over a sclerotic Russia. He concluded: ‘Putin doesn’t want a conflict with Nato because Russia will lose. And lose quickly.’

Putin fears that direct military aggression brings excessive risk

Radakin is right. Russia remains, and is likely to remain, in term of both numbers and quality, at a military disadvantage to Nato. But not only would Russia lose quickly; Russia neither has the intent nor military capability to launch an armed attack on Nato in the first place.

On intent, Putin has been pretty consistent. He has obsessed over Ukraine since the very earliest days of his presidency, but has demonstrated little similar irredentism towards those former countries of the Russian empire that are now members of Nato. In 2015, he said that ‘only an insane person thinks Russia would attack Nato,’ and last week he said western claims that Russia harbours intentions of attacking Europe ‘are utterly baseless.’

Putin, although malevolent, is not insane. He knows that Nato remains at its core a nuclear alliance. He understands that the catastrophic costs of any direct Russian military aggression against the alliance would bring chaos – anathema to the man who boasts to have brought domestic stability over the last 20 years. There is no public or elite support for a wider war against Europe. The Russian population are already tiring of Putin’s blunder in Ukraine.

Strategically, since the failure of his attempted coup de main in 2022, Putin is on the defensive, absorbing the land he took in eastern Ukraine in the early weeks of the conflict into Russia proper. He and his cronies have consistently, both publicly and privately, signalled their desire to keep their ‘Special Military Operation’ localised, and not to escalate it to a regional conflict with Nato. He has few allies. Last week, Putin acknowledged the severe national strain of his war in Ukraine: ‘social, demographic, infrastructural’ problems, resource constraints, and the ‘imperative… to bolster our defence industry.’ These aren’t the words of a man thinking of starting a war with America and Europe.

Russia does not have the military capability to attack Nato, either. The Russian army also switched to strategic defence at the end of 2022 – its natural doctrinal position since the 1970s. Both Defence Minister Shoigu and the Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov have reiterated their military strategy of ‘Active Defence’ to repel and prevent an armed attack on Russia and or its allies. Russian deterrence policy in 2020 permitted the use of nuclear weapons ‘in the event of aggression against the Russian Federation’ – not as a way of waging war.

Current discussion in Russia’s authoritative Military Thought journal is on strategic nuclear and conventional deterrence, and also on operations to ‘repel the offensive of a high-tech and numerically superior enemy.’ Re-establishment of the Soviet-era Moscow and Leningrad Military Districts, in western Russia, should be seen as as a defensive counter to the accession of Finland to Nato, not as a springboard for an armoured blitzkrieg. (In any event, Gerasimov’s vaunted army failed to achieve this in 2022.) The planned Russian military exercise, ‘Zapad’ (meaning west), was cancelled in 2023 – a sign that Putin’s baleful gaze remains firmly on grinding out some form of pyrrhic victory in Ukraine.

Today, as a retired US general, Ben Hodges, highlighted: ‘after ten years of war, Russia, with every advantage, still controls only 18.5 per cent of Ukraine, their navy and air force are failing all tasks,’ while suffering some 350,000 casualties. A Russian acquaintance of mine wrote an article saying that Russia’s attritional approach in Donbas remains ‘very costly for the Russian armed forces in terms of losses and expenditure of resources and can lead to excessive depletion of forces.’

Even if Putin’s political intent changed, it is implausible to think that his military could be quickly re-purposed to attack Nato without a full doctrinal rethink, of which there is no sign, and an extended period of restructuring, reorganisation, retraining and rearmament. In Moscow in July 2022, a Russian expert told me it would take at least ten years to re-equip the Russian army after its early losses in Ukraine. Western sanctions, economic pressures, military industrial issues, and further steady losses have further complicated and extended the rate of re-equipment. Former president Dmitry Medvedev wouldn’t have had to threaten factory bosses with Stalin-like repression if the military industrial complex, showing only modest production growth last year, was deemed capable of supporting a wider conflict against Nato. It is churning out updated or repaired models of older equipment, abandoning newer models.

So, no, the Russian army isn’t coming, though it represents a significant potential challenge. Hopefully Radakin’s speech will, like he said he wanted, ‘inject a sense of perspective’ to the debate, balancing the need to maintain adequate national defences while not exaggerating the threat, alarming the population or bankrupting a fragile economy.

Of course the West can do more to ensure a Russian attack never comes. First, it should support Ukraine, deny Russia a strategic advantage and bleed the Russian army white. Second, it should support non-Nato countries in Russia’s neighbourhood that remain highly vulnerable. Third, it should ensure effective and credible Nato nuclear and conventional deterrence to punish Russia in the unlikely event of an invasion. Fourth, it should ratchet up sanctions against Russia’s military industrial complex and its western profiteers.

But as George Kennan, the doyen of early US Cold War policy, warned in the 1940s: ‘Much depends on the health and vigour of our own society.’ Like communism, Putinism is a ‘malignant parasite which feeds only on diseased tissue.’ Putin has invested heavily in his own means of indirect aggression – political interference, threats, disinformation, espionage, cyber attacks, assassinations – to divide, dishearten and weaken the West. He fears that direct military aggression brings excessive risk. Investment, as Kennan said, ‘to improve the self-confidence, discipline, morale and community spirit of our own people’ and to deny Russia’s political warfare attacks are just, if not more, important than defence spending. War fever does not help.