https://www.wsj.com/articles/tony-abbott-putin-west-weak-ukraine-russia-invasion-military-fossil-fuels-nuclear-germany-lng-woke-covid-regulations-china-11645977566?mod=opinion_lead_pos5
Mr. Abbott served as prime minister of Australia, 2013-15.
‘The bullying of small nations by big ones, the trampling of justice and decency in the pursuit of national aggrandizement, and reckless indifference to human life, should have no place in our world.”
Those were my words to the Australian Parliament on the morning of July 17, 2014, when a Russian missile battery had shot down flight MH17, killing 38 Australians among the 298 on board, as Russian proxies seized the Donbas. If it wasn’t yet obvious in 2008, when Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia, it should certainly have been six years later, when he annexed the Crimea, that Mr. Putin was bent on the restoration of greater Russia—and to hell with the freedom and independence of the countries that were once part of the Soviet Union.
Yet since then, Western democracies have culpably failed to boost their military capability while indulging acts of economic and cultural self-harm.
Take the U.K., the West’s second-strongest military power. The total number of British defense personnel dropped from about 600,000 in the 1950s to 300,000 in the 1960s and about 150,000 now. British forces in Europe declined from 80,000 in the 1950s to 50,000 in the 1960s to 25,000 in 1994 (still including one tank division), before dwindling to zero in Germany by 2020 and 1,000 in Estonia (placed there after 2015 in reaction to Russia’s renewed threat). In response to Russia’s blitzkrieg on Ukraine, the U.K. government has just announced that this force will be boosted to an armored brigade of fewer than 3,000. Given that the U.K. has provided by far the strongest response to the current crisis, it’s little wonder Mr. Putin thinks the West is weak and easily distracted.
