{"id":93113,"date":"2026-05-01T16:37:14","date_gmt":"2026-05-01T16:37:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/93113\/"},"modified":"2026-05-01T16:37:14","modified_gmt":"2026-05-01T16:37:14","slug":"the-blogs-the-age-of-western-insanity-why-israels-armed-forces-are-now-the-wests-second-dan-zamansky","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/93113\/","title":{"rendered":"The Blogs: The age of Western insanity: why Israel\u2019s armed forces are now the West’s second | Dan Zamansky"},"content":{"rendered":"

Israel is a tiny<\/a> country, with a population which is a small fraction of the rest of the West. Yet, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) now have more personnel on active duty than any of Australia, Canada, Italy or the United Kingdom. When adding the vital reserve component, the strength of Israel\u2019s armed forces is greater than that of any large Western country, with the exception of the United States. This is not an exaggeration, but rather the plain facts as they appear in the Military Balance<\/a>, the annual open-source analysis of the world\u2019s armed forces published by the British International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS)<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n

A comparison with the data from 1974 shows how and why this has come to pass. In that year, the one after America\u2019s woeful abandonment of South Vietnam<\/a> and Israel\u2019s immensely difficult struggle<\/a> for survival in the Yom Kippur War, the signs of the West\u2019s crisis were already in sight. First of all, the West\u2019s seven major powers other than the United States had a total population 70% greater than America, yet between them could barely muster the same number of active personnel as America alone. Three of these countries; Australia, Canada and Japan, barely had armed forces worth the name. Israel, whose population at that time was equal to that of a medium-sized city, already had almost as many personnel on active duty as Australia and Canada combined.\n<\/p>\n

Even at that time, now more than half a century ago, much of the West was free-riding, taking advantage both of the security protection provided by the United States and of the deterrence value of Israel\u2019s bitterly-earned military successes, partly secured with the help of American armaments resupply. Would the USSR have sent its tank divisions across the inner German border in 1974 or 1975, had Israel been crushed by the Soviet-armed Egyptian and Syrian armies<\/a> in 1973? Nobody in the West wants to consider this question, or its implications in 2026.\n<\/p>\n

The Western land armies of 1974 were far from overwhelmingly strong, with West Germany\u2019s 340,000 hardly a convincing shield against a prospective Soviet armored charge through central Europe. In the case of war, everything would have depended on the 630,000 reservists across the West German armed forces, as well as their then-numerous counterparts in other Western countries.\n<\/p>\n

Now, all the reserves have gone with the wind. The total reserve strength of the seven powers other than the US stands at 262,300, just over half the size of the IDF\u2019s reserve component, alone. The active armed forces have been cut to half their size 50 years ago. The numerical strength of the formerly significant European militaries, in particular, has fallen by three fifths.\n<\/p>\n

No reference to automation or artificial intelligence can account for the Western, and especially European, cuts. Rather, the so-called \u2018peace dividend<\/a>,\u2019 which evaporated with the fall of Kabul in 2021 and the Russian invasion of all of Ukraine<\/a> which followed a mere six months later, has caused an evisceration of Western military power.\n<\/p>\n

If one ignores political rhetoric, it is self-evident that no return even to the strength levels of 1974, which were very far from extraordinary, is in sight. Germany\u2019s ground forces, if they merit the label, are now at less than a fifth of their strength that year. Four years into the Russo-Ukrainian war, the largest in Europe since the Second World War.\n<\/p>\n

Israel is the only significant Western military power whose armed forces have grown, rather than fallen, in size over the last half century. Israel\u2019s survival represents an ever-more essential component of overall Western security, especially as the ability and willingness of other Western countries to act to ensure that security becomes more questionable from one day to the next.\n<\/p>\n

The United States of America, even with a military much reduced in size, remains the only possible guarantor of the safety, the very survival of the West. America\u2019s shrunken land forces are larger than those of the seven other Western powers, combined.\n<\/p>\n

Much of the West has adopted a security policy which can be politely described as insane. Therefore, Israel and the United States have become the leading Western nations by default.\n<\/p>\n

\u2014\n<\/p>\n

If you found what you read above interesting and substantive, do read more and subscribe to my Substack,\u00a0The New World Crisis<\/a>.\n\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tDan Zamansky is a British-Israeli independent historian, with a particularly strong interest in the history of the World Wars and the long shadow these cast over the contemporary world. He believes that the mistakes of the past are being systematically repeated at present, and this process must be urgently reversed.
\n
\nDan Zamansky is author of The New World Crisis, a Substack analyzing the problems of today, see it at https:\/\/newworldcrisis.substack.com\/\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Israel is a tiny country, with a population which is a small fraction of the rest of the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":93114,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[12570,1648,38,37,1421,24289,26850],"class_list":{"0":"post-93113","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-israel","8":"tag-ai-artificial-intelligence","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-donald-trump","11":"tag-israel","12":"tag-israel-at-war","13":"tag-israel-independence-day","14":"tag-memorial-day-for-fallen-soldiers"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/116500303019400990","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93113"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93113\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/93114"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}