Max Weber was the image of a cultured intellectual of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The German sociologist was best known for his essay \u201cThe Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism\u201d, an explanation of why Protestant countries outperformed others in that period. When the First World War started, Weber was 50 years old. The German historian Golo Mann, the younger brother of Thomas Mann, included a revealing comment by Weber in his book The History of Germany Since 1789. It shows how easily we get drawn into wars:<\/p>\n
\u201cMax Weber, whom we know of as a harsh melancholic realist, wrote about \u2018this great and wonderful war\u2019 and how marvellous it was to still be alive to experience it, and yet how bitter it was that his age prevented him from going to the front.\u201d<\/p>\n
At no point did Weber and many other war-cheerleading Germans of the time appear to consider the possibility that the war might not turn out the way they thought it would.<\/p>\n
I see Europe in a similar position today. Like Weber, many intellectuals and politicians of our era are gung-ho about going to war with Russia. One of the biggest cheerleaders for Western military intervention is the historian Timothy Snyder, previously at Yale, now at the University of Toronto. He said in 2023<\/a>: \u201cThe Russians have to be defeated, just like the Germans were defeated.\u201d<\/p>\n European politicians, too, are becoming increasingly gung-ho about fighting the Russians. One of them is Alexander Stubb, the Finnish president. I knew him from my time in Brussels, when he was a humble MEP, the embodiment of a calm, intellectual northern European. He said last week<\/a> that security guarantees for Ukraine invariably mean that the guarantors are willing to fight the Russians.<\/p>\n I am not underplaying the security threat posed by Vladimir Putin. The intrusion of Russian fighter jets into Estonian airspace no doubt constitutes an unacceptable act of aggression. Nato has every right to shoot them down and should signal strongly that this is what will happen next time. But defending your alliance is different from fighting a proxy war in Ukraine, a country that is not part of Nato.<\/p>\n The Cold War was a period of relative stability not only because of balance-of-power politics, but because politicians who experienced the horrors of the Second World War wanted to secure peace. Most of that generation is no longer with us. Like Weber, today\u2019s European elites have missed out on the opportunity to fight a glorious war. The difference is that they would prefer to let others do the fighting for them.<\/p>\n The likelihood of an escalation into a hot war is big enough to be taken seriously. Apart from a general war-hungry disposition, the biggest risk today is that we, like those Germans in 1914, are misjudging the enemy. Putin, too, misjudged the Western response to his invasion of Ukraine, and the resilience of the Ukrainian army. But the Western misjudgements are more persistent.<\/p>\n The biggest of all was that Russia\u2019s economy was weak and would ultimately buckle under Western pressure. This misjudgement has several layers. It started off with a statistical lie \u2014 that Russia was really only a small economy. If you measure the size of the Russian economy by its annual output in US dollars, that would have indeed been the case. At the start of the war, the Russian economy was approximately the size of Spain\u2019s if measured in US dollars. But this is not a good way to judge a country\u2019s capacity in times of war. What matters is the spending power of their money \u2014 how many tanks their money can buy. The answer is they can buy a lot more tanks than us.<\/p>\n If you measure an economy on the grounds of purchasing power, a completely different picture emerges from that suggested by our complacent statistic. According to the World Bank, the world\u2019s largest economy, by far, is China, provided the measurement is made on the basis of purchasing power parity. (Purchasing power parity accounts for goods being more affordable in some countries than in others.) Number two is the US. Then comes India, and then Russia. Germany, in sixth place, is the biggest of the European countries.<\/p>\n \u201cAt the start of the war, the Russian economy was approximately the size of Spain\u2019s if measured in US dollars.\u201d<\/p>\n Based on this measure, the 10 countries that form part of an alliance with China and Russia, the so-called Brics, are bigger than the US, Western Europe and Japan together. We live in a truly bi-polar world. The US and China are the leaders of each side. We no longer call the shots, even if we think we do. Over time, the other side will become bigger, because they are growing faster than us.<\/p>\n Since the start of the war, Russia has outgrown all of the G7 economies. The British economist John Maynard Keynes would not have been surprised, because what happened was a classic Keynesian war economy effect. The UK experienced this effect during the Second World War. Putin re-organised Russia into a war economy.<\/p>\n I am emphasising these economic facts because this is what will inform the reality on the ground in Ukraine going forward. It is money that buys weapons. This money for Ukraine has dried up. The US has given \u20ac115bn in total bilateral aid to Ukraine so far, which dwarfs Germany\u2019s \u20ac21.3bn and \u20ac7.56bn from France<\/a>. Without the US, there is absolutely no way that the Europeans could afford to bankroll the war themselves. For that, they have to borrow money.<\/p>\n Or they could raid the \u20ac210bn of frozen Russian assets that sit in Europe. Previously, Germany, France, Belgium and the European Central Bank have opposed an asset raid \u2014 for different reasons. Belgium has most of the money on its soil. The money sits in the vaults of Euroclear, a large financial depository based in Brussels. France and Germany might be on the line for any compensation claims should Russia win in commercial courts. The ECB believes that an asset raid is illegal and would irrevocably damage Europe\u2019s reputation as a financial centre. Under normal circumstances, it would be hopping mad for the EU to take such risks, but if they want to continue to support Ukraine, this is the only financial vehicle they have at their disposal. Now that the European Commission has come out with a proposal for unlocking the money<\/a>, there is now a good chance that it could happen.<\/p>\n And then what? Leaving the complex technical and legal issues aside, the EU will run into a problem very similar to Margaret Thatcher\u2019s caricature of socialism: eventually, they will run out of other people\u2019s money. The misjudgement is that the \u20ac200bn will tide us over until Donald Trump leaves office, when he will be succeeded by a Democrat who will happily resume providing the lion\u2019s share of the funding. Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, said recently that the war will end when Russia is economically exhausted. That\u2019s the Western strategy.<\/p>\n But our sanctions have failed to cripple the Russian economy. Remember Einstein\u2019s characterisation of madness as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different outcomes. The EU has so far agreed 18 packages of sanctions against Russia. A nineteenth is now being prepared.<\/p>\n There are indeed some signs of financial stress in the Russian economy. Russia\u2019s central bank chief, Elvira Nabiullina, admitted earlier this year that the Russian economy managed to expand on the back of essentially free resources, labour, sequestered industrial capacity, and liquid assets from the country\u2019s National Wealth Fund. These resources have been truly exhausted, she said. But this comment was not addressed to the West, but to Putin. Putin needs to find means to create new resources. As does the West.<\/p>\n But Russia has something that Ukraine has not. China is a better ally to Russia than the US is to Ukraine. The Western neocons keep on underestimating the depth of the China-Russia alliance, which is the result of inept US foreign policy over the last ten years. By placing sanctions and tariffs on both countries, the US ended up creating a strategic alliance between them. The US, meanwhile, is much more detached from Ukraine under Trump than under Biden.<\/p>\n The mistaken idea behind Western sanctions is that Russia and China are dependent on Western technology like semiconductor chips. Very much to the surprise of the Biden administration, China managed to build high-performance chips themselves. Last week, China turned the tables by placing a ban on the import of Nvidia chips.<\/p>\n The \u20ac200bn in frozen assets that we might unleash in loans to Ukraine can also easily be matched by the other side. China could give a loan to Russia, collateralised on Western assets in China, or on receipts from legal compensation that Russia may be entitled to in the future. It is an ongoing misjudgement to think that the West \u2014 the smaller part of our duopolistic world \u2014 is going to smoke out the larger one.<\/p>\n Misjudgement of this scale and number is what turns regional wars into world wars. Our army of tweeting, war-hungry Western intellectuals are Max Weber\u2019s successors. They leave me in no doubt that there is substantial support for a glorious war, just as there was over 100 years ago.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Max Weber was the image of a cultured intellectual of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 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