Since the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine, the nuclear threat has been regularly brandished by Moscow. These repeated threats from Moscow are, perhaps, at the origin of the statements by Sébastien Lecornu, Minister of the Armed Forces, according to which the period that has opened since 2022, and the Russian invasion of part of Ukraine, would prove to be more dangerous for France, Europe, and the World, than during the Cold War.
It is clear today that wars and areas of high tension have multiplied on the planet and have increased in intensity, with a simultaneity that was not present during the forty years from 1949, the creation of NATO and the Warsaw Pact, and the first Soviet A-bomb test, and the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989.
However, this simultaneity is not enough, on its own, to explain Mr Lecornu's rather worrying remarks. So, is the Minister of the Armed Forces exaggerating, in the hope of preserving the armed forces budget in a tight budgetary context, as is sometimes suggested, or is his observation well-founded?
In this section:
The same fears as those of the Cold War are becoming relevant again
It is true that only three and a half years ago, before Russia launched its successive exercises aimed at gradually deploying a powerful military force along the Ukrainian borders, the hypothesis of a major war in Europe seemed to be dismissed by the vast majority of European decision-makers, apart from the Baltics and the Poles, who had not ceased to warn about this risk since the capture of Crimea in 2014.
Although NATO members had agreed to increase their defence investment to 2% of their GDP at the Cardiff conference in 2014, many, particularly in Western Europe, showed no eagerness to reach this target by 2025, as set at the time.
The war in Ukraine has therefore caught many Western leaders and their respective publics cold, both of whom have been shielded for 30 years from all truly strategic issues, only worrying about issues related to the production of wealth and the increase in purchasing power.
In just a few days, the whole of Europe has been plunged back into hypotheses of generalized conflicts in Europe, and even nuclear conflicts, with Moscow not hesitating to brandish this threat to prevent any military aid to Ukraine coming from Europeans and Americans.
Thus, one month after the start of the Russian offensive, tensions and threats were such that France had to deploy, simultaneously, three of its four Triomphant-class nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines, or its entire strategic fleet then available, to respond to the Kremlin's repeated threats to use nuclear weapons.
The subject and the associated fears have since become part of the public debate, with awarenesses that are all the more intense as they are close to the Russian borders. Ultimately, today, the perception of danger is such that it is no longer even masked or watered down in political discourse.
Major crises, tensions and conflicts have been multiplying on the planet since the end of the 2010s.
It is true that beyond the war in Ukraine, which served as an electroshock for a large majority of Westerners, as for the change of era that we have witnessed in recent years, major crises and tensions, but also wars, of increasing intensity, have multiplied on the planet, over the past decade.
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