Colin Sheridan: Why Europe’s war rhetoric risks turning fear into policy

Warnings about a looming Russian threat risk replacing evidence with emotion, and turning democratic debate into a test of loyalty

Russian president Vladimir Putin: Intelligence officials in frontline states such as Estonia have said publicly that there is no evidence of imminent plans for a Russian attack on EU or Nato members. File picture: Alexander Kazakov/Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo/AP

There’s a particular tone that creeps into public life when a big idea takes hold — a mix of urgency and self-importance, the faint rattle of epaulettes, the conviction that anyone who asks for evidence is either naïve or suspect.

Ireland, usually allergic to martial melodrama, is starting to catch it. Across Europe, the “Russian threat” has hardened into something less like analysis and more like zeitgeist. 

It generates warnings, panels, briefings, “resilience” campaigns, and that newest genre of public statement — the one that sounds as if it was written for a film trailer.

France supplied one of the most arresting lines when a senior military figure warned that the country must be ready to “lose its children” if war with Russia comes. 

It is hard to imagine a sentence more emotionally primed: children, sacrifice, inevitability. It lands in the gut, not the brain. 

Germany, meanwhile, has offered its own variations — warnings that Russia could be capable of attacking an EU or Nato partner within a few years, or even at any time, depending on how one frames “capable”.

Put these together and a pattern emerges. The timelines slide around — five years, eight years, any time — but the emotional conclusion is fixed: war is coming, and you must feel it now. 

It is the rhetoric of imminence, even when the dates are elastic.

Once that tone sets in, it spreads. It drifts into education debates about “preparing children”, into recruitment campaigns and talk of conscription. 

It becomes normal to speak as if war is not a failure of politics but a civic trial — something that must be rehearsed aloud lest we be accused of complacency. 

Yet the problem with these warnings is not simply that they are dramatic. It is that they encourage a way of thinking in which assertion substitutes for evidence. 

“We must prepare to lose our children” is not an assessment; it is a command. “Russia could attack” is not a forecast; it is a conditional inflated into destiny.

They also create a moral trap. If you question the language, you are told you are questioning the threat. 

If you point out that Europe has a long history of scaring itself into bad decisions, you are quietly repositioned as a stooge or an apologist. 

But facts are stubborn things, even when they are inconvenient to a good panic.

Alongside the loudest warnings, there are calmer assessments that receive far less attention. 

No evidence of imminent plans for a Russian attack

Intelligence officials in frontline states such as Estonia have said publicly that there is no evidence of imminent plans for a Russian attack on EU or Nato members. 

Nato itself has stated that there is no immediate military threat to its territory. None of this means “nothing can happen”, but it does mean inevitability is being rhetorically manufactured where uncertainty still exists.

So what are we really dealing with? A genuine security challenge, yes — Russia’s invasion of Ukraine changed Europe. 

But also a politics of threat: a style of public discourse that rewards escalation, treats caution as weakness, and collapses preparedness into perpetual alarm. 

And that politics has beneficiaries. Military organisations are designed to plan for worst-case scenarios. That is their job. But worst-case planning has a habit of becoming self-validating. 

When authority rests on anticipating disaster, calm assessments rarely advance careers. Urgency does.

Fear also disciplines the public. It smooths over disagreement, compresses debate, and makes extraordinary measures feel responsible. 

“Resilience” is a useful word until it becomes a solvent poured over democratic scrutiny.

What's your view on this issue?

You can tell us here

Third — and this is the point rarely said out loud — peace is not profitable. 

Peace does not drive procurement cycles or justify emergency budgets and fast-tracked contracts. Peace is stable, slow, and fiscally boring. 

Threat, by contrast, is liquid. It circulates money, influence, and relevance. Entire industries depend not on war itself, but on the permanent possibility of it.

None of this requires conspiracy. It is structural. A security ecosystem fed by fear will always find reasons to stay hungry.

This does not mean Europe should drift into complacency, or that deterrence does not matter. It does. But there is a clear difference between sober readiness and public hysteria, and we are drifting toward the latter.

Manufacturing consent by invoking children

The clearest warning sign is the use of children. When leaders invoke children — losing them, training them, hardening them — they are manufacturing consent. 

The child is the perfect emotional accelerant. A society that cannot argue is a society that can be led anywhere.

Ireland, meanwhile, is being pulled into this theatre of readiness almost by osmosis. A small state with limited capacity is invited to absorb continental anxieties wholesale. 

We may not shape European security policy, but we can import its paranoia. And because we are not a military power, our primary contribution is psychological. 

We can repeat the language, adopt the posture, and call it maturity. What we cannot afford to do is turn this argument into a loyalty test. 

You can believe Russia is dangerous and still criticise claims of inevitability. You can take security seriously without converting public life into a permanent siren.

Hysteria is not a strategy. It is a mood — sometimes a method — with a long history of dragging countries into wars they barely understood.

If we are serious about protecting our children, we could start by protecting them from the politics of fear — and from the assumption that war is the only future worth planning for, because peace, inconveniently, doesn’t pay.