September 10, 2025

Europe’s Delusions Over What It Means to Deter Russia

By: Franz-Stefan Gady

The article was originally posted on Foreign Policy.

In December 1941, as Japanese bombers and landing ships converged on Singapore, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill still clung to the belief that the British territory and naval base remained impregnable—“our boasted fortress,” as the British commander responsible for its defense called it. Its surrender was, in Churchill’s devastating assessment, the “worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history,” the defeat leaving a “scar on his mind,” his physician later said.

In reality, Singapore was no impregnable fortress. As the Japanese launched their final assault, Churchill sent desperate orders: “There must at this stage be no thought of saving the troops or sparing the population. … Commanders and senior officers should die with their troops. The honour of the British Empire and of the British Army is at stake.” Yet no amount of exhortation could compensate for the strategic failures that had made defeat inevitable long before the first shots of World War II were fired.

Today’s European leaders are in a Singapore trap, crafting a training mission designed to signal resolve rather than achieve an actual military objective.

Today, as European leaders craft their response to Russian aggression in Ukraine—and as NATO holds emergency Article 4 talks after Russia’s overnight drone attack on Poland—they risk repeating the same fundamental error that doomed Singapore: substituting tactical gestures for strategic clarity and allowing political convenience to drive what should be comprehensive strategic imperatives. The parallels are sobering, revealing how self-deception creates a predictable cascade toward military disaster.

Singapore’s destruction emerged from Britain’s grand strategic delusion in the Far East—the fantasy that naval supremacy could substitute for territorial defense, rooted in the imperial strategy of the 1920s that treated Singapore Naval Base as the cornerstone of Far Eastern defense. British planners envisioned a war with Japan unfolding in three neat phases: Singapore’s garrison would hold the supposed fortress while the British Main Fleet sailed from Europe to defeat the Japanese in a decisive naval battle and subsequently blockade Japan’s home islands. By 1937, according to naval historian Stephen Roskill, “the concept of the ‘Main Fleet to Singapore’ had, perhaps through constant repetition, assumed something of the inviolability of Holy Writ.” This strategic framework completely disregarded the changing character of naval warfare, the rise of air power, and the impossibility of defending a land-based fortress solely through sea-based operations.


Read the full article on Foreign Policy.

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