Russia's bullish plans, unveiled this week, to build up to six aircraft carrier battlegroups and upgrade its nuclear submarine fleet are part of a worrying trend. They provide further evidence that Moscow's military revival, initiated by Vladimir Putin and continued by his presidential successor, Dmitri Medvedev, may in time pose some unwelcome challenges for Europeans determined to believe the days of east-west confrontation are over.
Parallel Russian proposals for inclusive new European security structures that could in theory supplant Nato and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe are the political window-dressing for Moscow's burgeoning ambition. And physical pressure on unfavoured neighbours, such as Nato aspirant Georgia or Baltic breakaways Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, is a reminder that the "Bear is back", or thinks he is.
Russia is testing a new intercontinental missile, the Bulava-M, whose main claim to fame is its supposed ability to pierce any defensive missile shield. Memo from Moscow to George Bush and his east European collaborators: take your Star Wars interceptors and go jump. The penetration of Georgian airspace by four Russian jets last month was less subtle still. Georgia claims a new Caucasus conflict is being hatched in the Kremlin.
"The pressure comes in many ways," said a Baltic region diplomat said, speaking of life on Europe's edge. "There is political interference using money, the use of oil and gas supplies as a weapon, there is cyber-warfare, there is the military. They [the Russians] try to keep us weak and worried. What they really want is a good question."
One answer is that resurgent Russia, buoyantly bobbing on a sea of oil revenue, is ready to use any tool, from arms build-up and sabre-rattling [as in the Black Sea region] to diplomatic blockading [as over Kosovo] to political assassination [as in London], to regain the top-table status and leverage lost when the USSR imploded.
Nobody is suggesting a return to the scenarios that kept Nato planners busy during the cold war, working out how to repel a Soviet sweep across the north European plain. All the same, European governments and their militaries seem unprepared, unwilling or divided – or all three – over how to deal with this emerging behavioural pattern. As the recent Union of the Mediterranean summit in Paris indicated, they are more focused on security threats emanating from the south than from the east.
They may be looking the wrong way. But in any case, as Nick Witney argues in a European Council on Foreign Relations report entitled "Re-energising Europe's security and defence policy", the EU's capacity to defend its citizens against threats from whatever quarter is deeply unimpressive. The so-called European security strategy has been in place since 2003. But precious little has been done to advance it, he says.
Witney, a former head of the European Defence Agency, blames "procrastination, weak coordination, and persistent absenteeism by some member states" for a collective failure to modernise, equip and coordinate Europe's armed forces to meet future challenges and mount effective, well-resourced international operations. "Seventy per cent of Europe's land forces are simply unable to operate outside national territory … Much of the €200bn that Europe spends on defence each year is simply wasted," he said.
Whether the threat is terrorism, international trafficking, unmanageable immigration flows or Russian-style bullying, Witney says leading powers within the EU must be able to work more closely together without being held back by more reluctant or less responsible countries.
In his view that could mean excluding the likes of Austria, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, Bulgaria, Cyprus and Greece, which put relatively little money and men into defence, from the policymaking of more actively engaged powers such as Britain, France and Germany.
Witney also notes that recent changes of heart in Washington and Paris mean key obstacles to closer European defence cooperation that complements rather than rivals Nato have been removed. The need to do better is urgent, he says, giving as an example the EU's 1999 decision to create a fully capable, 60,000-strong "rapid reaction force". Nine years later this force remains wholly hypothetical, notwithstanding the evolution of smaller "battlegroups".
Despite such advocacy and the French EU presidency's prioritising of defence and security cooperation, it seems likely, with defence budgets falling and armies such as Britain's badly overstretched, that Europe will continue to under-achieve, endangering its citizens while failing those in Africa and elsewhere who could benefit from European-led or supported peacekeeping and stabilisation operations.
The shortfall in EU defence capabilities has long been the subject of US criticism. Such complaints are generally benign. But with a less well-disposed Russia once again prowling around the neighbourhood, the need for a coherent, organised, collective European defence that is neither reliant on nor subordinate to Washington could become painfully obvious.
Simon Tisdall