BRENDAN O’NEILL: The end of the Age of Fragility: The war in Ukraine has exposed the moral infirmities of the West.

The war in Ukraine seems to be waking up Western European leaders to their own dangerous delusions. It is shaking some from their luxurious conceit that we inhabit a post-war, post-nationhood world in which everything is mostly fine and dandy, give or take the ‘climate emergency’ and all of that. So Germany has started to make unprecedented moves to bolster its military forces. Some German greens are even wondering if the fantasy of living in a non-nuclear world has been firmly shattered by the Russia-Ukraine war, and if it might now be time to resuscitate all those shutdown nuclear power plants. No doubt British officials are also looking at whether their decimation of the military and their capitulation to anti-nuclear greens has been wise, given that war and energy and other historical questions are not as neatly resolved as we thought they were.

Yet even as all of this happens, we need to ask ourselves how we got into this situation. How we arrived in a world in which defending people from supposedly offensive words is considered more important than defending our borders. In which we seem to have so little need for the virtue of ‘strength’ that we’re willing to blacklist the word itself for being gendered and stereotypical. This is where the Ukraine war really confronts us. It interrupts, violently, our post-Cold War conceits. It upends our belief that history, in Europe at least, is largely settled, and now we can concern ourselves with petty things like pronouns and sexual identity or with purposely overblown, mission-creating projects for the technocratic elite, like the ‘climate emergency’. This conceit has impacted on almost every facet of public life in recent decades, nurturing the delusion that ours is a post-war, post-borders, post-everything continent, in which the highest aim of public life is either to manage the public or validate individual identities. Those bombs in Ukraine have shattered this Western arrogance and decadence by reminding us that history lives.

We can hope.