-by building dissonance within. Some like to remember fondly the call by Ronald Reagan for Gorbachev “to tear down this wall”. The United States “Won the Cold War” said George Bush Senior in his State of the Union Address. We need to step back and recognize with some humility that the Soviet Union fell largely of its own weight rather than as a result of external pressure. Again today Russia is economically weak. It has become an exporter of raw materials, its industrial sector is weak, and its revenues are already falling. Conditions now offer the opportunity to aggravate Russia’s economic frailty – let’s focus on that.

Over the last decade, the European land armament industry developed into a thriving market driven by growing demand from the BRICS, a new wave of emerging countries and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The criticism leveled by Americans at Europe’s neglect of its commitment to defense is not new, and is often exaggerated.

The First World War gave rise to the emergence of the discipline of international relations, but it was the Second World War and the Cold War that fostered its development.

Beginning in the 1970s, becoming solidified with the “peace dividends” in the 1990s and finally accelerated by the financial crisis of 2008, Europe’s demilitarization is undeniable.

The First World War helped redefine the notion of strategy, giving it a political dimension that it previously lacked.

In 1914 the firepower of modern weaponry produced a massacre. To limit losses, the warring parties dug themselves into trenches. The French army was forced to innovate.