So, when the former British Prime Minister himself wrote in a Sunday paper in 2014 that “Britain should avoid sending armies to fight”—strongly implying that the Army’s primary task was now humanitarian relief—I saw how the impact on the thinking of our allies and potential adversaries was profound. This pronouncement signalled that Britain was led by a government terrified of being seen to commit, but nevertheless yearning to be seen as bold and resolute. A country famous for once “walking softly and carrying a big stick”—meaning that British governments did not make threats they did not fully intend to implement—now had a leadership that shouted loudly but, thanks to ongoing defense cuts, carried an increasingly tiny and impotent stick. And be in no doubt, nobody in the military was fooled by the UK’s 2015 Strategic Defense and Security Review with its creative accounting to maintain the Defense budget at two per cent of GDP and the “jam tomorrow”—and most of these are many, many years in the future—of its big-ticket equipment items.

Since I wrote the preface for the UK hardback edition of this book in May 2016, everything I predicted has come to pass and we are now in an even more perilous situation. Russia has been ramping up its so-called “snap” exercises with up to 40,000 troops at a time, suddenly and without prior warning, practicing the overthrow and occupation of the Baltic States. American naval ships have been buzzed at low level by Russian fighters in the Baltic Sea and there has been a massive buildup of Russian military force in the vicinity of the Baltic States with three Motor Rifle divisions (around 60,000 personnel) since January 2016. In the words of Dmitri Trenin of the Carnegie Moscow Center, the Kremlin has been in a state of war with the West since 2014. While not yet in the Baltic chicken coop, the wolf is prowling around the still very flimsy fence. We are, de facto, in a new, and much more dangerous, form of Cold War.