Meanwhile, the one man doubtless rubbing his hands together in glee at this turmoil has been the Russian president sitting in his office in the Kremlin. Britain, once Europe’s premier military power, seemed set on a course of moral and physical disarmament. As a young KGB officer in East Germany during the Cold War, Putin recalled the respect in which Britain, under its “Iron Lady” prime minister, was held by Russia for its bold recapture of the Falkland Islands in 1982. Britain had said they would do what seemed near impossible and had gone ahead and done it. That combination of a show of arms and quiet but grim political resolve had given Britain huge political capital. Clearly that stubborn resolve, so respected and admired across the world, had evaporated. Britain was now becoming little different from any other semi-pacifist, European social democracy; more interested in protecting welfare and benefits than maintaining adequate defenses.

If Britain’s enemies concluded that it was fast losing the will to fight for what it believed in, much of Europe never had the will to start with. Moreover, the US was now looking to the threats and opportunities of the East, instead of the old world of the West.

This is the story of how the West failed to heed the warning signals from Russia, unwittingly emboldened its president, and, through a succession of disastrous policy decisions, blundered over the edge of the precipice to war.

“So what?” you may say. Of course, it will be grim for the people of the Baltic States and Poland, “faraway countries of which we know little”—to paraphrase the UK’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in 1938 when shying away from facing up to Nazi aggression towards those countries. But will it really affect us in the US and Western Europe if NATO is rendered impotent and we are unable to protect the Baltic States and Poland from Russia?

The answer to that is a resounding, “Yes.”

First, the most terrifying scenario is that, without strong conventional deterrence—tanks, planes, artillery, ships, and boots on the ground—the only remaining line of defense for a NATO facing imminent military defeat is nuclear weapons.

The growing weakness of the West’s conventional forces means that the only way Russia can be deterred or defeated is by the threat or use of nuclear weapons. However, the consequence of the release of intercontinental ballistic missiles on Russia would be Armageddon; a result so terrible that the Russian president will calculate that the US, UK (despite the strong statement of intent from UK’s new Prime Minister Theresa May that she would have no hesitation ordering the use of nuclear weapons), and France—the only nuclear-armed states of NATO—would never risk the near total destruction of human civilization in the US and Europe for the sake of three small Baltic states.

And he is probably right. Which is why he would get away with it.