Ronald:
Actually I would say the best thing the west could do is nothing.
Wrong, RR, and not even a nice try. Best thing the West can do is feed arms to the Poles, and let the Poles feed Ukraine. :-) (And the Hungarians, if they feel up to it).
ORAC: I looked up the XX blog. Interesting gent.
I think he's mostly right on "two core reasons for Western collapse of will before Putin’s decidedly modest aggression in Ukraine."
The first is that Western and Central Europe have so substantially disarmed since the end of the Cold War. Hardly any European NATO countries spend the “required” two percent of GDP on defense, and no amount of American scolding about it seems to make any difference.
1. A fifty to sixty year old story that goes back as far as the Eisenhower administration and the beginnings of NATO.
2. Western and Central European nations are again showing that they have no stomach for war. When an adversary know you have no stomach for a fight, he'll bully you. Is this all an elaborate head fake, or is this lack of spine for real? If we play "follow the money" then the chances that it is a head fake look pretty slim.
3. Look at how fast "the West" ran short of ammo in Libya. Hmmm.
But the moral collapse of Europe is even worse than the military collapse. All the armaments in the world do no good when the will to use them is absent. Since the Cold War’s end, Western Europeans have convinced themselves of many things that simply are not true. Their optimistic worldview, which really is the highest form of the WEIRD Weltanschauung, abandoned any notion that monsters might still exist, and many Europeans, including most of their leaders, seem unable to accept the new reality that Vladimir Putin has forced upon them. Yet denying that Russia aims to change the European order, and will use force to do so, will not stop Kremlin misdeeds, actually it will only encourage more Russian
aggression.
While this has some merit, I think that the Euro group are weighting their main effort with their economic weapon, as economics will always underwrite capability.