Interesting to note that despite the usual windy speeches, the UK continues to CUT defense spending in real terms and now no longer has any meaningful military capacity. Likewise Macron may make windy speeches and a few empty gestures (a tiny number of aircraft and SPAs) but he's on his way out an Le Pen owes her political life to Putin's generosity in paying for her Party for so many years. The reality is that democracy has resulted in catastrophe (predictably....) and we've come to the end of the road. We had 80 years of peace in the West after WWII - the longest period of unbroken peace in western Europe since the fall of the Roman Empire - and now we've thrown it all away because we let morons stand for election and we let morons vote. As Plato noted more than 2,400 years ago, democracy always ends in tyranny.