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I agree with that, is there a contradiction here?
It's neither fear mongering nor a self fulfilling prophecy if you're simply stating facts. It's not the Danish PMs fault, that Russia mistakes itself for some kind of empire
"I think we are in the most difficult and dangerous situation since the second world war." is, by her own wording, decidedly not a fact. It's pointless hyperbole and headline-hunting that compromises (arguably deliberately so) the reader's perception of the world. A world that does not make rational decisions but decisions solely based on its perception of itself.
And it was her active decision to make that statement.
Sorry, did I miss the war the UdSSR forced on us in between 1944 and its end? Or Russia until 2014? When was the last time a European country was invaded by a foreign nuclear power? Or the last time a NATO member had their air space repeatedly violated by armed planes and drones?
I'm either misunderstanding you or the Danish PM. So I suppose, even though that would be her job, convince me: Why would the ongoing impotent flailing and blustering of an economically severely strained aggressor and their continued reasonable hybrid effort against your/my/one's nation be "more dangerous" 2025 than in 2022, 2023 or 2024 and thus warrant a policy change compared to those years? Policy changes that, mind you, wouldn't even more than tangentially affect nations that are currently facing actual attacks.
Because this 'flailing and blustering of an economically severely strained aggressor' is now turned against us and reaching a level where NATO member have been forced into opening fire already.
Given the situation a statement like the "most dangerous situation since WW2" stops being fear-mongering, but starts being at least somewhat reasonable.
As for acting accordingly deterrence is a key part of that. Russia is going to see a lot of those actions as escalation. They certainly cried about every bit of aid send to Ukraine as being escalation. Putin and Trump certainly think somewhat alike. So being prepared against Putin is also going to help against Trump. The problem with that is that a war not waged due to heavy military spending, makes the military spending look stupid. The issue here is that we do not know how much was actually needed.
That is the nature of a security dilemma. Riling up the general population to facilitate arms races is not a way out of it, is it?
It is not. Russia is at war and has a war economy already. It can not have an arms race as well. The potential problem is that Russia might win the war against Ukraine and then use its military to fight the EU or that they believe they would lose due to EU support of Ukraine and therefore come to the conclusion that stopping that support could be achieved by attacking the EU.
The way out of it is to send a lot of arms to Ukraine, while having a strong enough force in the EU to make sure that Russia does not do anything stupid.
As for Trump that might happen, but the EU only needs enough to defend itself. So no carriers or large navy needed.
So we should talk about the situation but we cannot state the severeness of the situation?
Is there any point in "stating" severeness of the situation, if you cannot measure it?
There's no scale here, Frederiksen didn't sit down to develop some metric for situation severeness and then came to the conclusion "Oh, this rates at 1.2 Cuban Missile crises, better give the alarm", she just blurted out a soundbite.
I'm sorry, but what?
Not everything worth discussing is easily measurable.
If I were to say that U.S. democracy is deteriorating rapidly and hasn't been in this sort of danger in decades, would you say I'm recklessly fear-mongering since it cannot be measured in a floating-point value with a rigorous, well-defined unit of measure?
You're being needlessly contrarian and reductionist.