Instead of answering force with force, Germany’s leader responded to Russia’s attack with meetings and words. “We very much want the six-point plan to be implemented very promptly so that Russian troops are no longer in Georgia, outside Abkhazia and South Ossetia,” Chancellor Angela Merkel announced after meeting the Russian president.

All well and good. But that’s not what the Russians want, and they’re the ones driving tanks and holding guns.

The West is going to learn a difficult lesson in the years ahead: People with hard power don’t respect soft power.

Russia, because it has plenty of oil and thus plenty of money, has rekindled its hard power. China, because it doesn’t have any oil but wants to make sure it’ll always have access to it, is also building hard power.

The U.S. stands almost alone as a hard power Western nation. Britain has some, Spain some, Italy some, Germany some, but not enough and not always the political will to use it.

Western Europe, meanwhile, likes to think it has plenty of soft power. But in fact it really doesn’t even have that. Almost a third percent of Europe’s oil comes from Russia. Germany gets about a third of its natural gas from Russia. France gets about 20 percent. If Russia decides to shut off its energy exports Western Europe’s economy could quickly grind to a halt. The consumer has become the hostage.

Soft power is a smokescreen that countries with no power deploy. Russia’s military has created a gentle breeze that’s blowing the smokescreen away. It’s not too late for America’s NATO allies to wake up and rearm. But they need to wake up and move quickly.