Category Archives: foreign policy

Don’t Offend Russia?

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Heaven forfend.  Or at least that was Michael O’Hanlon’s (Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution) concern when he proposed An Alternative to NATO Expansion That Won’t Antagonize Russia.  Never mind that what’s in American national interest is what matters, not that subset of it that won’t upset an enemy of ours.

[T]hese two countries [Ukraine and NATO], as well as other Eastern European neutral states, get no protection from NATO.

I’ll leave aside the value of NATO protection as that organization is currently constituted, funded, and armed; that’s a separate discussion.  No, the nub of O’Hanlon’s misunderstanding is this:

They are also too close to Russia for NATO to protect them, absent the deployment of a large and permanent forward defense.

He wrote that as though he thought forward deployment would be a bad thing.  In some respects it would be, but not for the reason he thinks.  Forward deployment of lots of heavy units would be foolish; such units would simply be targets in the event of a Russian decision to invade (aside from the fact that, with modern weapons and Russia’s forward deployment of nuclear weapons in Kaliningrad and its deployment of nuclear cruise missiles in western Russia, such units would be targets anywhere they’re stationed).  On the other hand, forward deployment of smaller, but still combat capable, units would send a very clear message that any Russian invasion would be an invasion of much more than just the nominally target nation.

On top of that, they most assuredly are not “too close to Russia.”  They merely abut Russia.  Russia is too close to eastern European nations by O’Hanlon’s logic.  Then he suggested this in all seriousness:

It is time that Western nations seek to negotiate a new security architecture for neutral countries in Eastern Europe today. The core concept would be permanent neutrality, at least in terms of formal membership in treaty-based mutual-defense organizations. The countries in question collectively make a broken-up arc from Europe’s far north to its south—Finland and Sweden; Ukraine, Moldova and Belarus; Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan; Cyprus plus Serbia, and possibly other Balkan states. …

The new security architecture would require that Russia, like NATO, commit to uphold the security of Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova and other states in the region. Russia would have to withdraw its troops from those countries in a verifiable manner

It is, indeed, time for a new security architecture, but O’Hanlon’s idea is little different from unspoken surrender born of false premises.  Permanent neutrality?  Russia won’t allow it; it never has.  Russia commit to uphold another nation’s security?  It’s already partitioned Georgia and occupied parts of it, and it’s dividing up Moldava, working as it is to carve off Transnistria.  It’s partitioned and occupied parts of Ukraine, explicitly crapping on the Budapest Memorandum in the process.

O’Hanlon can’t be that ignorant.

This isn’t naïveté.  This is idiocy.  I repeat: what’s in American national interest is what matters, not that subset of it that won’t upset an enemy of ours.  The same holds for Europe, as well, most especially those nations of eastern Europe, under the Russian gun as they so plainly are.

Part of the Problem with Claims of NATO Obsolescence

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…is the Left’s and Europe’s lack of understanding of the meaning and the import of obsolescence.  This is illustrated by a piece in World Politics Review.

The failure to understand is illustrated with this claim:

[A]lthough Russia’s resurgence as a revanchist and norms-breaking power has conveniently thrust NATO back into the thick of European and American security concerns, Europe actually faces no threats for which the alliance is the most effective instrument. In fact, Europe faces no military territorial threats at all.

Never mind that Russia militarily partitioned and is occupying significant fractions of Georgia and Ukraine, has moved nuclear weapons into its enclave in Kaliningrad, as mounted cyber attacks on each of the Baltic States and its subsequent redeployments of military units closer to the borders with Poland and those same Baltics.

The failure is further illustrated with this:

…Russia’s resurgence, and Moscow’s clear willingness to use military force to further its political objectives, do not represent an existential threat to Europe….

How illogical is that?  How head-in-the-sand?  If Moscow is willing to use military force to further its political objectives, on what planet is that not an existential threat to the nations of Europe?

Then there’s this:

[L]ike his attacks against China for currency manipulation, Trump’s criticisms of the disproportionate cost borne by the US for European defense are slightly outdated. Although the trend has been reversed since the Ukraine crisis, the past decade actually saw a steady drawdown of American forces stationed in Europe under the George W Bush and Obama administrations, which left the US military presence on the continent at historic lows.

This is just disingenuous.  We still bear a disproportionate cost for the defense of Europe: we still spend more than the 2% of our GDP on defense that the NATO treaty requires every treaty member to commit to defense.  Most of the NATO nations—notably including rich and prosperous Germany—still commit less than the 2% they promised to commit when they joined NATO.

Even this bit is disingenuous:

The metric Trump uses to measure proportionate contributions to the NATO—total defense expenditures, which puts the U.S. at roughly 75 percent of alliance spending—is also misleading, since the vast majority of America’s defense budget is not devoted to European defense. If you look at contributions to the alliance’s permanent budget, for instance, the U.S. pays 22 percent, compared to 14 percent for Germany and 12 percent for France. But Germany’s GDP is roughly one-fifth of America’s, and its population is one-fourth; France’s GDP is roughly one-seventh of America’s, and its population is one-fifth.

The US has permanent global commitments, and NATO does not.  NATO has traveled all the way to the Balkans and made trips as far as Afghanistan, but these are temporary sojourns, and so the relative costs for Europe are quite trivial and irrelevant to the question of proportionate contributions to European defense.

Beyond that, there’s very little in the piece that addresses the question of NATO obsolescence.  Beyond this bit of vapidity, that is:

NATO is no longer as necessary as it once was. But there are many reasons why both sides of the Atlantic should want to maintain it.

NATO is obsolete because it’s designed to resist a Soviet-style massive ground and air invasion backed by the threat of nuclear weapons employment.  It’s not at all prepared to resist, much less defeat, today’s threat: terrorist attack, whether isolated incidents or well-coordinate, broad spectrum attacks; military attacks in small bites, like today’s Russia inflicted on Georgia and Ukraine while Europe watched with its collective thumb in its collective mouth; the new combined arms attack represented by military assault accompanied by cyber assault and infiltration by little green men, Russia’s hybrid war; economic threats like withholding Russian sales of oil and natural gas to western Europe.

This isn’t a time to bleat about Europe is too spending comparably with the US or to pretend confusion over President Donald Trump’s remarks vs those of his Vice President and his Cabinet Secretaries; this is a time for NATO’s European nations to get serious about their commitment, and it’s a time to revamp NATO—with those increased monies—to deal with today’s and tomorrow’s threats, not simply to rest on yesterday’s laurels.

A Sense of Self-Importance

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That’s the sense of the European Union as it desperately seeks validation from the US for its existence—as if, as The Wall Street Journal put it, an American Administration is responsible for the EU’s fate.  Here’s European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker:

I do think the United States needs a strong, united European Union on all possible issues.

We’d certainly benefit from a united front on the continent on matters relating, for instance, to Russia.  But this doesn’t need an EU; it simply needs a common understanding by the continental nations of the threat posed by Russia.

Such a united front, also, isn’t likely in the form of an EU, as fractured and divided as that institution is on matters of border sanctity, immigration, national debts and who’s responsible for their repayment, taxing régimes, trade with nations outside the EU’s nominal boundaries, membership and desirability of membership, and on and on.

The EU’s overblown sense of its own importance is a sign of its entirely justified insecurity.

They’re Already Paying

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Hundreds of people in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez gathered on the edge of the Rio Grande River on Friday to form a “human wall” to protest US President Donald Trump’s plans for a wall between the countries.

Thanks for the assist, Protestors.  As we both know, the wall is necessary—metaphorically if not literally—in order to control our borders, regardless of who pays for it.  Just be sure, guys, that you leave openings in it for easy, legal border crossing, just as we intend to do.

Who Works for Whom?

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John Curtice, writing in The Guardian, in the land where John Locke was borne, seems confused on the question.  His proximate piece is his missive on the nature of referenda in Great Britain.  He began that piece with a false premise of very large proportion, and that—as false premises are wont to do—set the tone for the rest of his op-ed.

In the Commons debates on Brexit during the last fortnight, many MPs have found themselves voting for something they do not believe in. Instead of being their constituents’ “representative”, they now appear to be no more than the people’s “delegate”.

Yet, what else can a representative of constituents be but their delegate?  Unless Curtice means an MP must be the front for their constituents—to “represent” by doing in Parliament what he deems best for them regardless of what they might think is best for themselves.

The thing went downhill from there; he identified four aspects of the referendum on Great Britain’s choice to go out from the EU or to remain within its confines that he considered “cause for concern.”

First, the promise to hold one [the Brexit referendum] was only made because David Cameron found it politically convenient to do so.

Because that motive somehow invalidates the concept of the British people having a voice.  Sure.

Second, the campaign period was relatively short. Only five months….

Because a mere commoner is just too ignorant or stupid to understand a simple question like “Do you want to stay in the EU or go out from it?” unless their betters, their…MPs…and the Curtices of the nation complexify the thing and then “explain” it to them.

Third, unlike most previous referendums, voters were being invited to endorse the status quo rather than a proposal for change.

Yeah, that’s a confusing change-up.  Uh, huh.  Oh, and no plan for going out were that choice voted up despite the confusion?  That’s part of the Betters’ effort at complexifying.  The question was go or stay, not what to do if the choice selected were go or stay.

And this:

Fourth, though often forgotten, the EU vote was the second referendum bite at the European cherry. The issue had supposedly been settled by the referendum Harold Wilson called in 1975.

Because once taken, a decision can never be changed.  The grandchildren must never be allowed to change from their grandparents’ path.  Well, I suppose that’d be one way to decomplexify the thing.

…it is time to lay down some systematic rules about when a referendum should be held – and should not.

How else to have the commoners’ Betters keep control of the outcome, after all?

Not allowing referendums to take place when there is no detailed proposal for the change in question might be a good place to start.

Who gets to decide the adequacy of the “detailed proposal?”  Who gets to demand that there be voice of the people, no referendum, until a satisfactory “detailed proposal” is sufficiently in place?  And sufficiently debated (by whom)?

You know who.  Because the people exist just to give the Betters in Government something to do.