Tag Archives: foreign policy

Should NATO Cooperate with Russia?

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Can it, even? NATO’s new head, Secretary-General, Jens Stoltenberg, thinks so. After all, “Russia [is] NATO’s biggest neighbor and both [are] here to stay.”

Sure. Enemies must cooperate, because they’re both big. Makes sense. Yeah.

“We simply can’t ignore each other. One way or another, we will have a relationship. The question is what kind of relationship,” he said.

NATO continues to aspire to a cooperative relationship with Russia but to get there Russia would need to want it and to take clear steps to make it possible.

Well, he’s half right: we can’t ignore each other. But Russia’s view of “cooperation” has been clear. It invaded and partitioned Georgia, with one effect being the prevention of that nation from joining NATO as it had wanted to do. It invaded and is busily partitioning Ukraine for the explicitly stated purpose of keeping it from aligning with western Europe, much less joining NATO, a move Ukraine had indicated it was interested in exploring. It has threatened Poland with nuclear attack if it accepted basing American missile shield facilities on its soil. It has moved troops close to the Baltic States and pursued cyberwar against them.

Yeah, we need to cooperate with this enemy. Or NATO needs a new politician to head it up who understands the situation.

Is the Distinction Important?

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The Wall Street Journal ran an article by Danny Yadron and Siobhan Gorman earlier in the week that talked about the penetration by Russian hackers of Federal government computers and those of companies doing business with the government. It’s an important article, and I recommend you read it all, but I want to focus on a couple of statements made in it that go to the heart of why we’re having so much trouble dealing with our enemies.

The statements are these:

A US official said differentiating between Russian criminal hackers and government hackers is difficult because the government uses cybersurveillance tools created by criminal groups and criminals use tools developed by the government.

And

“It [the recent hacking of JP Morgan Chase & Co] looks to be criminal and of Russian origin,” the US official said. But when it comes to gauging whether that criminal element is working with the government, “you’re back into that gray area. You really can’t tell.”

Russia is a totalitarian state, for all that it has “elections.” All the modern, cool totalitarian states do this anymore. As such a regime, the “criminal” hackers are limited in doing what they do without the Russian government’s active condoning of that behavior. This is further substantiated by the ubiquitousness of the free exchange of tools between these hackers and their government.

Whether any particular hack job is done by hackers or by formal agents of the Russian government, both are working for the benefit of Russia and for (not only to) the detriment of us.

Misunderstandings like these, of the fundamental character of certain of our enemies, are at the heart of why we’re having so much trouble defending ourselves from them and ultimately of defeating them.

Trust

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I’m going to poke my nose into European affairs, again.

The backdrop is the French budget crisis. The backdrop to that is this. In one of the EU’s responses to their part in the global economic crisis of 2008-2009, the EU passed the Stability and Growth Pact, which authorized the European Commission, the executive body of the European Union (though the Commission has its own president, the body acts like a President-by-Committee) to require EU member nations to submit their national budgets to Commission approval. If the Commission disapproved the budget and the nation in question refused to make Commission-directed corrections, the Commission could levy very serious fines on that nation.

Among the rules of the Pact is that a national deficit cannot exceed 3% of its GDP: cuts to spending and/or increases in taxes could be required by the Commission to bring the nation’s deficit in line. Various smaller nations in the EU already have been subject to budget disapproval and Commission-required corrections or fines. Belgium, for instance, faced a fine of some €800 million in 2011 ($1,131 million dollars in 2011) until it made corrections. Greece and Italy also have been hit with Commission budget mandated corrections, and they have complied.

Enter France. French Prime Minister Manuel Valls has indicated flatly that France will not play by the EU rules to which it is signatory.

I will not permit people to discuss France in this context. France is a big country. We won’t [comply with Commission budget reform requirements].

The French Finance Minister has echoed his boss.

[W]e won’t cut more anywhere, and we also won’t raise taxes.

The Germans, though, despite being economically powerful enough—because it’s still economically sound—to get France to comply, is apparently too timid to do so. Chancellor Angela Merkel has dragged out an old chestnut of hers: “contractual agreements.” These are

written agreements between the European Commission and a Eurozone country that commit that member state to undertake specific savings measures or clearly delineated structural reforms. Under the original plan, the country could then obtain financial aid from a special fund in return. For France, the reward would be a further suspension of the deficit rules.

However. With France saying it’s going to welsh on one contract that it’s signed—that Stability and Growth Pact—how could it be trusted to honor another contract it might sign, a “contractual agreement?”

Manfred Weber, who leads the European People’s Party (think of them as all of Europe’s various Christian Democrats) in European Parliament emphasized the problem.

Europe is at a crossroads. The European Commission’s credibility is at stake with its review of the French and also the Italian budgets. France’s budget has to be rejected. President Hollande needs to make improvements.

There are two questions here. Is the EU’s word worth anything? Can they be trusted to carry out their own mandates? That question won’t be answered until the end of the month, when the Commission will attempt to give its final answer regarding the French budget.

The other question is whether the French word has any value, whether it’s possible to rely on any contract France or a French entity might sign. That question seems clearly answered.

Evil Foreigners

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That’s the claim of Hong Kong’s Chief Executive, Leung Chun-ying, regarding the current protests against Beijing’s usurpation of Hong Kong’s right to elect their own Chief Executive from a ballot of their own choosing. All of the kerfuffle is coming at the instigation of Evil Foreigners. Carefully unnamed ones, too.

Because it couldn’t possibly be the result of misbehavior (or simple error) by the government of the People’s Republic of China. It couldn’t possibly be that the PRC government has lost the consent of the people of Hong Kong to govern them (if that government ever had that consent).

Sure. That’s his story, and he’s sticking to it.

Russian Aggression

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…in eastern Ukraine, but not only there.

Russia plans to increase defense spending over 20 percent in 2015, with a lot of the additional money going to rebuilding Soviet era facilities in the newly acquired Crimea. This includes radar stations and naval facilities.

Naturally, all of this will support Russia’s continued occupation of partitioned Georgia, and it will facilitate Russia’s pending aggression against the Odessa Oblast of western Ukraine on the Sea of Azov, which stands between the Sea and Moldova, another Russian target as it seeks to restore the Soviet empire. It also eases Russian support for Vladimir Putin’s ally and BFF, Bashar al Assad in Syria.

Here, too:

…there’s plenty of Russian misbehavior against other neighbors as well. Finland reports that Russian aircraft increasingly test Finnish air defenses and twice recently Russian warships have threatened a Finnish research vessel operating in international waters in the Baltic. The Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) are receiving similar harassment, as well as Russian offers of a large discount on what they pay for Russian natural gas if they will leave NATO.