Germany actively explores new international policy options in the face of Trump's erratic foreign policy

Other nations around the world are obviously faced with making significant adjustments in their foreign policy in response to the new orientations and the high level of uncertainty in the Trump Administration's foreign policy.

Christoph Schult writes about German moves in "Allianz der Gleichgesinnten," Der Spiegel 28.07.2018. He takes as a starting point a meeting that German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas (SPD) had with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe. Haas, writes Schult, proposed to Abe:

... stellt Maas dem japanischen Regierungschef seine Idee eines neuen Staatenbundnisses vor. Sie konnte das weltpolitische Vakuum fallen, das Trump hinterlässt. In den kommenden Monaten soll ein Netzwerk global orientierter Staaten geknüpft werden, das sich in der Außen-, Handels- und Klimapolitik eng abstimmt. »Wir brauchen eine Allianz der Multilateralisten«, sagt Maas, ein Bündnis also, das für jene globalen Regeln und Strukturen der Nachkriegsordnung eintritt, die Trump ablehnt. >»Der Klügere gibt nach< ware in diesen Zeiten die falsche Maxime«, sagt Maas.

{ ... his idea of a new alliances of states. It could fill the political vacuum that Trump has left. In coming months, a network of globally oriented countries that agree with each other in foreign, trade, and climate politicies will be liked together. "We need an alliance of mulitilateralists," say Maas. Meaning an alliance that will engage for the global rules and structures of the postwar [post Second World War] order that Trump rejects. "'The cleverer give in', would be the wrong maxim in these times," says Maas.}

Trump's recent statements represented a turning point, in Schult's reporting:

Spätestens seitdem der US-Präsident den Nato-Partnern beim Brüsseler Gipfel mit dem Rückzug aus der westlichen Verteidigungsallianz gedroht und wenige Tage später die EU als »Gegner« bezeichnet hat, hat sich in Berlin, Brüssel und Paris die Hoffnung zerschlagen, dass Allianzen Trump überhaupt etwas bedeuten. Die USA hatten sich vom »Ordnungsgeber« zum »Ordnungszerstorer« gewandelt, heißt es in der Bundesregierung.

{At least since the US President threatened the NATO partners at the Brussels summit that he would withdraw from the Western defence alliance and a few days later described the EU as an "enemy," hope has been destroyed in Berlin, Brussels, and Paris that alliances mean anything at all to Trump. The US has changed from being a "provider of order" to a "destroyer of order," say people in the German government.} [my emphasis]

This article reads very much like a trial balloon floated intentionally by government officials, not so much like actual investigative reporting. That's how the press works. But it's another public indication that EU and NATO governments are moving to protect themselves from Trump's European policy, which - intentionally or not - is very much in line with the efforts of Vladimir Putin's Russia to undermine both NATO and the EU.

Schult's piece mentions several countries that the German government considers possibly important partners in this effort: Canada, Mexico, France, South Africa, Australia, and Argentina. It's strikes me that Canada and Mexico have a strong national interest in taking some part in this effort. Martin Hesse writes elsewhere in the same Spiegel ("America first, Dollar second") notes that Trump's currency policy (or just blundering actions) could destablize the world financial system. So countries all over the world have reason to be carefully considering options.

Also in the same issue, Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen gives a suggestion that a sort of stalling for time is also part of the Merkel government's perspective:

Diese Fixierung begleitet ihn ja schon über Jahrzehnte. Lange bevor er Präsident war, hat er bereits über deutsche Autos und deutsche Exporte gesprochen. Seine oft abfällige Art gegenüber Deutschland ist aber alles andere als typisch amerikanisch. Ich war bei meiner letzten US-Reise im Abgeordnetenhaus und im Senat und habe erfahren, mit welcher Leidenschaft sich die Amerikaner über Parteigrenzen hinweg zur Nato bekennen und wie sehr ihnen an der deutschamerikanischen Freundschaft liegt, die für viele nicht nur schone Erinnerung ist, sondern vor allem ein wichtiges Element der Zukunft unserer freien und toleranten Gesellschaften.

{This fixation [on Germany as an antogonist] is something that [Trump] has held for decades. Long before he was President, he had already spoke about German cars and German exports. But his often disparaging manner toward Germany is anything but typically American. On my last trip to the US, I was in the House of Representative and in the Senate and experienced with what passion the Americans across party lines recognized NATO and how much they valued the German-American friendship, which for many is not only a beautiful memory, but above all an important element of the future of our free and tolerant societies.}

She mentions that in those meeting with the Members of Congress, they made a point of recalling that Germany was the country that took the lead in formally invoking the NATO alliance over the 9/11 attacks and in support of the Afghanistan War.

She also has this to say about Russia's current position toward Europe:

Helsinki hat wieder gezeigt, dass Russlands Präsident Putin eine klare Strategie hat. Seine wirtschaftliche Schwache will er dadurch überspielen, dass er sich als globaler Player positioniert. Ein Mittel dafür ist auch, den Konsens der Atlantischen Demokratien, die Nato und die EU zu spalten. Eine klare Strategie des amerikanischen Präsidenten im Umgang mit Russland ist nach dem Treffen indes nicht zu erkennen.

{Helsinki [the Trump-Putin meeting] showed again that Russia's President Putin has a clear strategy. He wants to gloss over its economic weakness by positioning himself as a global player. One means for that is to try to split the consensus of the Atlantic democracies, the NATO and the EU. A clear strategy on the part of the American President in dealing with Russia, however, is still not apparent after the meeting.}

Von der Leyen also notes that Germany gets 9% of its energy from Russia. Considerably less than the 70% Trump claimed in one of his endless tweets.

NATO and the real interests of the US

All the talk about the 2% spending target for NATO countries, and now Trump's my-4%-is-bigger-than-your-2% nonsense, is beginning to get to me. Ewen MacAskill and Pippa Crerar report (Donald Trump tells Nato allies to spend 4% of GDP on defence Guardian 07/11/2018):

Trump left the assembled presidents and prime ministers [at the NATO summit] floundering, unsure whether he was serious about the 4% target, double the existing Nato target of 2%, which many do not meet, or whether it was just a ploy.

After making the announcement, Trump walked out.

The White House press secretary, Sarah Sanders, confirmed the 4% figure. “During the president’s remarks today at the Nato summit he suggested that countries not only meet their commitment of 2% of their GDP on defence spending, but that they increase it to 4%,” she said.

A percentage of GDP target for defense spending is an entirely arbitrary number. What counts is whether the defense budget is appropriate to a foreign policy that takes into account realistic security risks. And also how well the money is spent. A country with a smaller GDP like Greece - and one that has shrunk incredibly due to the EU's austerity policies - may need to spend more than 2%, but countries like Germany and France maybe less. Greece actually is spending more than 2% now.

Markus Becker in Gerade noch mal gut gegangen Spiegel Online 12.07.2018 gives the following percentages for the five NATO countries that currently spend more than 2% of GDP on defense:

Britain: 2.1%
Greece: 2.3%
Estonia: 2,1%
Latvia: 2.1%
United States: 3.5%

This is the total percentage for the US, not a percentage spent only on European defense.

Über-Realist Stephen Walt in The EU and NATO and Trump — Oh My! Foreign Policy 07/02/2018 refers to the painfully obvious point that "Trump’s evident distaste for these institutions [NATO AND G-7] mostly reveals his own ignorance and lack of strategic acumen." That's actually putting it generally.

Walt is actually being generous in putting it that way. A desire to join in Vladimir Putin's foreign policy - for whatever reasons - probably also plays a major role. Even though he likely doesn't really understand that either. Not that he would act differently if he did!

Walt gives his realist-theory view of US interests in Europe, which despite myself I have to admit is persuasive as far as it goes:

The U.S. interest in Europe is fairly straightforward. In addition to their mutually beneficial trade and investment relations, the United States has long sought to preserve an overall balance of power in Europe. ...

There is no potential hegemon in Europe today, however — neither Germany nor Russia has the population, economic strength, and military clout to take over the whole place — and thus there is no serious threat to the regional balance of power. Thus, the United States could (and should) reduce its military role and gradually turn European security back to the Europeans. [my emphasis]

And in line with that view, he thinks that it makes practical sense for the EU nations to maintain cohesion in the Union and take on a bigger role in continental defense. And, "Given that the United States still has an
interest in a tranquil Europe, a strong EU would be even more valuable if the U.S. security role in Europe were to decline."

But he doesn't think Trump is making any kind of realistic evaluation of US interests in his foreign policy: "The national interest is irrelevant; it’s the Nielsen ratings that count."

Transatlantic tensions

James Traub recently described a basic difference of perspective between the US and the EU countries when it comes to escalating confrontation with Iran (RIP the Trans-Atlantic Alliance, 1945-2018 Foreign Policy 05/11/2018):

As a simple matter of geographical proximity, Europe is threatened by conflict in the Middle East as the United States is not. The tidal wave of asylum-seekers from Syria in 2015 upended European politics and exposed a popular vein of xenophobia and illiberalism that has thrown a terrible scare into European elites. Europe simply cannot afford to follow the American lead if the United States is prepared to sow further chaos in the region.

He has a dramatically pessimistic diagnosis of the US-Europe relationship:

The Atlantic alliance, built to contain the Soviet Union in the aftermath of World War II, began to die when the Cold War ended. What kept it alive over the last three decades has been less strategic necessity than a convergence of values — the values of the liberal postwar order. Now, the senior partner of the alliance, the United States, has lost interest in those values. The alliance was already a corpse, but Donald Trump drove the last nail into its coffin when he decided this week to withdraw from the nuclear deal with Iran.

I wouldn't say that "the values of the liberal postwar order" loomed quite so large as that in the considerations on both continents. The US saw NATO also as way of amplifying its own standing and capability for power projection in the world. And as a way to enforce and enhance its dominance in the famous "unipolar moment." European allies, particularly those of the former Soviet bloc, wanted the continued protection of NATO in case Russian ambitions became threatening to them.

So the deterioration of liberal values in the US under the Trump Administration can scarcely be said to be the main reason for the current troubles in NATO right now. And Traub does discuss some of the conventional power-political considerations that affect the alliance.

Traub also uses the nails-on-the-blackboard characterization of Trump's foreign policy as a "Jacksonian moment," presumably on the mistaken notion that Jackson pursued an aggressive foreign policy as President.

But no breach of the NATO alliance itself is immediately in sight. One of the ways that could change would be if Trump's reckless Middle East policies wind up with a direct clash between US troops and those of our NATO ally Turkey.

Nationalism, xenophobia and the EU

Damir Marusic, the executive editor of The American Interest, has an essay in the journal called The Dangers of Democratic Determinism 02/05/2018, in which he addresses the current state of democracy in Europe in particular. He has a useful observation about the EU, which he reasonably describes as "a largely undemocratic bureaucracy that talks in the lofty language of a post-national political community grounded in a set of universal Enlightenment values."

As Tony Judt remarked, historians and statesmen have invoked several recurring themes in describing those years in Western Europe: “Europe’s recovery was a ‘miracle’. ‘Post-national’ Europe had learned the bitter lessons of recent history. An irenic, pacific continent had risen, ‘Phoenix-like’, from the ashes of its murderous — suicidal — past.” These themes constitute a hopeful and morally redemptive narrative, especially for West Europeans who in large numbers had acquiesced to German occupation and had collaborated with the Nazis right up until liberation. Judt notes that Hitler managed to administer Norway with only 806 German overseers, and that 35 million Frenchmen made little trouble for some 1,500 German officials and 6,000 German civilian and military police. It was humiliating on a grand scale, even before these nations began to grapple with their complicity in the Holocaust.

The way in which these stories were used is also significant. Judt pointed out that a kind of ahistorical determinism related to these redemptive myths was built over time into the project of European unification. To oversimplify a bit, a set of trade treaties had set up an increasingly complex bureaucracy that had started to encroach on national sovereignty. It needed legitimation to continue doing so. “[T]he real or apparent logic of mutual economic advantage not sufficing to account for the complexity of its formal arrangements, there has been invoked a sort of ontological ethic of political community,” Judt wrote. “Projected backward, the latter is then adduced to account for the gains made thus far and to justify further unificatory efforts.” [my emphasis]

This is a broad narrative, of course, with many variations. But such narratives are necessary and often constructive in a larger, normative sense. Every political community has to have them.

Each such narrative privileges some information and values over others, and some historical events over others. Which mean they can have the effect of hiding or distorting historical realities that don't fit in with the broad line of the narrative. In this case, one of the historical realities that the narrative obscures is that the United States put a great deal of pressure on western European nations, West Germany and France in particular, to make some concrete moves toward unification. But recognizing that aspect of the story does not have to diminish the very real accomplishments of European leaders and publics in achieving what they have in the European project.

Marusic also desribes the dominant narrative of the Cold War for the US this way: "the Soviet challenge was quickly understood in Manichean terms, with American foreign policy driven by a form of secularized Protestantism." A reasonable enough broad description, though clearly the intensity of that perception ebbed and flowed with time and events. And, "Where it could, it sought to impose a version of the American Creed onto the world it encountered."

He uses the term "democratic determinism" to cover both the optimistic EU narrative, the Cold War US narrative, and the Western narrative on the post-1989 transformations.

Since the number of countries in Europe falling into the first category increased after 1989, "After 1989 and the fall of global communism, this narrative became turbocharged - triumphalist and self-certain." Presumably here he means "global communism" to refer to the USSR and the allied eastern Communist countries, and Yugoslavia, as well.

It's when he comes to how he understands the dominant narrative in the post-1989 period in eastern Europe that I become more reserved about his framework. He is reacting to xenophobic nationalism as a growing political force, even a currently dominant one in Poland and Hungary. And he argues that in eastern Europe, liberal democratic institutions were always primarily understood as being for the benefit of the dominant ethnic group.

Here he is making a broad judgment based on the history of nationalism in that area. The Russian Empire was known as the "prison house" of nations because of the various kind of national groups contined with in it: Georgian, Kazakh, Uzbek, Ukrainians, Chechens, Poles, to name some of the examples more familiar to Americans. Jews were also a major ethnic/national/religious grouping in the Russian Empire which was often a party to disputes with other such groups, most notoriously in the infamous pogroms . of the late nineteenth century.

The Ottoman Empire was also a large collection of national groupings with Turks, Turkmens, Armenians, Greeks and others, with a variety of languages, religious affiliations and cultural traditions. The Greek revolt against Ottoman rule in the 1820s (???) generated considerable sympathy in the West. The British poet Lord Byron died in Greece fighting on the side of the Greek revolt. It was over the foreign policy position of the United States on the Greek revolt during the Monroe Administration that occasioned the often-quoted remark of Secretary of State John Quincy Adams that the US does not go abroad in search of monnsters to destroy. As the Ottoman Empire weakened in the latter half of the 19th century, Russia and the Habsburgs competed to snatch parts of the declining empire. And movements for national independence gave birth to the Balkans Wars of the early 1900s, a bloody preview of those in the last decade of last century.

The Habsburg Empire, whose last incarnation was the Austro-Hungarian Empire with a "dual monarchy" arrangement (Austrian and Hungarian). The Habsburgs were the dominant dynasty for centuries in the "Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation," which was declared dissolved in 1806 after Napolean's armies had effectively pummeled it. Winston Churchill's famously grumped that it had been neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. Whatever measurements Churchill was applying in that judgment, the Holy Roman Empire successfully adjusted to the new nation-state system set up by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Including Habsburg rulers of Spain that presided over the non-inconsiderable Spanish colonial possessions in the Americas.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire is sometimes cited as a precursor of the European Union as a functioning multicultural, multilingual political unit. And it did survie the end of the Holy Roman Empire by just over a century. But in many ways, it was dysfunctional, with chronic political conflicts and the 1848 upheavals. Frustrated democratic aspirations with intensely mixed with drives for national independence or greater rights for Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenians, Ruthenians, Galicians, Ukrainians (also), Poles (also), Hungarians, and even Austrian Germans, who were lumped in for years with others as part of Cisleithania, essentially the non-Hungarian part of the empire. And it also included a not-inconsiderable population of Jews.

All three of those empires were heavily involved in eastern Europe. The First World War emerged in signficant part from the competing interests of those three empires in the Balkans.

Marusic cites an essay by economist Branko Milanovic on the particular important of the desire for national independence by countries in the Soviet bloc in comparison to the desire for Western-style liberal democracy. I won't go into Milanovic's particular arguments here except to say that I'm not convinced that they are as heterodox as Marusic takes them to be.

Marusic goes farther, though:

The purpose of Milanovic’s essay is narrow: to show how dif??cult it will be to compel these recalcitrant countries to accept migrants anytime soon—maybe ever. But the essay’s deeper implications are striking, and help illuminate one of the blindspots plaguing democratic determinists. The discom??ting truth is that some amount of ethnic nationalism is not just tolerated, but accepted as completely legitimate by many voters throughout Eastern Europe.

Unlike Milanovic, a democratic determinist sees 1989 primarily as an ideological triumph, and understands the values that underpin it as universal and indivisible from the proper functioning of a modern state. If 1989 is thought of as a successful democratic revolution, then much of the politics of the past ten years in Eastern Europe can only be seen as backsliding. Someone like Viktor Orban, who has selfconsciously positioned himself as a kind of soft nationalist, is seen as inherently illegitimate — a symptom of political decay.

But insofar as Milanovic’s model is correct, an “Easterner” listens to the incessant complaining coming from democratic determinists in Brussels and bemusedly scratches his head. His legitimately elected leaders are merely protecting values dear to him and his country from a bunch of messianic foreigners preaching an idealistic universalism he’s never signed up for, and that he doubts exists. He just doesn’t see what the big deal is.

This sounds too much like resignation in the face of xenophobia for me to feel comfortable with this formulation. Extreme nationalism doesn't affect only internal politics. It encourages foreign aggression as well.

Also, EU countries including Hungary and Poland have serious international commitments to NATO and to the European Union. In both western and eastern Europe, leaders of EU countries have tended to treat the EU as a free-trade zone whose political commitments don't need to be taken especially seriously. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has taken a regrettable approach to the EU of using it to maximize short-term national advantages for German and for her own neoliberal doctrine of austerity, even in the face of the Great Recession.

The EU gives Europe its best chance of coping reasonably with immigration challenges that are not going away, though they will have more and less acute phases. And the current EU solutions which rely heavily on dumping the problems onto Turkey and Greece, and to a significant extent on Italy, have practical consequences and serious moral implications, too. And all EU countries are failing their commitments and responsibilities if they don't accept more refugees on a regular basis and reject xenophobic policies and actions.

Our current US President is certainly not going to let xenophobia in other countries deter him from taking whatever policy he finds most convenient for his family business. But a more sensible and pragmatic Administration - I hope we have one sooner than later - may want to undertake a very practical re-evaluation of NATO commitments. And part of that new look would surely include a review of relations with Turkey, both because of its authoritarian trend and its commitment to allies in the aftermath of the Syrian civil war who are on opposite sides of those backed by the US. But a realistic re-evaluation of NATO could also raise the question of whether we should have a major security alliance with countries that reject basic democratic values, human rights, and international law.

NATO expansion in the Balkans

A Politico EU article by Howard Amos suggests that Russia is pursuing a more active policy in the Balkans against further NATO expansion there. (Vladimir Putin’s man in the Balkans 06/21/17)

The article's narrative structure is a bit confusing. But it says that a hawkish adviser of Putin's, Nikolai Patrushev, has been given a more prominent role in Russian foreign policy for the Balkans. It cites Mark Galeotti of the Institute of International Relations, "Patrushev is definitely one of those people who think Russia is in an existential struggle for its survival. It’s a Cold-War, Manichean vision of the world. And one in which any reversals for the West are implicitly good for Russia."

And Amos reports:

In public statements, Patrushev has claimed the United States is striving to dismember the Russian state to “open up access to rich resources that they think Russia unfairly controls.” He has also criticized what he sees as increasingly aggressive behavior from NATO, claimed that European Union foreign policy is dictated from Washington and warned of the rise of Nazism in Eastern Europe. ...

Russia is particularly angry over the accession to NATO earlier this month of Montenegro, the small Adriatic country that accused Russian intelligence officers of masterminding an attempted coup in the country last year, apparently designed to derail its bid to join the alliance.

In the wake of allegations of Russian involvement in the murky coup plot, Patrushev rushed to Serbia to meet top government and security officials, in what many saw as a mission to smooth ruffled feathers. Media reports had suggested Belgrade had extradited several Russian nationals accused of masterminding the plot.

NATO expansion means increasing tensions with Russia, and has already encountered notable Russian pushback in Georgia and Ukraine. In strictly practical terms, whatever gains the NATO countries expect to obtain with further expansion, intensified Russian resistance is part of the cost.

Unilateral foreign and military policy in the Cheney-Bush Administration

A strong and militaristic trend toward unilateralism in American foreign and military policy didn't begin for the Republican Party with the nomination of Donald Trump for President in 2016.

I'm not trying to make a case for "normalizing" bad behavior by the Trump Family Business Administration. But I am pointing out how deeply rooted this set of bad ideas is within the Republican Party.

Philip Gordon's and Jeremy Shapiro's book Allies At War: America, Europe, and the Crisis Over Iraq (2004) had this to say about the Cheney-Bush Administration's general attitude post-9/11 about alliances and unilateral actions by the United States. This comes in a discussion of how the Administration shafted European and other allies over an environmental agreement by rejecting the Kyoto Protocol:

In retrospect, the manner in which the U.S. government withdrew from the process of international negotiation on global warming signaled more than just a repudiation of Kyoto. The harsh diplomatic style of the rejection contrasted sharply even with a similar rejection by the Reagan administration of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea in 1982, when that administration also decided to reject a treaty that its predecessors had supported. But unlike the Kyoto rejection, before doing so the Reagan administration sent a special envoy - ironically, Donald Rumsfeld - to consult with allied governments and convince them not to sign or ratify the treaty. While that position hardly endeared him to European publics, Reagan's willingness to conform to established practices of consultation meant that criticism focused on the U.S. objections to the treaty itself, rather than on its potential to cause a breakdown in the alliance. ...

Bush's efforts with the allies, however - as one senior administration official put it - could best be described as "multilateralism à la carte." He was willing to use multilateral forums when they presented the most convenient path to accomplishing some specific U.S. foreign policy goal. But much of the administration never seemed to believe that U.S. commitment to international institutions and allied relationships had a long-term value that justified U.S. engagement when unilateral action- or actions with the support of certain individual countries-would be more expedient in the short term. The sum total of Bush's actions in his administration's first two years sent the clear signal that this type of deeper commitment simply did not exist. [my emphasis]

Cheney and Bush also used rejection of an international environmental agreement to thumb their noses at the European allies.

Where Gordon and Shapiro could say of that Administration, "The sum total of Bush's actions in his administration's first two years sent the clear signal that this type of deeper commitment [to NATO allies] simply did not exist," the Trump Family Business Administration has managed to do that in less than half a year.

Speaking of which, Digby Parton may have come up with the definitive label for the Trump team: the Carnage Crew. (John Kelly the “grownup”? Forget it — Homeland Security chief turns out to be another Trump zealot Salon 06/12/2017)

The stakes for the US and Europe in NATO

The national security expert and adviser to Presidents Zbigniew Brzezinski, who passed away just recently, was a devout Cold Warrior. But he also tended toward a realist perspective. That manifested itself in the run-up to the Iraq War, when he made his opposition to invading Iraq very clear and public.

In an article from 2003, Hegemonic Quicksand The National Interest Winter 2003/04, he looked at the role of the European Union in US foreign policy in Eurasia and the Middle East, particularly the Islamist challenge in its various forms.

The current anti-Europe policy of the Trump Family Business Administration has given the US/European divisions over the Iraq War renewed immediate relevance. Brzezinski's article was written at that now-almost-forgotten moment after the ousting of Saddam Hussein's government when it still seemed possible that violence was quickly winding down in Iraq. War opponent Brzezinski even writes in this article, "The decisive military victories in the 1991 and the 2003 campaigns against Iraq firmly established the United States as the sole external arbiter in the area." It's jarring now to read material from later 2003 which refer to US victory in Iraq as an accomplished reality.

NATO has never been free of conflict among its various partners. At some times, that conflict has been significant. NATO formally began with the North Atlantic Treaty of 1949, constituted as a defensive alliance against the Soviet Union. For the first 52 years of its existence, until 1991, the Soviet Union also still existed. After the fall of the USSR, NATO became an alliance in search of a mission. Brzezinski's 2003 article focused on NATO as a force multiplier and essential partner for the United States. But partner for what?

At the beginning of the article, he forecasts, "For the next several decades, the most volatile and dangerous region of the world - with the explosive potential to plunge the world into chaos - will be the crucial swathe of Eurasia between Europe and the Far East." He describes that area as "the unstable region that currently extends from approximately the Suez Canal to Xinjiang, and from the Russo-Kazakh border to southern Afghanistan - almost like a triangle on the map. In the case of both areas, internal instability has served as a magnet for external major power intervention and rivalry." He also refers the triangle he describes as "the Global Balkans," a term that doesn't seem to have caught on.

And it's in managing the crises in that region in which he sees the mission of NATO consisting going forward from that point. He surveys other significant potential allies for that purpose, and explains why he sees them as less useful than NATO.

He writes that Israel and the United States have historically been close diplomatically and that it could "not only to be America's military base but also to make a significant contribution to any required U.S. military engagement." Israel does have the largest armed forces of any country in the region. And has nuclear weapons.

But, as he notes drily, "American and Israeli interests in the region are not entirely congruent." Brzezinski sees the US has having a strong long-term interest in decent relations with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), both of which Israel has no interest in strengthening. Although Israel can find common interest with the Kingdom and the UAE on issues like opposing the Alawite regime in Syria and regarding Iran as an adversary.

Brzezinski notes, though, that until there is a real settlement of the Palestinian issue, Israel's value as an active military ally to the US in the Middle East will be limited. Prospects for an Israel-Palestine peace agreement look considerably less optimistic in 2017 than they did in 2003.

He sees India's potential as a strategic ally limited by the intensification of both Hindu and Muslim sectarian politics. The increasing influence of Hindu nationalism in India since 2003 is part of this trend. He writes that "the more radical of the Hindu politicians tend to present" the "war on terrorism" as a war against Islam. This is problematic for reasons that should be obvious. But it does fit with the US Republican Party's understanding.

India also has long-standing tensions with its neighbors China and India. The conflict with Pakistan has the dispute over the Muslim-majority province of Kashmir, which is currently party of India at its center.

Brzezinski notes the trend, already strong in 2003, that "Russia has come to see its Muslim neighbors as the source of a potentially explosive political and demographic threat, and the Russian political elite are increasingly susceptible to anti-Islamic religious and racist appeals." Both of which are potentially factors that should theoretically facilitate an anti-Muslim-extremism alliance between the US and Russia. But Brzezinski also points to Russia's record in Afghanistan and Chechnya as a major factor in giving Muslim countries in the region a dim view of Russia. In addition, "the newly independent Central Asian states [which include many Muslims] increasingly define their modern history as a struggle for emancipation from Russian colonialism."

So Brzezinski saw the most promising ally of the US in promoting stability as being the nations of the European Union:

Only Europe, increasingly organized as the European Union and militarily integrated through NATO, has the potential capability in the political, military and economic realms to pursue jointly with America the task of engaging the various Eurasian peoples on a differentiated and flexible basis-in the promotion of regional stability and of progressively widening trans-Eurasian cooperation. And a supranational European Union linked to America would be less suspect in the region as a returning colonialist bent on consolidating or regaining its special economic interests.

And he states an essential condition for European-American cooperation:

European engagement will not occur, however, if it is expected to consist of simply following America's lead. The war on terrorism can be the opening wedge for engagement in the Global Balkans, bur it cannot be the definition of that engagement. This the Europeans, less traumatized by the September ll attacks, understand better than the Americans. It is also why any joint effort by the Atlantic community will have to be based on a broad strategic consensus regarding the longterm nature of the task at hand. [my emphasis]

The nuclear agreement with Iran is an example of what cooperation with the US and Russia can accomplish in that region. Brzezinski specifically cites the initiative taken by the EU at the time to get that process moving. It took over a decade to get it done. And it took a more cooperative arrangement between the US and Europe than the Cheney-Bush Administration practiced in 2003 and which the Trump Family Business Administration is clearly eager to jettison. Or, jettisoned: it may time to speak in the past tense about that.

But some of the issues on which he focuses are also reminders now of opportunities missed: promoting an Israel-Palestine peace agreement, stabilizing Iraq (a sadly forlorn hope in retrospect) and improving relations with Iran. The latter is something on which significant progress has been made. But Trump seems to be signaling - he sends so many confusing signals - that he's signing on to the Saudi and Israeli push for war with Iran. So it's not only on global climate change that the Trump Family Business Administration is veering away from common ground with the EU. "Active strategic partnership between the United States and the European Union would also make it more likely that Iran could eventually be transformed from a regional ogre into a regional stabilizer." But stabilization of Iran and the Middle East is the opposite of what Trump and his Defense Secretary "Mad Dog" Mattis want.

Brzezinski's article from 14 years ago is a reminder of the stakes involved in the US downgrading NATO and undermining partnership with the European allies. NATO since 1949 has been a power multiplier for the US and has generally supported US policy in the world. And, as Brzezinski points out, achieving a more stable and constructive situation in the "Global Balkans" triangle requires for now and the foreseeable future close cooperation between Europe and the US.

NATO survived the crisis provoked by the Iraq War, just as it survived the Suez Crisis of 1956 in the first decade of its existence. Part of the reason surely had to do with the Northern Atlantic economic crisis that started in 2007-8 and created serious problems for European unity, which obviously took a bit hit from the Brexit vote. The US and European partners also found a common interest in NATO Enlargement, as outlined on the official site (my emphasis in italics):

29 March 2004: Accession of Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia.

21 April 2005: Launch of the Intensified Dialogue on Ukraine’s aspirations to NATO membership and related reforms, at an informal meeting of foreign ministers in Vilnius, Lithuania.

21 September 2006: NATO foreign ministers in New York announce the decision to offer an Intensified Dialogue to Georgia.

28-29 November 2006: At the Riga Summit, Allied leaders state that invitations will be extended to MAP countries that fulfil [sic] certain conditions.

2-4 April 2008: At the Bucharest Summit, Allied leaders invite Albania and Croatia to start accession talks; assure the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia that it will be invited once a solution to the issue of the country’s name has been reached with Greece; invite Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro to start Intensified Dialogues; and agree that Georgia and Ukraine will become members in future.

9 July 2008[-] December 2008: Accession Protocols for Albania and Croatia are signed. Allied foreign ministers agree that Georgia should develop an Annual National Programme under the auspices of the NATO-Georgia Commission.

1 April 2009: Accession of Albania and Croatia.

4 December 2009: NATO foreign ministers invite Montenegro to join the MAP.

22 April 2010: NATO foreign ministers invite Bosnia and Herzegovina to join the MAP, authorising the North Atlantic Council to accept the country’s first Annual National Programme only when the immovable property issue has been resolved.

2 December 2015: NATO foreign ministers meeting in Brussels invite Montenegro to start accession talks to join the Alliance, while encouraging further progress on reforms, especially in the area of rule of law. In a statement on NATO’s “open door” policy, ministers reiterate decisions made at the 2008 Bucharest Summit concerning the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and encourage Bosnia and Herzegovina to undertake the reforms necessary for the country to realise its Euro-Atlantic aspirations and to activate its participation in MAP. Ministers also reiterate their decisions at Bucharest and subsequent decisions concerning Georgia, welcoming the progress the country has made in coming closer to the Alliance and expressing their determination to intensify support for Georgia.

19 May 2016: Allied ministers sign the Accession Protocol, following which Montenegro has ‘Invitee’ status and starts attending North Atlantic Council and other NATO meetings.

5 June 2017: Accession of Montenegro

Ironically, NATO's "out of area" interventions in the Balkans, Afghanistan and the Middle East, especially Libya, not only served as a common mission that also brought NATO back from the kind of internal strife the Iraq War produced in the alliance. But those actions also helped to tarnish the image of Europe in the crisis area Brzezinski called the Global Balkans.

Even more ironically, the enlargement of NATO membership has brought NATO's value for the Europeans back towards its original purpose. The eastward expansion of membership met with serious resistance from Russia with Georgia in 2008 and then Ukraine in 2014. It's safe to say that the aspirations for NATO membership of Georgia and Ukraine are effectively on indefinite hold. The 2004 expansion included not only more countries from the former Warsaw Pact, but also the three Baltic states Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Those three had previously been part of the Soviet Union itself, as had Georgia and Ukraine.

Foreign policy "realists," including the late George Kennan and Stephen Walt, warned that in the normal calculation of the Russian government, whether it was Putinist or liberal democratic or whatever else in its orientation, could be expected to treat the enlargement as a national security threat and start to push back against it. Remarkably, though, NATO leaders, including the Bush and Obama Administrations, seemed almost Pollyannish about that warning. In particular, adding Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania committed all other NATO countries to defend those countries in the case of any Russian aggression. But it has never been thought necessary to fortify those three countries as though a Russian invasion might be a likely event, much less an imminent one. And Western policymakers probably seriously underestimated what a dim view that Russian leaders took of NATO military intervention in the Balkans, especially in the Kosovo War.

And Russian strategists much surely be thinking out scenarios in which Russia seizes all or part of those three countries as a way to test the seriousness of NATO commitment to them. Are the US France, Britain, France and Germany prepared to go war with Russia over some occupied strips of land in the Baltic nations? What the Russians did in Georgia and Ukraine, which were aspiring NATO members but not yet part of the pact, were similar actions to that scenario.

Yet both Democrats and Republicans seemed to see NATO expansion as having political and military upsides with relatively small risks on the downside. Cold War triumphalism dulled the collective judgment of our policymakers in many ways.

In the 2002-3 crisis within NATO over Iraq, Russia was actually a political ally of the US in supporting the Iraq War. Vladimir Putin was already President of Russia. But Russia was cooperating with the on the war in Afghanistan, as well. (I've always wondered if there was an element of calculation there in which the Russians thought, yeah, let's allow the United States to learn what an intervention in Afghanistan can be like.) There was still serious tensions over issues like installation of "missile defense" in eastern Europe.

But there was no serious split between the US and the European allies over the need for solidarity in the face Russian aggression directly against NATO members. That was probably in significant part because the prospect of that kind of Russian military aggression wasn't considered a serious possibility.

After the Georgia crisis of 2008 and the Ukraine crisis, the latter including Russia's incorporating the Crimea as its own territory, have shifted those perceptions and calculations in significant ways. Now European leaders have to take into account that the Trump Family Business Administration with its dubious entanglements with Russian interests and its seeming hostility to European unity may not be as committed to supporting NATO allies against Russian pressure. And that's going to affect their willingness to cooperate with the US on "out of area" military and political actions.

This post is part of my efforts to understand the direction that US-European relations in the Trump Era. There are a lot of what-ifs that are difficult to ignore in thinking about NATO. In practical terms, trying to preserve NATO after the fall of the USSR and looking for a new mission for it was probably inevitable. But in retrospect, I have big doubts about the Kosovo War, which I supported at the time. And I think the NATO enlargement was probably not a good idea. Incorporating the Baltic countries directly into NATO and inviting Georgia and Ukraine to eventually join were mistakes, done with far too little realistic consideration of the consequences.

But kicking out the Baltics, for example, would be a dramatically different thing than not incorporating them in the first place. If the US government wants to drastically redefine its relationships to Russia and to oppose rather than support European unity, to do that while minimizing the downsize risks would be a very difficult political and diplomatic task. The Trump Family Business Administration is clearly not capable of pulling off something that complicated while minimizing dangerous disruptions. I'm particularly interested in how the European allies will attempt to minimize risk and damage to themselves while the current US administration attempts to do such a thing. And to do it in what would surely be a blundering way.

NATO in a new light in the Trump Era

Der Spiegel's most recent cover story about Trump's anti-European position on the Paris Accord on global warming is available in English, and it's quite an interesting one: Donald Trump's Triumph of Stupidity 06/02/2017.

This was the cover for the German version of the story:

There are a number of passages in the article that helps put the current state of relations between the EU and the United Statesss. Like these:

Merkel's verdict following Trump's visit to Europe could hardly be worse. There has never been an open break with America since the end of World War II; the alienation between Germany and the U.S. has never been so large as it is today. When Merkel's predecessor, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, refused to provide German backing for George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq, his rebuff was limited to just one single issue. It was an extreme test of the trans-Atlantic relationship, to be sure, but in contrast to today, it was not a quarrel that called into question commonly held values like free trade, minority rights, press freedoms, the rule of law -- and climate policies. ...

Merkel, who grew up in the Soviet sphere of influence, never had much understanding for the anti-Americanism often found in western Germany. U.S. dependability is partly to thank for Eastern Europe's post-1989 freedom.

Merkel has shown a surprising amount of passion for the trans-Atlantic relationship over the years. She came perilously close to openly supporting the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and enjoyed a personal friendship with George W. Bush, despite the fact that most Germans had little sympathy for the U.S. president. Later, Merkel's response to the NSA's surveillance of her mobile phone was largely stoic and she also didn't react when Trump called her refugee policies "insane."

As such, Merkel's comments last Sunday about her loss of trust in America were eye-opening. It was a completely new tone and Merkel knew that it would generate attention. Indeed, that's what she wanted. ...

In the past, it had always been the British and the Eastern Europeans who stood in the way of the joint efforts promoted by Germany and France -- for the most part out of fear that an internal European competitor to NATO could result. But Britain's decision to leave the EU also means that it will no longer be able to block such efforts. The Eastern Europeans, meanwhile, who see themselves as being on the front against Russia, have lost faith in Trump's pledges to the alliance. [my emphasis]

This is a good reminder that the rift between the US and leading NATO allies like Germany and France over the Iraq War was dramatic and serious.

The current tensions in the NATO alliance continue that earlier confrontation in some important ways. Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer was an especially popular spokesperson for neoconservative advocates of war with Iraq. In the light of objections to preventive war in Iraq from NATO allies Germany and France, Krauthammer mocked NATO as essentially militarily useless to the United States (U.S. power rises as NATO fades into irrelevance Chicago Tribune/Washington Post wire 05/27/2017 05/27/2002)

NATO may still have a role in peacekeeping (especially in Europe's own Balkan backyard) but not in war-making. As a serious military alliance it is finished. But there is no need for a funeral. NATO can be usefully re-imagined. Its new role should be to serve as incubator for Russia's integration into Europe and the West.

It is precisely because NATO has turned from a military alliance into a trans-Atlantic club of advanced democracies that it can now safely invite Russia in--and why Russia has so reconciled itself to NATO. Russia recognizes NATO's shift from a military to a political organization. That is why it has so muted its objection to NATO's expansion into the former Soviet republics of the Baltic states.

That idea used to make the Russians apoplectic. But with NATO a hollow shell, they are relaxed about having us in, and we are relaxed about having them in. The unprecedented place at the NATO table recently offered Russia by the Bush administration is the correct next step in NATO's transformation. Join the club.

NATO is dead. Welcome, Russia, to the new NATO. [my emphasis]

Chris Patten, then the EU Commissioner for External Relations, reacted publicly to George W. Bush's use of the phrase "axis of evil" including Iraq in his 2002 State of the Union Address, a speech which seemed to signal a determination to go to war with Iraq (Jonathan Freedland, Patten lays into Bush's America The Guardian 02/08/2002):

Chris Patten, the EU commissioner in charge of Europe's international relations, has launched a scathing attack on American foreign policy - accusing the Bush administration of a dangerously "absolutist and simplistic" stance towards the rest of the world.

As EU officials warned of a rift opening up between Europe and the US wider than at any time for half a century, Mr Patten tells the Guardian it is time European governments spoke up and stopped Washington before it goes into "unilateralist overdrive".

"Gulliver can't go it alone, and I don't think it's helpful if we regard ourselves as so Lilliputian that we can't speak up and say it," he says in today's interview.

Those were the days when the national press was treating Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld like a rock star. Remember this? Defence Secy comments on Europe, France, Germany AP 07/30/2015:

Rummy didn't have no use for "Old Europe" (Outrage at 'old Europe' remarks BBC News 01/23/2003):

"Germany has been a problem and France has been a problem," Mr Rumsfeld told Washington's foreign press corps on Wednesday.

"But you look at vast numbers of other countries in Europe, they're not with France and Germany... they're with the US.

"You're thinking of Europe as Germany and France. I don't," he said. "I think that's old Europe."

On Thursday, the French and German leaders reiterated their opposition to war as they continued celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Elysee Treaty between their two countries.

"We are both of the opinion... that one can never accept it when it is said that war is unavoidable," [SPD German] Chancellor [Gerhard] Schroeder said in an address to hundreds of French and German students in Berlin attended by Mr Chirac.

"War may never be considered unavoidable."

A spokeswoman for Mr [conservative French President Jacques] Chirac called for calm in the dispute.

Joachim Fritz-Vannahme discussed how Rummy and the Cheney-Bush Administration differentiated between Old and New Europe in that context (“Falke, Hahn, Taube. Washingtons Schmähung trifft die Europäer im Augenblick der größten Uneinigkeit” Die Zeit 6 Feb 2003; translation by Allison Brown at GHDI, accessed 06/08/2017):

How quickly a banality can turn into an insult! Donald Rumsfeld’s apt expression “New Europe,” meaning a Europe whose focus is shifting from Western to Central Europe, already enjoyed great popularity as a key geostrategic term years ago. This was especially true in Paris, the stronghold of “Old Europe,” where, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, many worried about the role they would play.

Rumsfeld’s invective hit Europeans at the moment of their greatest discord. The common foreign policy that they so readily invoke still remains a Cloud Cuckoo Land where everyone can build his or her own nest, whether he be a British hawk, a German dove, or a French rooster. This could be seen on Monday, when the EU foreign ministers were able to muster only a minimum of unity at their meeting in Brussels. The inspectors,* they demanded, should be given more time. But not even behind closed doors did they discuss what would happen when time ran out, or how Great Britain, France, Spain, and Germany – the four EU members on the UN Security Council – would vote: individually or (as virtually no one in Brussels believes) in concert for Europe?

Everything seems crystal clear from Rumsfeld’s perspective. His reference to Old Europe is an attack on the insubordinate German-French entente. Spain, Portugal, and Italy, on the other hand, are being entered on the map of well-behaved New Europe by the Pentagon surveyor.

What that translated into is that a few long-time NATO members with conservative governments, along with "Bush's Poodle" Tony Blair of British New Labour, wanted to kiss up to the Cheney-Bush Administration over invading Iraq.

But Rummy was also favoring newer NATO members who also wanted to do so. Fritz-Vannahme quotes Le Monde from that time, "A large internal market with the protection of NATO. That is the image of the EU that people have in Prague, Warsaw, or, say, Budapest. That is opportune for the United States, since that's its idea of Europe as well."

That last point is important. The United States historically favored European unity, which now takes the form of the European Union. But the US has also favored a broader but relatively weak EU, one that in particular would not be able to unite around a common foreign policy or form a significant central EU military force of its own. So under the three previous administrations, the US encouraged the US to expand EU membership to former Warsaw Pact countries sooner rather than later. On the one hand, this provided EU aid for their development. But it also expanded the number of countries that had to be brought into unison for major decisions in the EU, thus making the prospects for greater unity dimmer and more distant.

Something similar was taking place in NATO, an alliance that in reality has always been under American direction despite considerable time and effort placed on consultation. The alliance undertook and enlargement of its membership after the fall of the Berlin Wall. German unification added the former East Germany to NATO. The NATO website conveniently provides this historical sketch (Enlargement 06/07/2017):

Based on the findings of the Study on Enlargement, the Alliance invited the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland to begin accession talks at the Alliance’s Madrid Summit in 1997. These three countries became the first former members of the Warsaw Pact to join NATO in 1999.

At the 1999 Washington Summit, the Membership Action Plan was launched to help other aspirant countries prepare for possible membership.

Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia were invited to begin accession talks at the Alliance’s Prague Summit in 2002 and joined NATO in 2004. All seven countries had participated in the MAP.

NATO's website says of the process, "The new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe were eager to guarantee their freedom by becoming integrated into Euro-Atlantic institutions."

The Cheney-Bush Administration used the desire of those Central and Eastern European countries to be part of NATO, in significant part out of continuing fear of future Russian aggression, as a way to exert counterbalancing influence to German and French dissent within the alliance. And those new members were particularly interested in having American guarantees against outside aggression.

What the Spiegel article cited at the start of this post brings out significantly changes that situation. "The Eastern Europeans, meanwhile, who see themselves as being on the front against Russia, have lost faith in Trump's pledges to the alliance." (my emphasis)

Britain is now leaving the EU, as well. Britain has what is fondly called the "special relationship" with the United States, which means that since the Suez Crisis of 1956, British policymakers have tried to avoid being in opposition to the US on any major foreign policy issue, though they tended not to be thrilled by the US war in Vietnam. But this gave the US a major way to influence decisions of the EU, since Britain was more likely to side with the US on major issues than France or Germany, which was also the case with the invasion of Iraq.

Now Britain is out of the EU. And the Eastern European countries will have to look more to their European partners now for assurances of assistance against military threats from Russia. Which has become more urgent over the last 15 years as Russia has pushed back hard in Georgia and Ukraine against the prospects of those countries aligning more formally with the EU and NATO.

This creates a significantly new situation, in which the EU countries are now likely to perceive much greater urgency in cooperation with each other. Including in opposition to policies from Washington that they find undesirable.

And the EU's principal leader, Angela Merkel, isn't feeling inclined to make things easier for Washington this time around. On the contrary, she's rallying other European countries to create a major effective counterbalance to US power.

Trump abroad

"[Trump's] genius was to promote his clownishness, so that the headlines fed to the New York Post consisting of makebelieve quotes from his then mistress Marla Maples (‘Best Sex I’ve Ever Had’) became a PR platform for the licensing of his celebrated name to murky investors from Russia, China and Saudi Arabia who were looking for an American frontman." - Sidney Blumenthal, A Short History of the Trump Family London Review of Books 02/16/2017

The outline of a Trump foreign policy is coming into shape, for better or worse. He's talking up a friendlier policy with Russia. He got along well with his Saudi friends on this current trip, promising them massive arms sales to encourage them to escalate armed conflict in the Middle East, and signing up for their Sunni front against Iran and the Shi'a. He's been backing off his campaign threats against China.

He's not being so friendly to the formal allies of the United States in Europe. Maybe if Angela Merkel had kicked in another $100 million to Ivanka's foundation like their Saudi friends did, this week's meetings in Europe might have gone more smoothly.

It seems that Trump is pushing forward with the goal of weakening the EU and NATO, a goal he shares with the Russian government of Vladimir Putin. As Josh Marshall writes, "Trump’s comments clearly envision a transformed and debilitated NATO, one that is one half protection racket, one half high-dollar membership golf resort. You pay your dues or you’re out. It’s a service, not a commitment." (The Fix Is In; Nato Is Out TPM 05/25/2017)

And he recalls:

... the line the Trump braintrust was pushing last December and January, which was that they intended to pursue a plan of breaking up the EU, using a newly Brexited UK as their tool to tear it apart. This was clearly back in a period of maximal Trumpite triumphalism, when they fantasize about rolling the whole world before their ‘revolution.’

Times change; reality intrudes; compromised advisors are tossed aside.

But this cluster of signs and provocations suggests strongly that we are still in the same place, still in a position where the President of the United States is actively seeking to undermine NATO and – through different modalities and for slightly different reasons – the EU as well.

But that's not the same as saying he understands what he is doing, beyond the needs of the Trump Family Business. (And given his record in business, it's not obvious how well he understands the latter!) For instance, as Daniel Gross explains in Trump Reportedly Wants to Stop Germans From Selling So Many Cars Here, Where They’re Made Slate 05/25/2017:

Donald Trump had some tough words for the Germans at the NATO summit in Belgium on Thursday. “The Germans are bad, very bad,” he reportedly told Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Union. “Look at the millions of cars that they’re selling in the USA. Horrible. We’re gonna stop that.”

It is certainly true that Germany runs a big trade surplus with the world and with the United States. (Last year, the U.S. trade deficit with Germany was nearly $65 billion.) But Trump can’t stop the German cars from coming in to the U.S. because, to a large degree, they’re already here. See, it turns out that many “foreign” cars are actually made in the U.S. while many “American” cars are made in Canada and Mexico. That’s how globalization works today.

Some antiwar advocates are looking at the Trump Administration still for hopeful signs of less interventionist inclinations. And we may see some actions by Trump that actually are conducive to a more peaceful world. As Trump's current Secretary of Energy Rick Perry famously said of Trump, even a stopped clock is right once a day. (More literally: Rick Perry: ‘A Broken Clock Is Right Once A Day’ TPM 09/03/2015)

Nat Perry offers a version of this in Dems Still Blaming Others for Trump Consortium News 05/08/2017:

In discussing Trump’s approach to Syria, Clinton said she supported the recent U.S. missile strike targeting a Syrian airfield, but nevertheless complained that it was too limited in scope and perhaps may have even been coordinated with Russia in order to keep East-West tensions under control.

“I am not convinced that it really made much of a difference, and I don’t know what kind of potentially backroom deals were made with the Russians,” Clinton told Amanpour. “There’s a lot that we don’t really yet fully know about what was part of that strike. And if after all it was a one-off effort, it’s not going to have much of an effect.”

In other words, Trump erred not by firing 59 cruise missiles against Syria, which violated international law and resulted in numerous civilian casualties, but by limiting the scope of this attack. The clear implication is that if Clinton were president, it would not have been “a one-off effort,” and probably would not have been done in consultation with Russia.

Instead, Clinton would likely be making U.S. intervention in Syria a centerpiece of her foreign policy, and would show little concern over how this might spiral out of control in terms of ratcheting up tensions – or all-out military confrontation – with nuclear-armed Russia.

This is an important point. But it's also notable that he's criticizing Clinton for supporting something that Trump has done.

And however desirable big shifts in policy may be, like a less confrontational posture toward Russia, or some large change in NATO, are also difficult to pull off. And Donald Trump and his foreign policy team has yet to show they can do far less difficult things right.

As Paul Pillar writes of the Trump-Saudi anti-Iran stance, "Coming to believe one’s own rhetoric is a common fault. To the extent that the Trump administration starts making policy based on the belief that Iran really is the root of all security problems in the Middle East, the result will be policy that is misinformed and thus misdirected and ineffective." (Costs of the Clenched Fist The National Interest 05/24/2017) And the same is likely to be true in Trump's foreign policy across the board.

Russia, Ukraine and parsing politicians' positions on foreign affairs

Wolfgang Münchau's Eurointelligence (How to think about Russia 03/10/2017) links to a nearly three-year-old article by Karl-Heinz Kamp at the Carnegie Europe center, Bad Idea, Vladimir! 04/04/2014, that looks at the standoff between Russia and NATO over Ukraine and Russia's annexation of the Crimea that year. He argues that from the Russian viewpoint, re-annexing the Crimea (which was part of Russia from 1783 until 1954), may have taken on more of a burden than a blessing:

In the context of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s goal to reestablish at least parts of Russia’s bygone empire, the annexation of Crimea looks like a smart move. Yet so far, the cost-benefit analysis of this illegal step seems to leave Russia in the red.

Before the Anschluss, Moscow controlled the whole of Ukraine through the compliant regime of former president Viktor Yanukovych. In the future, Russia will be able to sway only parts of a country that is on a slippery slope toward disintegration. Unwittingly, Putin added another source of instability to his already shaky Russian empire.

The downsides, of course, have a lot to do with the reaction of NATO countries. Kamp describes the lines of confrontation:

However, what looks like a negative cost-benefit analysis for Russia raises concerns in many NATO member states. Since Putin appears too smart to strike a bad deal, it is fair to assume that Moscow assesses costs and benefits differently from the West. If that is the case, Russia might be ready to take even bigger risks than just occupying Crimea to score points at home. The long-standing axiom that Russia would never dare commit an act of aggression against a NATO member because the repercussions would be too dangerous for Moscow could prove hollow.

Baltic governments anxiously ponder the scenario of Russia stirring up unrest among ethnic Russians in their countries to have a pretense to “protect” its citizens abroad. For instance, how would NATO react if Russian forces occupied a 30-mile-wide strip of Estonian border territory as a “safe haven” for ethnic Russians and provided them with Russian passports? Would it send in the NATO Response Force and start a major war over 30 miles of land? Doing nothing would mean the end of NATO as a functioning alliance. [my emphasis]

This is a real dilemma, even if our neocons and "humanitarian hawks" see it as an opportunity, adding the Baltic states to the NATO alliance in 2004 was a reckless move. Or at minimum, not well considered.

Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia were also added to the alliance in 2004. Albania and Croatia followed in 2009. But unlike former Warsaw Pact members Albania, Bulgaria and Romania, the Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were directly incorporated into the old Soviet Union. It's not hard to understand that, whatever the moral or legal claims may be, the closer NATO's borders get to the border of Russia, the more concerned any Russian policymaker would be about it.

The post-World War II Western decisions about policy toward Russia are still debated today in the historical sub-field of Cold War Studies. The post-1989 Western policies toward Russia will no doubt be debated for a long time, as well. But in 2017, we are where we are.

Kamp links to a Reuters report from 2014 that discusses the position of three former German Chancellors on Russia and the Ukraine/Crimea crisis (Erik Kirschbaum, Putin's apologist? Germany's Schroeder says they're just friends 03/27/2014):

[Gerhard] Schroeder is hardly alone with his criticism of the West. Two other former chancellors, Helmut Schmidt and Helmut Kohl, have also questioned the treatment of Putin and Russia.

Schmidt, a Social Democrat like Schroeder, has called sanctions against Russia "dumb", saying in the latest edition of Die Zeit: "It would be better, in the interest of peace, to sit down and talk instead of threatening sanctions."

Kohl, a Christian Democrat (CDU) like Merkel, told Bild newspaper in mid-March: "The upheaval in Ukraine was not handled intelligently. There's also been a lack of sensitivity with our Russian neighbours, especially with President Putin."

Schröder does have an obvious financial interest in defending Russian foreign policy positions. But that doesn't necessarily mean his advice is bad on the topic. Especially since two other former Chancellors were expressing similar concerns in 2014. It's worth noting that Schröder's Foreign Minister, former Green leader Joschka Fischer, also worked for Russian energy interests after he left office. But he was far more critical of the Russians' actions in Ukraine in 2014. In fact, he leans toward the hawkish side on NATO affairs in general. (See: Ralf Neukirch,
The Eternal Rivalry of Joschka Fischer and Gerhard Schröder Spiegel International 02/15/2010)

The following also notable, in light of current news in the US. A green Member of Parliament is quoting as calling the former Chancellor as basically a Russian stooge:

"Schroeder is spreading the Kremlin's propaganda and everyone should understand that he's now a paid spokesman for Russia," said Manuel Sarrazin, who sits on the European affairs committee of the German parliament for the opposition Greens.

"He's in the service of Russia with a big conflict of interest," Sarrazin told Reuters.

Kirschbaum's report also refers to a TV report, "An ARD TV investigation, called 'The dubious activities of the ex-chancellor on Putin's behalf', said Schroeder took part in a secret meeting at the Russian embassy in Berlin on March 4, three days after Putin announced his right to invade Ukraine."

It's worth mentioning here that Chancellor Willy Brandt had to resign in 1974 after it was discovered that one of his closest staff, Günter Guillaume, was exposed as an East German spy. But he really was a spy. It wasn't a matter of him having some undisclosed meeting with an East German diplomat during a political campaign.

My point here is that we need to take conflicts of interest into account in the position officials or major public figures take on foreign policy. For instance, our ExxonMobil Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, was previously the CEO of a company that once had a deal for $500 billion worth of business with Russia, a deal that was put on indefinite hold by the Obama Administration's sanctions on Russia over Crimea. It would be foolish to disregard that aspect of his experience.

But having political positions that match up to those of a foreign government or political group isn't a sign of corruption or treason. Though either could lead to that result. Foreign policy is largely about deciding which countries to favor and which to oppose. And on which issues.

And Germany has its own particular national interests with Russia: "Berlin's economic links with Moscow are much stronger than those of other big Western powers. Germany is the biggest buyer of Russian natural gas exports, and its government has tended to tread more carefully than the United States, Britain or France."

Does the NATO Treaty require the US to go to war?

This pair of commentaries highlight the question of whether the United States is obligated to go to war if a NATO member is somehow attacked:

• Ilya Somin, Using Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty to legalize the war against ISIS Washington Post 11/15/2015
• Julian Ku, Should the U.S. Even Bother to Invoke Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty After Paris? Opinio Juris 11/16/2015

One of more reckless bipartisan foreign policy assumptions of the last quarter-century was the eastern expansion of NATO, done without much thought of the risks and potential disadvantages.

Russia has been pushing back over the last eight years in Georgia and Ukraine, the latter in significant part a response to questionable "regime change" manuevers by the US and NATO there.

So if some Trump-type government takes over in, say, Estonia, and decides to stage some military provocation against Russia, does that mean the United States is obliged to restage Napolean's march on Moscow?

Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty says:

The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.

Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security. [my emphasis]

But Article 11 (mistakenly referred to as Article IX in the Ko column) also says, "This Treaty shall be ratified and its provisions carried out by the Parties in accordance with their respective constitutional processes." (my emphasis)

Ko plausibly reads this as meaning that the NATO Treaty does not in any way override the US Constitutional provisions on war powers. Not that Congress has been much of a restraint on Presidential warmaking since, well, decades and decades.

But the obligation to go to war under the NATO Treaty is not automatic. Given the current contortions of NATO policy in the Middle East, Turkey's current differences with NATO members since the coup attempt of July 15, and various kinds of mischief-making around Ukraine and the Baltic states, this is probably something worth remembering.

NATO's Warsaw summit

Unlimited private money in politics is a definite threat to democracy. So are war and militarism. And it's a shame that the ongoing assumptions of American foreign policy aren't more of a normal focus in our politics these days.

Patrick Lawrence writes about the posture that NATO leaders struck in their recent meeting in Warsaw, Poland: The West escalates with Russia: Make no mistake, a second Cold War is now official NATO policy Salon 07/12/2016:

One, the U.S., Britain, Germany and Canada will each station a rotating battalion in a front-line state. These are respectively Poland, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia. Two, after many years of heated debate, nuclear weapons are to remain part of the NATO arsenal in Europe. Three, the alliance officially assumed command of an anti-missile defense system that, as of now, has components in Spain, Turkey and Romania.

There is no mistaking the magnitude of these decisions when taken together. I liken Warsaw last week to Washington in the spring of 1947, when Truman’s advisers and Senate allies determined it was time to sell the public a permanent wartime economy and a national security state. What followed was his “scare hell out of the American people” speech, so named by Arthur Vandenberg, a Republican senator from Michigan and one of Truman’s intimates. What followed that was $400 million in aid to the fascist Greek monarchy, and what followed that was the first Cold War.

Reality No. 1: The West is now to have troops closer to Russia than ever before in history. Reality No. 2: Russia has signaled no intention whatsoever of doing anything more than defending its borders, rock-candy mountains of unsupported nonsense in the press notwithstanding. Reality No. 3: The only reason these soldiers will rotate is because NATO agreed with Russia in 1997 not to station troops permanently east of Germany. These deployments are a disgraceful fiddle, thus. Reality No. 4: NATO officers continue to insist that missile defenses are intended to counter Iranian missiles. It now takes very big brass to trot this one out: Given last year’s nuclear accord, the standing explanation no longer passes even as a fig leaf.

A White House Fact Sheet of July 8 reported what the summit would do:

Specifically, allied leaders will take decisions to enhance collective defense by enhancing NATO’s forward presence on the eastern flank through the deployment of one rotational battalion each in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland, as well as developing a tailored forward presence in Romania and Bulgaria. In addition, NATO will further develop the Alliance’s ballistic missile defense capabilities, and ensure its nuclear deterrent remains credible, safe, secure, and effective. Allies will also take steps to build resilience against non-traditional challenges such as hybrid tactics, cyber vulnerabilities, and terrorist threats as essential components of credible deterrence and defense. Each of these efforts supports the explicit commitments allies have to one another in Articles 3 and 5 of the Washington Treaty regarding our individual and collective capacity to resist armed attack, the indivisibility of our security, and our mutual responsibility to contribute to collective defense.

Together, these measures represent the largest reinforcement of NATO’s collective defence and deterrence since the end of the Cold War. NATO does not seek confrontation, but will defend all allies against any threat. Everything NATO does is defensive, proportionate, and in line with each ally’s international commitments. Our deterrence and defense aims not to provoke a conflict, but to prevent one.

Allies will also decide at the summit to expand the Alliance’s efforts to project stability beyond NATO’s borders. All NATO allies are members of the U.S.-led Global Coalition to Counter ISIL (C-ISIL), and the Alliance will take additional steps at the summit to bolster C-ISIL efforts, including through direct NATO support to the C-ISIL coalition as well as through enhanced training of the Iraqi Security Forces. In the Aegean Sea, NATO is already providing capabilities to support EU and national efforts to address the refugee and migrant crisis in Europe, and will seek to decide to further enhance our maritime security cooperation with the European Union to help address the security challenges in the Central Mediterranean Sea. NATO is also focusing and intensifying its defense capacity building and other areas of security cooperation with regional partners, such as Iraq, Jordan, Tunisia, Morocco, and Mauritania to address the root causes of instability. [my emphasis]

That's quite a euphemism; Instead of projeting force, NATO will "project stability."

Albrecht Müller offers his own antiwar perspective in Ein Rückblick auf die perfekte Propaganda im Umfeld des NATO-Gipfels. Daran kann man die Methoden der Manipulation bestens studieren. Nachdenkseiten 12.07.2016.

Paul Jay of The Real News has an interview here with leftist Russian professor Alexandr Buzgalin on relations between Russia and the West, Why is the Capitalist West Fighting with Capitalist Russia? 07/13/2016:

Robert Parry's Consortiumm News has also been raising concerns about NATO current posture, such as:

Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, Merkel Urged to Temper NATO’s Belligerence 07/06/2016

John Walsh, NATO Marches Toward Destruction 07/08/2016

Medea Benjamin and Alice Slater, Challenging the New Cold War 07/09/2016

Natylie Baldwin, Russia Pushes Back on NATO Expansion 07/09/2016

Graham Fuller, Europe’s NATO Ambivalence 07/10/2016

Ivan Eland, NATO as an ‘Entangling Alliance’ 07/11/2016

Rick Sterling, Western Propaganda for a New Cold War 07/14/2016

Graham Fuller makes a key point:

The peaceful collapse of the Soviet Bloc in 1991 also posed a difficult question: what would be the rationale for NATO’s continued existence? All organizations seek to perpetuate their own existence and NATO became almost desperate for a new mission — a new enemy. Washington was loath to yield up its key instrument of control in European politics.

But how much do European geopolitical goals mesh with American ones? This too depends on one’s geopolitical vision of the world. For Europe, war among its members is virtually unthinkable. But Washington and NATO have a vested interest in maintaining a Russian threat as the centerpiece of E.U. geopolitics.

Today the U.S., including virtually all of its mainstream media, adopt reflexive anti-Russian positions. In U.S.-sponsored parlance, Russian President Vladimir Putin now represents a “resurgent threat.” Indeed, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs incredibly informs Congress that Russia represents America’s number one existential threat. Aggressive NATO maneuvers at the very doorstep of Russia help make this a self-fulfilling prophesy.

The political trend that self-identifies as "paleo-conservative" is also critical of NATO policy. Their criticism comes from an isolationist/nationalist viewpoint, although they can make some valid points on occasion. As Rick Perry said in his most memorable pronouncement, even a stopped clock is right once a day.

The American Conservative is generally in the paleo-conservative category, but not all their contributors are. Andrew Bacevich sometimes appears there, for instance. Philip Giraldi of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (and a signer of the article from them cited above) writes on the Russia issue in Russian Harassment and Other Fables The American Conservative 07/13/2016. And he makes this sensible observation:

One thinks of Russia less frequently when U.S. policy failures are examined. In 1991, Russia was a superpower. Today it is a convenience, a straw man fortuitously produced whenever someone in power wants to justify weapons expenditures or the initiation of new military interventions in faraway places. Much of the negative interaction between Washington and Moscow is driven by the consensus among policymakers, the Western media, and the inside-the-beltway crowd that Russia is again—or perhaps is still and always will be—the enemy du jour. But frequently forgotten or ignored is the fact that Moscow, even in its much-reduced state, continues to control the only military resource on the planet that can destroy the United States, suggesting caution should be in order when one goes about goading the bear.

Bonnie Kristian, who identifies as a libertarian, also writes for that same publication, Is the Pentagon Hyping the Russia Threat? 06/20/2016. She picks up on this earlier article by Mark Perry, which focuses on inter-service rivalry in the military as an important factor in how the supposed Russian threat is perceived: The U.S. Army’s War Over Russia Politico 05/12/2016.

NATO and the Ukraine crisis

Stephen Walt looks at the recent past of NATO in NATO Owes Putin a Big Thank-You Foreign Policy 09/04/2014, reminding me in the process that I wasn't so totally off-base in thinking there was a good chance the crisis over the Iraq War in 2002-3 would finish off the alliance.

His immediate point is that the Ukrainian crisis gives NATO a new mission to justify its existence:

Undertaken, like the old British Empire, in a "fit of absentmindedness," NATO expansion [after the fall of the USSR] rested on the assumption that these various guarantees would never need to be honored. It was not until the brief Russo-Georgian war of 2008 that a few Washingtonians (and a larger number of Europeans) begin to recognize that these commitments might actually involve some cost and risk. But by then it was too late, because any challenge in Eastern Europe would be seen as a test of U.S. credibility and NATO's resolve. Needless to say, this is precisely how most people -- including President Barack Obama, who has called the Ukraine crisis a "moment of testing" -- are now interpreting the tussle over Ukraine. [my emphasis]

Walt finds his "realist" assumptions surprised by the survival of NATO post-Cold War:

Until the Ukraine crisis arose, NATO looked like a nearly extinct dodo that had somehow managed to last into the 21st century.

NATO's survival after the Cold War remains something of an anomaly. Alliances normally arise in response to threats, and many previous alliances collapsed quickly once the external danger was gone. Mindful of this tendency, NATO's proponents have been searching for a convincing rationale for its continued existence ever since the Berlin Wall fell. But their efforts have been mostly stillborn; despite annual summits, earnest communiqués, and a lot of brave rhetoric, the alliance's capabilities, importance, and coherence have been visibly declining for two decades. [my emphasis]

Walt is not impressed with NATO's major military undertakings of the last two decades: "The Bosnian intervention in 1995 and the war in Kosovo in 1999 were at best partial successes; they took longer, cost more, and produced more ambiguous results than NATO's defenders like to admit. NATO's efforts in Afghanistan have been mostly a failure, and no member of the alliance wants to do anything like that again." (my emphasis)

Walt also reminds us that the expansion of NATO to the former Soviet bloc countries was a high-risk undertaking, though the American public and political elite didn't generally perceive it that way:

But as George Kennan, Michael Mandelbaum, and other experts warned in the 1990s, NATO expansion turned out to be a fundamental strategic misstep. It alienated Russia without making NATO stronger; on the contrary, expansion involved extending security guarantees to mostly weak countries that would be the hardest to defend should Russian power ever recover.

Melvin Goodman recalls Kennan's cautions on NATO expansion in The Flaw in ‘Cornering’ Russia Consortium News 03/10/2014:

In expanding NATO, the United States has been guilty of betraying a guarantee that Secretary of State James Baker gave to Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze in 1990, when the United States stated that it would not “leapfrog” over East Germany to place U.S. military forces in East Europe in the wake of the Soviet military withdrawal from Germany. ...

President Clinton seemingly had no appreciation of the great difficulty involved in Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s acceptance of the unification of Germany and German membership in NATO in view of Russian historical memories and huge World War II losses. One of the few sources of Soviet pride in foreign policy was the Soviet defeat of the German Wehrmacht, which was the key to the U.S. and British victory on the Western front. Three-fourths of the German Army fought on the Eastern front, and three-fourths of German losses took place on the Eastern front.

U.S. diplomats and academics, particularly those with expertise in European policy and the Soviet Union such as George Kennan, made a valiant effort to convince President Clinton that the expansion of NATO was bad strategic policy. Even members of the administration, including Secretary of Defense William Perry, tried to dissuade the President from his strategic blunder. In using military power against Serbia in the late 1990s, Clinton seemed to have no idea of the long historical ties between Russia and Serbia. [my emphasis]

The Cheney-Bush Administration also contributed "to the alienation of the new Russian leadership by sponsoring NATO membership for former Soviet Republics (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania); abrogating the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which was the cornerstone of strategic deterrence; and deploying a national missile defense system in California and Alaska," Goodman writes.

One of the continuing disputes over the origins of the Cold War was the extent to which the Soviet Union was reacting to a perception of Western encirclement after the Second World War. This discussion has echoes of that dispute.

But even assuming abundant bad will on both sides during the early years of the Cold War, the post-Cold War situation of Russia was blatantly different than that of the Post-World War II USSR. The USSR was left after the Second World War in practical military control of most of eastern Europe: Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Georgia, Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and eastern Germany. After the Cold War, it was the US and NATO that expanded their anti-Russian military alliance to most of those countries.

In any pragmatic view, including the Realist foreign policy theory of which Walt is a leading practitioner, that expansion would have produced a defensive response from Russia sooner or later. We may even be surprised the Russian pushback took as long as it did. The Russo-Georgia War of 2008 was part of it. Their pressure on Ukraine today is another part of it.

This doesn't rule out more proximate causal factors, of course. Including neocon Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland's overt sympathy for regime change against the elected (though authoritarian) pro-Russian government of Ukraine of a few months ago. (Ed Pilkington, US official apologises to EU counterparts for undiplomatic language Guardian 02/06/2014; Top U.S. official visits protesters in Kiev as Obama admin. ups pressure on Ukraine president Yanukovich CBS News 12/11/2013)

Mark Mardell noted of Nuland's infamous "f**k the EU" comment that "it's the larger conversation, which shows the US is manipulating Ukraine just as much as Russia, that is the real diplomatic disaster." (Victoria Nuland: Leaked call shows US hand on Ukraine BBC News 02/07/2014)

See also Robert Perry's Neocons and the Ukraine Coup Consortium News 02/23/2014.

Tags: nato, russia, ukraine