Tags
alliances, allies, Biden, deterrence, globalism, Mike Pence, NATO, North Atlantic treaty Organization, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Republican debate, Russia, Soviet Union, tripwires, Ukraine, Ukraine War, Vladimir Putin
At last month’s Republican presidential primary debate, former Vice President Mike Pence claimed that if Russia isn’t defeated in Ukraine, it is not “going to be too long before [Russian dictator Vladimir] Putin rolls across a NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) border.”
It’s an argument that’s become a favorite among hawks in America’s Ukraine policy debate – including President Biden, who has made essentially the same point by stating that members of this alliance that are Ukraine neighbors “know better than anyone what’s at stake in this conflict not just for Ukraine, but for the freedom of democracies throughout Europe and around the world.”
And revealingly, it’s one that unwittingly reveals one big reason that attaching so much importance to prevailing in Ukraine is nonsensical even granting many key larger assumptions about the need for the United States to pursue globalist foreign policy strategies priorities like creating and maintaining a worldwide alliance network. In fact, it greatly weakens the case for this foreign policy approach.
Let’s start with the basic globalist case for maintaining NATO, which, since 1949 has linked the security and indeed survival of the United States to the security of Canada and a large and steadily expanding (especially since the end of the Cold War) list of European countries. (Apologies to RealityChek regulars and others who already know this story.)
U.S. leaders did so overwhelmingly by extending a nuclear umbrella over other NATO members. They pledged that they would risk nuclear attack by the old Soviet Union (and now Russia) by threatening to retaliate against those adversaries with America’s own nuclear weapons, and thereby guarantee that aggression would turn into a suicidal proposition.
And this otherwise head-scratching promise has been lent credibility by the stationing of U.S. “tripwire” forces in front-line NATO Europe members, especially Germany. The idea was to ensure that an invasion by Soviet or Russian forces would quickly start overwhelming numerically inferior U.S. units (and their families). So an American President little choice but to come to their rescue with nukes, even if escalation to full-scale nuclear war and warheads falling all over the U.S. homeland could well result.
Folks like me have long believed that this policy posed unnecessary and unacceptable risks to the United States’ very survival – mainly because it convinced wealthy allies that they needn’t beef up their own conventional forces enough to repel Moscow by themselves and at least greatly reduce the pressure on Washington even to brandish the nuclear threat, or heaven forbid use these weapons.
But even we have to recognize that the prospect of what was called Mutually Assured Destruction (appropriately acronym-ed “MAD”) gave Moscow big-time pause. That’s crucial to remember because the clear expectation behind this NATO strategy was not that it would help the West defeat the Soviets (and then the Russians) in an actual conflict, but that it would prevent any war from breaking out in the first place.
And it’s crucial to remember that the main aim was deterrence because that’s what statements like Pence’s above evidently forget. Because what is he (and what are they) really doing? They’re doing nothing less than actually advertising that the U.S. nuclear guarantee has become a deterrent that’s all-but worthless. That is, that if Putin wins in Ukraine, even though the NATO members bordering Ukraine are full-fledged alliance members entitled to nuclear protection, and even though U.S. troops have been stationed in these countries, none of that is likely to impress the Kremlin.
Just as bad, not only must statements like this inevitably reenforce whatever ambitions Putin may have regarding countries like Poland and the Baltics – along with his determination to dominate Ukraine. They also must inevitably plant seeds of doubt among his supposedly certain victim countries as well. After all, if those NATO countries whose borders Putin is allegedly certain to roll over hear messages like Pence’s (and Biden’s), won’t they be likelier to accommodate Russia somehow than rely on an America that may not be so reliable?
Just to remind: I don’t believe that any of the newer NATO countries like those in Ukraine’s neighborhood are so intrinsically important to the United States that their security warrants incurring even the slightest risk of nuclear attack on American soil. That goes double for Ukraine itself. But Ukraine hawks like Pence (and President Biden) clearly do believe this. And their apparent inability to grasp how they have fatally undermined one of their central arguments for supporting Ukraine “as long as it takes” reveals them as dangerously unqualified to make these kinds of life and death decisions for their fellow Americans. Unless you believe that incoherence is a great recipe for safeguarding the nation’s security.