Following Up: Why the U.S.-South Korea Summit Was Incredibly Weird II

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Biden administration, burden sharing, deterrence, Donald Trump, Following Up, North Korea, nuclear weapons, semiconductors, South Korea, tripwire, Yoon Suk Yeol

Yesterday’s post described how the mounting policy challenges that framed last week’s U.S.-South Korea summit drove one major globalist pundit to write a column that was nothing less than bananas policy-wise. With major tensions almost inevitably appearing between major goals sought by the two countries, he insisted both that these frictions exist only because of American selfishness and, as is globalists’ wont, that all good objectives actually are easily attainable simultaneously in this instance.

Today’s subject is thinking that in its own way is just as off-kilter. Worse, it’s positively dangerous because it’s official thinking from both of the above capitals, and its only conceivable effect can be to turn the already tinderbox-y Korean peninsula even more potentially explosive.

The reasons? It’s resulted in President Biden and his South Korean counterpart Yoon Suk Yeol just having sent – unwittingly to be sure – a twin message to scarily belligerent and nuclear-armed North Korea that (1) they have no faith in the strategy followed by their alliance for decades to deter aggression from the North; and (2) they haven’t yet come up with anything besides transparently symbolic moves to address the problem.

What other conclusions can legitimately be drawn from the official description of the summit’s accomplishments? According to the White House, among other decisions, the two governments agreed to give South Korea a role (but not the final say) in the process of deciding whether Washington would use nuclear weapons in a new Korean War; to deploy American nuclear weapons delivery systems “more visibly” in the peninsula’s vicinity; and to give South Korea’s military more training in preparing for and coping with “nuclear threat scenarios.”

Viewed in isolation, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with any of these measures. But no one should forget the context – because North Korea certainly hasn’t. The United States, as I’ve explained repeatedly, has already for decades not only vowed to use nuclear weapons to defend the South if necessary. To strengthen the credibility of this promise, it’s also stationed tens of thousands of American troops right up against the Demilitarized Zone dividing the two Koreas – that is, right in the invaders’ paths. The idea is that a U.S. President would face no real political choice but to use nukes to save them from total destruction by the North’s vastly superior conventional forces – and probably go on to vaporize the North – and that these prospects would prevent any attack in the first place.

Again, that’s been the U.S. plan for decades. It may as well be written in stone. (Although former President Trump expressed major reservations during his first campaign for the White House.) But last week, Mr. Biden and Yoon made clear their belief that it’s no longer deterring North Korea effectively enough. Why else would the new steps have been announced at such a high profile meeting?

At the same time, why would any thinking person believe that consulting more systematically with the South and sailing nuclear submarines in Korean waters more often will put the needed extra fear of God into North Korea? Similarly, how could these measures resolve the doubts about U.S. reliability that even staunch backers of the alliance in its longstanding form fear are developing in the South. Such qualms could either lead it to conduct foreign policies more independent of America’s (especially concerning curbing China’s technology development), or to create its own nuclear forces, or both.

The problem with the first two potential outcomes is that, as explained in a post last week, South Korea’s semiconductor manufacturing prowess has turned its security into a genuinely vital interest of the United States’; and that North Korea’s own steadily improving nuclear capabilities mean that fulfilling the defense commitment could soon expose the U.S. homeland to nuclear-armed missile strikes. 

A South Korea deterrent would greatly reduce this danger, particularly if it led Washington to remove from the South the “tripwire” ground units whose mission is to boost the odds that a Korean military conflict becomes nuclear, and thus probably suicidal for the North . But the consequent shrinkage of U.S. leverage over the North could leave a gaping hole in Washington’s efforts to contain China technologically.

Couldn’t Washington push wealthy South Korea to create a strong enough military to deter much poorer North Korea without going nuclear? In principle, yes, but the South’s very importance to American well-being have created the conditions for continued free-riding, because by definition, Washington couldn’t afford to impose consequences for its refusal. And a South Korea capable of defending itself without nuclear weapons would be just as capable of defying U.S. wishes on China and other foreign policy fronts as one armed with nukes.   

Perhaps most disturbing of all, the new tweaks to U.S. Korea strategy amount to a tacit but obvious admission of weakness – which countries of course should never telegraph, especially when faced with a seemingly volatile adversary like North Korea, and especially when their leaders clearly have no clue how to escape or resolve in any satisfactory way the dilemmas confronting them. 

Which is why I’m now worried that, for all the justified fears that before too long the United States and China could go to war – which could escalate to the nuclear level – the situation on the Korean peninsula is becoming a bona fide national security nightmare, too.   

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Following Up: Why the U.S.-South Korea Summit Was Incredibly Weird I

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Alan Beattie, alliances, allies, Biden, China, deterrence, extended deterrence, Financial Times, Following Up, Indo-Pacific, North Korea, nuclear weapons, realism, reciprocity, sanctions, semiconductors, South Korea, technology, Yoon Suk Yeol

Consistent with cutting-edge astro-physicis – and the last few decades of Marvel comics story-telling – I’m sure that among all the infinite number of universes in a “multi-verse” comprising creation, there’s one in which South Korea somehow genuinely has no reason to believe it has any obligation to comply with U.S. wishes in exchange for protection against complete destruction or enslavement by fanatically totalitarian North Korea.

I’m also sure that that universe isn’t the one we inhabit. Which is why it’s so whacko that Financial Times columnist Alan Beattie begs to differ, and that his editors evidently had absolutely no problem with this argument. And that’s only the lesser of two jaw-dropping new developments related to last week’s summit between President Biden and his South Korean counterpart Yoon Suk Yeol, which I analyzed in this post. Nonetheless, that’s the focus of today’s post. Tomorrow’s will deal with the second.

To be clear, I’m not contending that the South Koreans should be grateful to Washington for anything.

As a self-styled foreign policy realist, I’ve long held that countries can be counted on to act first and foremost in their own self-interest, and indeed should – in fact, unapologetically. I’ve taken many of my cues here from the Founding Fathers, who also considered the world to be far too dangerous to ground strategy in considerations of sentiment. So that puts me in pretty good company IMO. 

Moreover, South Korea is emphatically no exception, first because it lives in an exceptionally dangerous neighborhood; and second, because as I explained last week, its semiconductor manufacturing prowess gives it some clout vis-a-vis the United States.

Nor am I arguing that the U.S. commitment to defend the South has ever stemmed from anything other than a regard for its own security or independence or prosperity – even though I’ve disagreed until very recently (because of semiconductor manufacturing-related national security issues) with this characteristically globalist definition of national interest.

Instead, I’m arguing that, given the decision by Washington to protect the South even though its strategy of extended deterrence has recently exposed the United States to the risk of nuclear attack on the American homeland, it’s entirely reasonable for America to seek some South Korean help in meeting a different challenge. In this case, it’s helping Washington limit the technological progress that could enable China to attain military parity – and at some point even superiority – over the United States, and thereby undercut declared vital U.S. national interests throughout the Indo-Pacific region and even beyond.

But Alan Beattie? He writes that it’s “galling when Washington expects you to take economic hits for geopolitical gains when it’s not always willing to do the same itself.”

One fatal flaw in Beattie’s argument is the claim that the United States is asking South Korea to sacrifice some earnings (resulting from the major revenues it earns by supplying semiconductors and other high-value inputs to China’s huge electronics industry) without offering to pay any price for containing China itself.

What he ignores is how the Biden administration tough’s curbs on the investment and operations of America’s own semiconductor and chip-making equipment companies are costing them economically, too. Instead, he focuses on the electric vehicle manufacturing provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act, which require South Korean auto companies to produce key components in the United States in order to qualify for subsidies.

Yet these provisions apply not only to all foreign auto-makers, but to America’s as well.  And even if they were being applied in a blatantly discriminatory manner, however, it’s not as if South Korea wouldn’t still be getting a heckuva deal from its alliance with the United States. Beattie blandly describes the benefits to the South as “maintaining relations with the US….” Of course, as I stated above, it’s really about its national freedom and very survival.

Again, as a realist, I respect South Korea’s right to define its own interests however it wishes, and to act accordingly. But should I – or anyone – agree with Beattie that Washington’s desire for some South Korean reciprocity is “galling,” or excessively steep? It sounds like Beattie’s actual position is that any U.S. effort to leverage its commitment to defend South Korea is unreasonable – especially if it might interfere with the decades of hyper-globalization that the author tends to lionize uncritically, even though they’ve unmistakably fueled the dangerous rise of Chinese power. Can that be a serious basis for conducting diplomacy?

But from Beattie’s scathing tone, it’s also apparent that he’s condemning this kind of transactional approach to foreign policy for deeply personal reasons as well – likely the transparently childish view that the United States, or maybe just the Anglo-phone countries, should be above this sort of crassness, and that even if international relations aren’t comparable to a sporting event, where the real world stakes are modest, they should act as if they are – whatever the risks.

Thankfully, the Biden administration is steadily (though not fast enough for my tastes) thinking in more adult terms and recognizing – like the Trump administration before it – that one-way-street alliances no longer make sense from America’s standpoint (if they ever did). In this instance, moreover, South Korea could easily conclude that containing the tech prowess of a gigantic totalitarian and increasingly aggressive neighbor serves its own interests quite handily, too.

Tomorrow’s post will describe that aforementioned even more befuddling – and possibly more worrisome – consequence of the Biden-Yoon summit.

P.S. Full disclosure:  Beattie has blocked me on Twitter because he believed that my stances on immigration policy partly reflected anti-Muslim prejudices. So clearly he’s not my favorite journalist.  

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: U.S. Microchip Failures Have Now Worsened its Korea Nuclear Dilemmas

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allies, Biden, China, deterrence, extended deterrence, North Korea, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, semiconductors, South Korea, Taiwan, tripwire

As needs to become clear to U.S. leaders as South Korea’s president visits the United States, America’s loss of global leadership in the knowhow needed to make the world’s most advanced semiconductors now could expose the United States to nuclear attack from not one but two adversaries in East Asia.

The first threat of course comes from China, and stems from the possibility that it invades Taiwan. Because the island is the undisputed champ in manufacturing the most powerful chips, a Beijing victory could give it access to technology that’s crucial for making state-of-the-art weapons today, and for generations to come. And because that prospect, rightly in my view, is seen in Washington as an unacceptable threat to U.S. security, independence, and prosperity, the Biden administration has apparently decided to defend the island if the Chinese military moves.

The huge problem with this policy – which hasn’t been announced formally but has been mentioned in various seemingly off-the-cuff statements by Mr. Biden – is that success may require U.S. nuclear weapons use, and the Chinese have the forces to retaliate by attacking the American homeland with their own nukes. Maybe the possibility of a U.S. counter-strike on China would deter Beijing from pressing its nuclear buttons. But maybe it wouldn’t.

The threat that’s come into focus in recent days comes from North Korea and the target is South Korea – which unlike Taiwan is a full-fledged U.S. treaty ally that enjoys a longstanding and clearly stated American nuclear guarantee. Moreover, as is also not the case with Taiwan, the United States will find it exceedingly difficult to avoid nuclear weapons use if the North invaded the South. Worse, that’s so even if America ultimately concludes that South Korea’s security isn’t worth risking nuclear attack from a Pyongyang arsenal that’s smallish but could be able right now to reach American soil.

That’s because, as I’ve described repeatedly, American leaders have decided to bolster the credibility of the U.S. deterrent by stationing tens of thousands of American ground troops right in the way of any North Korean attack. The idea is to convince the North that to prevent its superior conventional forces from overwhelming the Americans, a U.S. President would launch his own nukes to destroy the invaders and likely the whole of North Korea.

This aim of intimidating the North with nuclear threats made sense when the United States had an enormous nuclear arsenal and Pyongyang was nuke-less. It even made sense when North Korea’s stockpile was even smaller than at present, and much less impressive. But due to the North’s recent progress and consequent current or imminent ability to vaporize an American city – or two or three – the U.S. nuclear guarantee, and the continuing presence of U.S. forces in the South whose vulnerability could force Washington into a damaging nuclear exchange, looks positively masochistic.

As a result, I’d argued for many years at least for withdrawing the tripwire and thereby increasing the odds that an American President would initiate a nuclear conflict with the North. Yes, South Korea could well be lost. But the United States itself would be saved from catastrophe. And of course South Korea could eventually respond by building up its own conventional military and going nuclear itself. Am I eager to see the roster of foreign nuclear weapons states expand? Of course not. But would this be better than the annihilation of Los Angeles or San Francisco or Seattle? That’s even a question?

It’s possible, however, that semiconductor-wise, South Korea might be as valuable as Taiwan. And if it’s still behind, it’s semiconductor manufacturing capabilities certainly aren’t far behind. (See this post for a sense of how complicated it is to determine who’s ahead.) Much more certain – the South is considerably ahead of American industry.

I’m not so much concerned that if the South felt abandoned, its microchip prowess would fall into the hands of the North Koreans. I’m much more concerned that a South Korea that’s decoupled from the United States security-wise would keep helping China develop its own semiconductor industry by building more and more advanced chip factories in the People’s Republic. It’s not just a distinct possibility, it’s a virtual certainty because China’s immense electronics industry is an immensely important customer for these South Korean chip manufacturers – just as it is for the U.S. semiconductor companies and chip equipment manufacturers that are equally guilty of strengthening China.

But the U.S. firms’ China operations and plans are now significantly restricted by the Biden administration’s tough sanctions. Even though it’s a U.S. treaty ally, South Korea has enacted no such curbs, and is still resisting American pressure to join Washington’s containment campaign. If the South feels cut loose by America, it’s not likely to sell China its crown jewel microchip tech. But as noted above, keeping on its current course could be damaging to major U.S. interests, too.

And that’s not even the end of the Biden administration’s current dilemmas. For there’s plenty of evidence that, despite the tripwire U.S. forces on their soil, South Korea’s leaders and its people no longer believe the Americans will ride to their rescue, or ride hard enough to risk nuclear war. So in principle, the United States could be stuck with the worst of all possible worlds – forced to maintain its current, nuclear war-risking approach to defending South Korea in hopes of preserving some semiconductor leverage with the South, but lacking the clout to gain meaningful South Korean support for limiting China’s tech progress. Reportedly, President Biden has decided to handle the situation with more energetic efforts to reassure the South.

Alternatively, South Korea could decide that it still doesn’t trust Washington, build its own nuclear weapons anyway, and feel even freer to go its way on China.

I can envision various scenarios in which all these needles are threaded to America’s advantage for the time being – and perhaps longer. But there are no guarantees. Meaning that the big takeaway is that when it comes to critical technologies, there’s no substitute for a Do It Yourself determination to maintain American leadership to avoid needing to rely on the kindness of strangers (and even allies) – or as is the case now, to restore it.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Thinking Straight About Ukraine and Taiwan

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Baltics, Biden, China, credibility, deterrence, extended deterrence, NATO, North Atlantic treaty Organization, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Russia, semiconductors, strategic ambiguity, Taiwan, Ukraine, Ukraine War, vital interests, Vladimir Putin

A flurry of developments in the last few days has underscored my frequently made and related points that

(a) America’s Ukraine policy is the height of recklessness because it’s courting any risk of nuclear war on behalf of a country whose fate it stlll doesn’t consider a vital interest; and

(b) the common claim that the best way to protect (genuinely vital) Taiwan is to beat help Kyiv defea Russia is nonsensical – and dangerously so precisely because of that nuclear war risk.

The evidence that Washington doesn’t view Ukraine as vital? Its continued refusal to admit it into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the longstanding U.S. security alliance. As explained repeatedly on RealityChek, for decades, the NATO allies have been protected not only by an American pledge to come to their defense whenever needed, but by a U.S. nuclear umbrella. This arrangement aimed at deterring attack by convincing potential aggressors that a such an assault on attack on any of them would trigger – if necessary – a response with the most destuctive weapons ever created and therefore their total annihilation.

And since the resulting nuclear conflict would threaten America’s very existence as well, this policy of “extended deterrence” was bolstered by the stationing of relatively small U.S. conventional forces directly in harm’s way. Their purpose – lending credibility to the American nuclear threat by leaving a President no choice but to push “the button” to save them in the likely event of their being overrun by a superior foe.

Given the literally existential stakes involved, U.S. leaders would need to be literally crazy to adopt such policies to defend countries whose loss would not pose literally mortal threats to American survival, independence, or prosperity. That’s why not every country on earth enjoys NATO-like protections.

But Ukraine lately has been a weird – and indeed absolutely perverse – exception. U.S. policy is clearly running some nuclear war risk – not by deploying any combat forces in the country (some auditors of weapons shipments are officially on the ground) but by deploying major forces in the immediate vicinity of a conflict that could well spill over borders and engage them.

At the same time, the United States still opposes admitting Ukraine as a NATO member and therefore extending to Kyiv that nuclear guarantee. Indeed, according to a Financial Times piece last Thursday, the Biden administration even opposes setting up a timetable for Ukrainian membership.

Reportedly, the main reason is fear of further provoking Russia, and increasing the odds of potentially catastrophic nuclear weapons use. But of course, if Ukraine is vital enough to be risking nuclear war already – due to the next-door military deployments – then what’s the problem? Would a NATO admissions announcement really worsen that risk materially?

If so, U.S. officials strangely haven’t made that argument. And if so, why is that even a consideration? When a truly vital interest is endangered, those are exactly the risks that by definition are worth running. In fact, when a truly vital interest is endangered, why not pour in U.S. forces to try turning the tide decisively?

Instead, the real reason is surely that U.S. leaders understand that Ukraine isn’t vital at all, but have decided to run not-trivial nuclear war risk anyway in hopes of threading a needle. I’m still waiting for a convincing explanation of why that strategy isn’t terrifyingly irresponsible.

One common answer: Preventing Russian success in Ukraine will best protect the nearby NATO countries – and at zero nuclear war risk because there would be no need for them to invoke the explicit nuclear guarantee they do enjoy.

That’s not a crazy argument. But this reasoning still leaves the United States in the bizarre (and needlessly dangerous) position of running non-trivial nuclear war risk to protect a non-vital country in order to avoid any nuclear war risk to protect countries that are deemed vital.

This argument is weird not least because – logically anyway – it credits the U.S. nuclear umbrella with little or no effectiveness. Why else would proponents believe that, having subdued a country with no explicit U.S. nuclear guarantee, Russia would inevitably attack a country with one? Along with tripwire forces?

This argument also ignores Russia’s failure to attack these very NATO countries. And it’s so far let them alone even though, especially in the case of the Baltic countries, they’re immediate Russian neighbors and in 1940 were officially absorbed into the old Soviet Union. They also contain big ethnic Russian  populations. That may not strike Russian dictator Vladimir Putin as an historical justification for re-gaining them as strong as that which he cites for Ukraine. But it’s still no doubt significant in his mind. It’s hard to avoid crediting the NATO nuclear guarantee for this success.

Which brings us to Taiwan. Unlike Ukraine, it’s genuinely vital to the United States. Unless you want to chance living in a world where China controls the global supply of semiconductors, and the technology needed to manufacture the most advanced versions of these chips. These rapidly improving devices are the building blocks of all the computing and communications systems central to the weapons that will soon dominate war-fighting, and of future innovation in the military and civilian worlds alike (including in artificial intelligence). Not so incidentally, increasingly advanced semiconductors will determine whether your privacy remains private.

Ukraine hawks of course insist that frustrating Russia there will help deter China from attacking Taiwan as well. And it’s true that Taiwan doesn’t enjoy a nuclear guarantee from the United States. It’s not even a formal treaty ally. But bilateral defense relations have recently moved much closer, and President Biden has several times promised that the United States will in fact move to defend the island against Beijing (see, e.g., here), removing much of the “strategic ambiguity” that has marked American policy for decades.

And these kinds of measures – which include a weekend statement from a Congressional Republican leader endorsing such actions, too – will deter China much more effectively than anything that happens in Ukraine for a very simple reason: Combined with such specific steps, and likely follow-ons, Taiwan very importance makes them credible.

With Ukraine, the opposite proposition obviously holds: Because it was never vital, U.S. efforts to prevent an invasion failed. For high stakes commitments to achieve low stakes goals are inherently non-credible.

Importantly, making grandiose promises to achieve transparently less-than-grandiose goals is no way to build or maintain credibility worldwide, either.  Instead, it’s much likelier to create or reenforce impressions of stupidity or pigheadedness – not good looks when last I checked.

The argument that going too far down the above Taiwan road needlessly creates too much risk can’t be dismissed out of hand. But even if it increases the odds of World War 3, because Taiwan is vital – and unless the word is meaningless –  going further down the road (including with symbolic gestures like the meeting in California between House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Taiwan’s president) can’t be ruled out, either.

Like so many foreign policy and national security questions, though, “how far” – and trying to thread that needle – is a matter for legitimate debate. But because Ukraine isn’t vital, assuming any nuclear risk on its behalf has been a foolhardy, potentially suicidal blunder. And indisputably so – at least for anyone without a death wish.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Biden Shows How Not to Make the Case for His Ukraine Policy

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Biden, Common Sense, deterrence, geography, national interests, NATO, North Atlantic treaty Organization, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Russia, Soviet Union, Thomas Paine, Ukraine, Ukraine War, vital interests, Vladimir Putin

Not that any more evidence was needed, but President Biden’s speech last week in Warsaw, Poland illustrated perfectly why his Ukraine war policy has been so reckless. Unless you think the United States should court nuclear war risk for a song.

Speaking just ahead of the first anniversary of Russia’s, to an audience that he knew would include his own countrymen as well as the large local crowd that assembled to hear him, the President could have said something on the order of:

“If Putin takes any part of Ukraine, he’ll go after our NATO allies and the rest of Europe next, placing his military just an ocean away from U.S. shores”; or

“If Putin takes any part or all of Ukraine, his dominance of the Black Sea region will be a giant step toward inevitable global conquest”; or

“If Putin takes any part or all of Ukraine, he’ll control minerals and other natural resources vital to the U.S. economy, and hold America hostage.

Or the President could have mentioned all these points to make the case that Ukraine’s independence per se is a vital U.S. interest for all sorts of specific reasons. He wouldn’t even have had to explain why, if that’s the case, it wasn’t admitted to the NATO alliance years ago, which would arguably have deterred the Russian attack in the first place by extending it the protection of America’s full nuclear arsenal – as befits a genuinely vital interest.

After all, who was going to call out this whopping inconsistency in his policy? A Regime Media deeply convinced of the globalist claim that the security of literally every country on earth is a vital U.S. interest, whether it’s an official American ally or not?

But Mr. Biden’s speech included none of these arguments. In fact, he’s never made these arguments. Instead, in Warsaw, he continued bloviating about Russia’s foes facing “fundamental questions about the commitment to the most basic of principles.  Would we stand up for the sovereignty of nations?  Would we stand up for the right of people to live free from naked aggression?  Would we stand up for democracy?”

And about the “eternal” stakes being “A choice between chaos and stability.  Between building and destroying.  Between hope and fear.  Between democracy that lifts up the human spirit and the brutal hand of the dictator who crushes it.  Between nothing less than limitation and possibilities, the kind of possibilities that come when people who live not in captivity but in freedom.  Freedom.”

There’s a good reason of course that Mr. Biden has never made specific, interest-based arguments for deep involvement in the Ukraine war – because when it comes to the United States, they’re just so much hokum. In fact, they’re even hokum-y for much of Europe even though it’s in Russia’s neighborhood. Because surely those in its Western half know that for decades during the Cold War, they were nearly as unaffected as Americans by the Soviet Union’s domination not just of Ukraine, but of all of Eastern Europe. And if they don’t, they should.

In the 1777 pamphlet The Crisis that so systematically and eloquently advocated for American independence, Thomas Paine faulted Britain for a “natural temper to fight for a feather” – that is, for vainglory rather than necessity or even significant tangible advantage. Consequently, that country “for centuries past, [had] been nearly fifty years out of every hundred at war with some power or other” and consequently had become a full partner in “the dismal commerce of death” and “the war and desolation [that] have become the trade of the old world.”

The thirteen colonies, by contrast, enjoyed advantages, resulting from geographic distance and consequent remoteness from European power politics and diplomacy, that afforded them “a retreat from their cabals.”

Clearly, this isn’t 1777, but the Atlantic is still a formidable geopolitical barrier; Ukraine is very far away; the United States today, unlike the Thirteen Colonies, is no military pygmy; and the power whose designs Mr. Biden would have the nation resist “as long as it takes” can create an ample nuclear “commerce of death.”

Opponents of the President’s Ukraine policy aren’t arguing that the oceans (or other circumstances) mean that the United States has no vital interests abroad. Instead, they’re insisting that, especially in a nuclear age, these interests be defined with precision and with a tight focus on considerations where the cost/benefit ratio is overwhelming weighted to the latter, not on gauzy appeals grounded in simple emotion. Mr. Biden’s failure to justify his approach to Ukraine in anything close to these terms is compelling evidence that this interest-base case simply doesn’t exist, and that the farther he proceeds down this road, the greater the needless peril to which he’s exposing America.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: U.S. Ukraine Policy Dangerously Flunks the Logic Test

Tags

alliances, deterrence, Nancy Pelosi, NATO, North Atlantic treaty Organization, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Russia, Ukraine, Ukraine War, vital interests, Vladimir Putin

There must be some kind of psychic connection between my good buddy Ace (so nicknamed because he’s actually flown in U.S. Air Force fighters), and Nancy Pelosi.

Just the other day, he made what I thought was the genuine genius point that the most important question surrounding U.S. policy toward Ukraine is one that’s never, ever, been asked: If Ukraine has indeed become a vital interest of the United States (a category into which, as I’ve repeatedly stated, e.g. here, it was never placed even during the depths of the Cold War), why wasn’t it admitted into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) long ago? Even stranger, why the continuing NATO cold feet of so many U.S. leaders who are so fond of claiming the vital importance of ensuring Ukraine’s success?

And hot on the heels of Ace’s questions, the House Speaker on Friday declined to endorse Ukraine’s request not just for inclusion in the decades-old Atlantic alliance, but for “accelerated accession” that would speed up a process that’s normally pretty complicated in normal times.

Yes, that’s the same Speaker Pelosi who had previously sounded pretty adamant about the need to stand with Ukraine “until the fight is done” because its fight for freedom ”is a fight for everyone.”

But as pointed out in the same news report that quoted Pelosi’s more temperate later remarks, even though these are anything but normal times in Europe, there’s no shortage of reasonable-sounding reasons for continuing caution. Specifically:

“The West fears that Ukraine’s immediate entry into NATO — which requires the unanimous approval of all 30 member-nations — would put the U.S. and Russia at war due to Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine as well as its forced annexations announced Friday.”

I wrote “reasonable-sounding, ”however, very deliberately. Because if you give the matter even a little serious thought (as Ace has), it becomes clear that such rationales make no sense at all.

In the first place, even though Ukraine remains outside NATO, the Western aid that’s helped Kyiv’s forces resist Russia so effectively has created a powder keg situation in Ukraine’s neighborhood (by stationing large numbers of U.S. troops right next door) that could all too easily ignite war between the two aforementioned nuclear superpowers anyway.

It’s true that the decision of the United States and Ukraine’s other allies to combine these deployments with hemming and hawing on NATO membership has so far produced a favorable outcome: Moscow’s been frustrated without nuclear weapons being used, much less a world-wide conflagration resulting.

At the same time, this needle-threading act could fail at any minute – which surely explains President Biden’s oft-stated declarations from the get-go that U.S. troops will not be sent into combat in Ukraine. He’s obviously determined minimize that dreadful possibility.

But all this prudence becomes completely inexplicable – at least if you value coherent thought – upon remembering what the word “vital” means in this instance. It’s describing an objective so important (Ukraine’s survival in its current form) that failure to achieve it would (at least at some point down the line) end America’s very existence, either as a physical entity or as an independent country. Even those who aren’t literalists presumably fear that failure to protect a vital interest will leave the United States only the most nightmarish shell of its present self.

To their credit, U.S. leaders who spearheaded the creation of the nation’s major alliances and supported their maintenance have put the country’s money where its mouth is. They have not only promised to use nuclear weapons against nuclear-armed adversaries to protect alliance members whose security is seen as vital. As I’ve often explained (e.g., here), they’ve deployed U.S. forces in “tripwire” configurations aimed at practically forcing Washington to push the fatal buttons and risk America’s nuclear destruction if non-nuclear defenses crumble.

Those policies have aimed above all to deter aggression, and despite the apocalyptic dangers they’ve raised, have been eminently sensible because a thoroughly respectable case ca be made, based on specific, concrete considerations, for the paramount importance of these allies.

For example, it is wholly plausible that the subjugation by hostile powers of places like Germany and Japan and Taiwan could produce intolerable consequences for the United States. In particular, each of those countries possesses technological and industrial prowess and assets that a country like China or Russia could harness to exercise control over the main dimensions of American life.

The point is not whether you or I personally agree or not. Rather, it’s that such fears are anything but crazy.

By contrast, there’s nothing specific and concrete that Ukraine boasts that I can think of – or, more revealingly, that any of its supposed champions have brought up – that Russia could use to achieve anything like the above results.

And this observation leads directly to the second logically loony flaw in America’s Ukraine policy – the one identified by Ace: If in the minds of U.S. leaders Ukraine actually was so all-fired important to begin with, or became so at some point before the Russian invasion (which the President has just declared must be resisted “unwaveringly”), why wasn’t it admitted to NATO right then and there, complete with the nuclear defense guarantee?

Not that any such move would have guaranteed that Russia would have kept hands off. But given that dictator Vladimir Putin hasn’t yet attacked any NATO members in Ukraine’s immediate vicinity or anywhere else, and that Mr. Biden’s vow throughout the entire crisis that the alliance will defend “every inch” of its members’ territory, surely is one reason why, wouldn’t admitting Ukraine before Moscow moved been a no-brainer?

Instead, the United States and the West have danced around this question for more than thirty years – and counting – practically from the moment Ukraine declared its independence from the collapsing Soviet Union in August, 1991. What’s been the problem during this entire period?

I mean, the place is supposed to be vital! In other such instances, that’s why the United States has even contemplated using nuclear weapons at all. And yet so far, Mr. Biden’s clear bottom line, even during the invasion’s early days, when his own administration assumed Zelensky’s government to be doomed, has been that U.S. forces will stay out as long as the combat stays inside Ukraine. In other words, he’s wavered. And almost inevitably, this position has sent Putin the message that Washington and the West ultimately don’t view that country as worth accepting the risk of national suicide.

So thanks to Ace, it must by now be evident that the United States has long believed that it could secure a vital interest with half measures (never a good habit to fall into) or that America should expose itself to an existential threat on behalf of an interest that’s short of vital.

And the folks who believe in either position are supposed to be the post-Trump adults in the room? And will be in charge of Ukraine strategy and the rest of American foreign policy for at least two more years?

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The Ukraine War is Creating Entirely New Nuclear Strategy Risks

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Biden, biological weapons, chemical weapons, deterrence, NATO, North Atlantic treaty Organization, nuclear war, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, red line, Russia, Ukraine, Ukraine invasion, Ukraine-Russia war, Vladimir Putin

The increasingly blustery way leading American politicians and chattering class members (mainly conservatives) have been talking about nuclear weapons and the Ukraine war is getting scary enough for me, and should be for you. (See, e.g., here.) Unless it’s OK that a major American city (or ten) may wind up looking like besieged and decimated Mariupol because playing chicken more boldly (but so far mainly verbally) with Moscow pushes above zero the odds of them getting hit by Russian warheads?

But something that worries me even more about these cataclysmic possibilities: For two main sets of reasons, the war could well create possibilities for nuclear weapons use that differ markedly from the scenarios that have dominated American planning for decades – and all the evidence indicates still dominates it today.

The first entails both Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine itself and the Russian dictator’s apparent decision to react to Ukraine’s stunning success to date in fighting back by raining maximum destruction on that country’s population. The second entails expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) membership right up to Russia’s borders after the Cold War ended and the old Soviet Union’s satellites became truly independent states and sought to join.

Simply put, the longstanding and existing scenarios have gone something like this: The Soviet Union (and now Russia) thinks about invading a NATO member (almost always the former West Germany) with its vastly superior conventional forces, but is deterred paradoxically by the very weakness of NATO’s conventional forces. The likelihood of these NATO forces getting overwhelmed and destroyed (along with all the NATO civilian personnel located nearby), would supposedly leave an American President no choice but to try to repel the attackers with nuclear weapons. The prospect that this escalation would turn into an all-out, world-destroying conflagration would be enough to prevent Moscow from attacking in the first place.

Today, however, the situation and possible nuclear scenarios are vastly different. After all, Putin has invaded not a NATO member – that is, a country whose security has been guaranteed by the alliance – but a country that hasn’t been permitted to join NATO. On the one hand, that’s comforting (except for the Ukrainians) because President Biden and other NATO leaders have ruled out the idea of direct military intervention in the conflict – precisely for fear that Russia could respond by attacking NATO units in Ukraine with nukes, or by attacking NATO forces and bases in members bordering Ukraine, or elsewhere in NATO-Europe, or even by striking the United States.

On the other hand, the very fact of heavy fighting in a country right next door to NATO members raises the possibility of the conflict spreading into those countries. This spillover could occur either by accident, or because Putin decides to attack the alliance’s extensive efforts to supply Ukraine. In turn, either such Russian operations could kill or wound NATO personnel who might be accompanying the weapons and other aid shipments as they travel through Ukraine, or Putin could decide to take out the facilities in Poland and other NATO countries from which these supplies are being sent into the war zone.

And don’t forget the spillover possibilities even from Russian attacks on Ukrainian forces inside Ukraine. Because Ukrainian resistance has been so effective (an outcome that so far was not only totally unexpected to the U.S. national security apparatus, but that contrasts strikingly with the longstanding assumption of Russian conventional military superiority that still underlies the alliance’s deterrence strategy), Moscow might need chemical or biological or nuclear weapons to regain the initiative. If these threshholds are crossed, the effects could, as noted here, easily blow beyond Ukraine’s borders and into NATO territory. And if NATO territory is affected, wouldn’t that qualify as an attack on a NATO member, or members, that would activate the alliance’s Article Five obligation that members view such a development as “an attack on all” – the core of the NATO treaty and the ultimate key to whatever deterrence power it’s assumed to have created?

Much more than the violations of international agreements that would result from these Russian moves, that’s why Mr. Biden and other NATO leaders have been warning Putin about “red lines” that he mustn’t cross by using these weapons of mass destruction. Yet the vague terms NATO has used to describe its promised responses so far make clear that alliance leaders haven’t yet decided how they actually would respond, and how to convey that message convincingly to Moscow. And yes, a Russian cyber-attack on a NATO member would trigger the same kinds of questions, uncertainties, and outright dangers.

As I’ve written repeatedly (notably here), the U.S. military doctrine that resulted and still prevails never deserved high marks for prudence, common sense, or even the basic test of a healthy sense of self-preservation. So it’s not like there’s a compelling case that Washington’s strategists today will come up with anything more sensible to handle these radically different challenges. And that’s all the more reason to try to put much more energy into stopping the fighting ASAP by cutting a deal that will surely fail to satisfy either Ukraine or Russia, but that ends, at least for the time being, the kind of reckless nuclear weapons talk that could all too easily lead to catastrophic nuclear weapons use – even if neither the United States nor its allies are actually attacked.     

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: How the Last Seven Days Could Really Shake the World

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alliances, Baltics, Crimea, deterrence, Donbass, energy, European Union, free-riding, Georgia, Germany, NATO, North Atlantic treaty Organization, nuclear deterrence, Olaf Scholz, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Poland, Russia, spheres of influence, Ukraine, Ukraine invasion, Ukraine-Russia war, Vladimir Putin

The situation in Ukraine as of this morning remains as fluid and full of uncertainties as it was when yesterday when caution persuaded me to pause and turn my attention to a sobering CCP Virus milestone.

But one feature of the conflict is becoming clear, and if it holds much longer, opens up the distinct possibility that the major assumptions that have animated U.S. policy toward European security merit major rethinking.

That feature: Ukraine is proving to be a much tougher military challenge for Russia than anyone, including me, expected. It’s still not entirely certain why. But even the explanations most favorable to Moscow and Russian military prowess – that Vladimir Putin decided to go gradual for fear of destroying the infrastructure of a country his regime will eventually need to run, or of needlessly enflaming the occupied population to the point of triggering an insurgency with staying power, or some combination of the two – lead (logically, anyway) to these potentially game-changing conclusions: that Russia is too weak to bend countries of any decent size to its will, and that there’s no reason to believe it will acquire the necessary power in the policy relevant future.

In other words, it’s one thing to take control over two tiny enclaves of a very small neighbor like Georgia (2008), or to seize a part of Ukraine with a sizable ethnic Russian population (Crimea in 2014), or to use local proxies to challenge on the cheap Ukrainian sovereignty over an eastern region also full of Russian speakers, or even to march into and annex two provinces of this Donbass region.

But using force to turn the rest of Texas-sized Ukraine with its population of more than 40 million people into a Russian satellite? That’s obviously been a much taller order.

And even if superior Russian troop numbers and weaponry ultimately do achieve their apparent near-term goal of replacing Volodymyr Zelensky’s government with pro-Moscow puppets, and thereby the longer-term goal of keeping Ukraine out of NATO, these results will seriously challenge the views of folks like me (most recently, here), who had credited Russia with enough power to bring into a sphere of influence Ukraine – along with smaller neighbors, like the rest of Georgia plus Moldova (neither of which belongs to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization – NATO), and even the three Baltic states that are NATO members.

After all, as mentioned above, keeping control over Ukraine alone may well seriously drain lots of Russian military power, and further strain an economy that’s not exactly a powerhouse to begin with. And if even the old Soviet leaders eventually found keeping Afghanistan not worth the candle, in part because public anger over casualties kept mounting, will Putin really be able to demonstrate greater staying power in Ukraine? Much less simultaneously keep the clamps on other small neighbors? Much less achieve the same objectives vis-a-vis larger Eastern European countries like Poland? Much less even credibly threaten anyone in Western Europe?

But if the more optimistic Ukraine scenario plays out, that would mean that the mainstream, globalist foreign policy leaders and thinkers who view keeping that country free of Russian control, and even bringing it into NATO, as essential for America’s security have been wrong as well – precisely because severe limits on Russian power are becoming increasingly obvious. Unless a Russia that can’t pose a military threat to Western Europe can pose one to the United States?

Russian failure or overly costly success in Ukraine even undercuts arguments that the militarily dominant, or any major, American role in NATO remains crucial. On the one hand, it’s true that, Russia has attacked non-NATO member Ukraine but not NATO allies like Poland and the Baltics. So Putin surely sees a big difference between countries to whose defense the alliance is committed (including with recent deployments of U.S. and other members’ military forces), and those outside the NATO umbrella.

But does that mean that the United States must still remain the kingpin, and contribute an outsized (and very expensive) share of the alliance’s military might? And continue to extend a nuclear shield over Europe – which of course creates a risk of nuclear war with Russia? Maybe not, especially upon considering the West European NATO members’ response to the Ukraine invasion.

Specifically, it’s been much stronger than I and most others expected, too. And the German response has been most revealing of all. After decades of being the alliance’s worst military free-rider, and skimping on its defense budget to the point that a top general just called his forces “more or less bare,” new Chancellor Olaf Scholz has now vowed a big increase in military spending and promised not only that Germany will hit the goal of members’ defense budgets representing two percent of their economies, but exceed it. Moreover, the entire European Union (EU), whose membership overlaps considerably with NATO’s, is now finally recognizing how dangerously moronic they’ve been in boosting their dependence on Russian fossil fuel supplies.

What this seems to demonstrate is that once the Europeans (many of whom have free-ridden militarily themselves) perceive a sharp enough threat to their own safety and independence and well-being, they change profoundly. They begin to act less like cunning and not-so-reliable protectorates determined to gain any benefits they can from Russia in full confidence that America will shield them from any dangers, and more like countries that recognize that their best bets for security and prosperity are their own considerable resources.

By the way, these resources include not only the wealth to field much larger conventional militaries, but French and British nuclear forces. So NATO’s European members should be able not only to deter Russia conventionally, but at the strategic nuclear level as well. And if they deem those nuclear forces inadequate to the task, they can build more

Just as important, this European awakening seems at least partly due to a dawning recognition that for a wide variety of reasons (e.g., America’s preoccupation with its internal problems, its supposedly unreliable recent political leadership, its higher prioritization of Asia, its resentment at being played), historic U.S. enabling can no longer be taken for granted.

All of which means that the American response should be not devoting more of its military strength to deterring or countering Russia in Europe, moving still more conventional forces to Eastern Europe, or unleashing a new round of rhetoric declaring its own vital, ironclad, and undying stakes in the continent’s security, but encouraging these trends – and especially appreciating the opportunity to let itself off the nuclear hook.

This doesn’t mean that the United States should make no contributions to Europe’s defense. But whatever assistance is proposed to the American political system should be clearly described to the public (and to the Europeans) as a policy of choice, not of necessity, and should be flexible enough to enable the nation to opt out of a conflict on the continent if it so decides, not trapped into one, as is potentially the case now. Indeed, as I’ve written, that danger could all too easily still result from the Ukraine war, because non-negligible U.S. forces are now deployed close to the actual fighting.

In 1919, American journalist John Reed came out with a book describing first-hand the Bolshevik Revolution of two years before called Ten Days that Shook the World.  I’m sure not yet certain that this first week of the Ukraine war will turn into seven days that shook the strategic and geopolitical worlds.  (And I certainly hope that the above scenarios turn out to be more accurate than Reed’s sunny expectations of Soviet communism.)  But American leaders focused on their own country’s genuinely vital interests shouldn’t overlook the possibility.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The Ukraine Crisis Grows Curiouser and Curiouser

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Annaleena Baerbock, Biden adminisration, China, democracy, deterrence, Eastern Europe, energy, European Union, Germany, human rights, Italy, Mario Draghi, NATO, natural gas, Nordstream 2, North Atlantic treaty Organization, Olaf Scholz, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Phase One, Poland, Russia, sanctions, sovereignty, Taiwan, tariffs, The Wall Street Journal, Trade, trade war, Ukraine

The longer the Ukraine crisis lasts, the weirder it gets. Here are just the latest examples, keeping in mind that new developments keep appearing so quickly that this post might be overtaken by events before I finish!

>What’s with the Chinese? Toward the end of last year, (see, e.g., here) I’ve been worried that President Biden’s Ukraine policy would push Russia and China to work more closely to undermine U.S. interests around the world – a possibility that’s both especially worrisome given evident limits on American power (Google, e.g., “Afghanistan”), and completely unnecessary, since no remotely vital U.S. interests are at stake in Ukraine or anywhere in Eastern Europe.

In the last week, moreover, numerous other analysts have voiced similar concerns, too. (See, e.g., here and here.)

But just yesterday, The Wall Street Journal published this piece reporting on Chinese words and deeds indicating that Beijing opposed any Russian invasion of Ukraine. You’d think that China would welcome the prospect of significant numbers of American military forces tied down trying to deter an attack by Moscow on Ukraine, or on nearby members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), or getting caught up in any fighting that does break out. The result of any of these situations would be an America less able to resist Chinese designs on Taiwan forcibly.

It’s unimaginable that Chinese leaders have forgotten about these benefits of war or a continuing state of high tensions in Ukraine’s neighborhood. But according to the Journal, Beijing has decided for the time being that it’s more important to avoid further antagonizing the United States on the trade and broader economic fronts – specifically by helping Russia cushion the blows of any western sanctions. China is also supposedly uncomfortable with the idea of countries successfully intervening in the internal affairs of other countries – because of its own vulnerability on the human rights front, and because it regards foreign (including U.S.) support for Taiwan as unacceptable interference in its internal affairs, too (since it views Taiwan as a renegade province).

Not that China isn’t already acting to prop up Russia’s economy – specifically agreeing earlier this month to buy huge amounts of Russian oil and gas. But if Beijing has indeed decided to go no further, or not much further, the potential effectiveness of western sanctions on Moscow would be that much greater. It would also signal that the Biden adminisration has much greater leverage than it apparently realizes to use tariffs to punish China for various economic transgressions – e.g., failing to keep its promises under former President Trump’s Phase One trade deal to meet targets for ramping up its imports from the United States.

>Speaking of sanctions, the Biden administration view of these measures keeps getting stranger, too. The President and his aides have repeatedly insisted that the best time for imposing them is after a Russian invasion of Ukraine, because acting beforehand would “lose the deterrent effect.”

But this reasoning makes no sense because it – logically, anyway – assumes that the sanctions that would be slapped on would achieve little or nothing in the way of inflicting economic pain powerful enough either to induce a Russian pullback or convince the Kremlin that further aggression along these lines wouldn’t be worth the costs.

After all, pre-invasion sanctions would be taking their toll while the Russians were fighting in Ukraine, and until they pulled out or made some other meaningful concession. The Biden position, however, seems to be that in fact, during this post-invasion period, they’d be taking scarcely any toll at all – or at least not one significant enough to achieve any of their declared aims. If that’s the case, though, why place any stock in them at all at any time?

>One reason for these evidently low Biden sanctions expectations is surely that, at least for now, the administration isn’t willing to promise that the potentially most effective punishments will be used. Nor are key U.S. allies.

Principally, last Friday, Deputy National Security Adviser Daleep Singh told reporters that banning Russia from the global banking system would “probably not” be part of an initial sanctions package. And Germany keeps hemming and hawing about ending the Nordstream 2 gas pipeline project even if Russia does invade.

The Germans – and the rest of Europe – are now acting like they’re taking seriously the need to reduce their reliance on Russian natural gas (which currently supplies some forty percent of their supplies of this fossil fuel. But Berlin has still not committed to cancelling its plans to buy even more gas from Russia via the recently completed Nordstream channel. (The pipeline isn’t yet in use because the Germans are in fact dragging their feet on final regulatory approval.) Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock has declared that Nordstream is “on the table” for her if the Russians move militarily. But nothing even like this non-promise has been made by Prime Minister Olaf Scholz. And last Friday, Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi said he opposes including energy in anti-Russia sanctions.

>The final puzzle: Although Poland is a linchpin of NATO’s strategy for preventing any Putin aggression beyond Ukraine, the European Union has just moved a major step closer to cutting the country off from the massive economic aid it receives from the grouping, and indeed has already frozen $41 billion in CCP Virus recovery funds it had previously allotted to Warsaw.

The decisions stem from Poland’s alleged backsliding on commitments it made to protect human rights in order to join the EU, but blocking these resources isn’t exactly likely to strengthen Poland’s ability to aid in the effort to contain Russia, and Ukraine itself is hardly a model democracy (see, e.g., here and here) – all of which can’t help but scramble the politics of the crisis in Eastern Europe yet further. And all of which should be added to the already impressive list of paradoxes, ironies, mysteries, and curiosities that everyone should keep in mind whenever they hear about the future of Europe, the global liberal order, world peace, and human freedom itself being at stake in Ukraine.    

Im-Politic: The Best Way Forward in Ukraine

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Afghanistan, Baltic states, Biden, China, Cold War, deterrence, Eastern Europe, NATO, North Atlantic treaty Organization, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Poland, Russia, Taiwan, tripwire, Ukraine, Vladimir Putin

This is by no means what I want to happen – in fact, I find the prospect pretty troubling (as should you), But I can’t help but wonder if the current Ukraine crisis will end peacefully with the United States putting tripwire forces permanently in many of the relatively new Eastern European members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), in order to protect them against possible Russian designs, along with throwing Russian leader Vladimir Putin some kind of a rhetorical bone concerning his opposition to Ukraine joining NATO.

As known by RealityChek readers, tripwire forces are relatively small numbers of U.S. troops stationed on the soil of a vulnerable ally whose purpose is to deter attack by an aggressive, heavily armed neighbor. The idea isn’t that these U.S. forces will be enough to defeat the enemy – Washington has never been willing to pay for the manpower and weaponry to accomplish that goal. The idea is that the fear of killing American soldiers will greatly reduce the odds of an attack in the first place. That’s because it would greatly increase the pressure on a U.S. President to respond with the only measure that could prevent their imminent, total defeat (and possibly many more U.S. casualties) – using nuclear weapons.

I don’t like the idea because, especially today, it exposes the American homeland to the risk of nuclear attack (by far the worst national security disaster that could befall it, and likely the most destructive event in the nation’s history) in order to protect countries less than vital to the United States, and which could easily defend themselves if they weren’t such defense skinflints and free-riders. (South Korea has been a prime example, although, as I’ve written, its semiconductor manufacturing prowess has made it more important lately.)

At the same time, the tripwire strategy arguably played some role in keeping the Soviet military on its side of the Iron Curtain for decades during the Cold War, and it’s certainly conceivable that the kinds of deployments that President Biden seems to be thinking about could produce the same results in places like the Baltic states (which used to be Soviet republics) and Poland.

Not that this course of action would be risk-free. Sending lots of troops and heavy weapons like tanks would amount to stuffing lots more soldiers and lethal hardware into a relatively small area, and very close to major Russian military forces. As I’ve written, the odds of an accidental conflict would inevitably rise.

That’s why it would be much better for the United States to come to an agreement with Putin recognizing the need for limits on Western military deployments on Russia’s borders, and on future NATO expansion.

But Mr. Biden doesn’t seem interested in serious negotiations. Maybe that’s because he honestly believes that geography shouldn’t matter in world affairs and that countries should be free to make any security arrangements they like regardless of what powerful neighbors think. Maybe that’s because he’s afraid of further charges of weakness from domestic critics and voters in the wake of his botched withdrawal from Afghanistan. Maybe it’s both. But at this point the reasons for his position matter much less than his position itself..

Boosting the U.S. military footprint in Eastern Europe, especially in a steady, methodical way, would project an image of strength that he so desperately seeks now, and in theory enough to offset the effects of his decision (for now) not to use force to save Ukraine (which in my view will at the very least increase Moscow’s dominance of the country, either through a military occupation, attacks that enable Putin to peel off regions of Ukraine’s east, or a coup or other machinations that install a puppet government in Kyiv).

And although Moscow will huff and puff, the presence of Americans in places like the Baltics in particular are likely to keep the Russians out – and in ways that the presence of, say, Danes and Spaniards won’t.

Some big questions would remain. For example, what if Putin tried to destabilize the Baltics by stirring unrest among their sizable Russian populations? And will Germany, which is actually blocking the efforts of NATO countries to strengthen Ukraine’s armed forces apparently and in part for fear of antagonizing Russia further, be OK with using the American bases on its soil to help maintain U.S. forces stationed on NATO’s easternmost front lines?

I don’t have the answers here. But worrisome as the tripwire strategy is, unless Washington is ready for some significant give-and-take on Eastern Europe’s future, it’s much better than some of the alternatives I can imagine:

>like a Russian takeover of Ukraine without any offsetting steps that really could create big doubts about American reliability in places unmistakably vital to the U.S. future – especially global semiconductor manufacturing leader Taiwan – and tempt more aggression by China (mainly against Taiwan);

>like so many foreign weapons flooding into Ukraine that they could either trigger a Russian preemptive attack on their own, or give Kyiv enough confidence to mount the kind of full-scale resistance that following an invasion that would produce fierce enough fighting to spill over into neighboring countries. Alternatively, such a conflict could push President Biden into more active U.S. military involvement that might become particularly dangerous because of its very haste.

After his summit with Putin in Geneva, Siwtzerland last June, the President said “I think that the last thing he wants now is a Cold War.“ Unfortunately, largely because he’s painted himself into such a tight diplomatic corner, for now, that may be the best of a series of bad outcomes for Americans. And for Europe East and West, it’s certainly better than the other kind of conflict.