Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The Ukraine War Demands Realistic U.S. Thinking About Sovereignty

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Antony J. Blinken, Biden, MIG 29s, NATO, North Atlantic treaty Organization, nuclear war, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Poland, sovereignty, Ukraine, Ukraine-Russia war

It’s been especially great to read the news reports this morning about progress in peace talks between Ukraine and Russia (except for the poisoning thing).

After all, an end to the human suffering in Ukraine may be approaching. Moreover, as I’ve written, the longer the fighting continues, the higher the odds that it spills over Ukraine’s borders, drags in the United States, and escalates to the nuclear level.

Also important, though, but less well appreciated, a non-disastrous (at least for the United States) conclusion to the conflict would give America’s current globalist leaders a chance to rethink two truly bizarre ideas about the way the world either does or should work that (1) have needlessly magnified those nuclear-war-with-Russia dangers, and (2) therefore expose the country to less risk if trouble in this region breaks out again, or similar crises erupt elsewhere. And both stem from thoroughgoing misunderstandings about the nature of sovereignty.

The first arose because of Poland’s idea work with Washington to supply MIG-29 fighter jets from its own air force to Ukraine. Though President Biden ultimately nixed the idea (after Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken seemed to approve it), his administation muddied the waters considerably, and left himself wider open to charges of weakness, by insisting that “This is Poland’s sovereign decision to make.”

The second has emerged because of the peace talks, and holds that the United States won’t be pressuring Ukraine to accept peace terms Kyiv doesn’t itself support because Ukraine, too, is a sovereign country with an untrammeled right to pursue or defend its interests however it sees fit. Somewhat embarrassingly, I can’t find any supporting links, but I’ve been following the Ukraine War policy debate closely, and the notion definitely is in the air – especially in the ranks of the hawks.   

From a purely operational standpoint, both propositions should be rejected outright by Americans. Poland, after all, doesn’t exist geopolitically in isolation. It’s a member of an alliance that includes the United States. No reasonable person would object to any steps it took to defend its own territory if attacked. But when it comes to situations in which it’s not victimized by aggression, and in which its actions could affect the security of its fellow members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Americans and others in NATO should by all means object to any freelancing. And the more so since Poland wanted to join NATO specifically because it (rightly) doubted its ability to fend off Russia by itself.

Neither the United States nor any other NATO member should ever accept the argument that one of their ranks should enjoy complete freedom of action regardless of its larger consequences, but has the right to demand their help if it comes under attack (including because of its unilateral acts). In other words, receiving alliance benefits means accepting alliance responsibilities.

Similar considerations should govern U.S. policy toward Ukraine-Russia negotiations. Ukraine isn’t a treaty ally of the United States, but it’s sure receiving lots of military aid and humanitarian from America (and other NATO members) – and wants much more. If its bargaining tactics prolong the fighting, the United States’ own security could suffer. So Washington should never hesitate to take whatever steps are needed to ensure that – in America’s judgement – Kyiv’s aims (however understandable from Ukraine’s vantage point) don’t needlessly threaten U.S. interests.

For any thinking adult, the views here shouldn’t be the slightest bit controversial. So why are they so difficult to accept even for so many American leaders with lots of knowledge of and experience in foreign policymaking – and whose very success makes clear that they’re hardly babes in the woods in dealing with their careers and other areas of their lives? As indicated above, it’s because they hold views about sovereignty stemming from assumptions about world affairs that can only be accurately described as fanciful.

That is, sovereignty is evidently seen as a status that either actually commands universal respect, or should command such respect, at least from individuals and governments with any regard for (equally universal) standards of acceptable behavior. As with most long and deeply embedded assumptions, the bases for this status and its legitimacy are rarely spelled out anymore. When they have been specified, the argument seems to resemble that made for human rights – that it springs either from a Creator, or from some feature of existence that is so innate, and even defining, as to be inalienable (as the American political tradition terms it).

Without wading too deep into discussions philosophers have had since philosophizing began, and whose resolution seems nowhere in sight, I’ll just put forward the proposition that it’s one thing to articulate and propagate common standards of acceptable behavior for individuals. Without them, it’s difficult to imagine creating any community or society worth living in.

But sovereignty as an idea with autonomous power over the relations among different communities and societies – which in the case of world affairs means relations among states? Much less an idea that actually does command such respect? Where, specifically, are the commonly accepted standards of behavior that must underlie this construct? Yes, enshrined in heaven only knows how many international treaties and agreements. But when inconvenient, honored in the breach at best is the only answer that passes the all-important eyeball test.

The reason, moreover, could not be more obvious, at least to an empiricst: Since there are no commonly accepted standards of behavior in a de facto sense, states haven’t been able to agree on a system to enforce those standards. And yet this situation seems anything but obvious to America’s globalists, at least judging by how the idea of sovereignty shapes their policies and stated opinions.

One explanation for these illusions that my own work has pointed to is that globalists don’t see, or don’t want to acknowledge, any intrinsic and inevitable distinction between the communities (specifically, those they rightly admire) into which the world has long been divided, and a global community that they either suppose exists in meaningful ways right now, or is steadily forming. As a result, they also seem to believe that because of America’s immense weight, if their government acts as if that community exists now, its foreign policies will be able to bring it to completion that much faster.

To which I can only reply with the standard but still insightful warning about not permitting hope to triumph over (millennia of) experience.

Not that there’s no such thing as sovereignty in world politics today, and not that such sovereignty is anything new. But although it’s recognized in any number of international legal documents, it’s not a creation of these documents or any body of law. It’s a creation of capability. If states are able through their own devices (and these can include skillful diplomacy, not only the exercise of power) to preserve themselves in the forms they desire, they’re sovereign, and are treated as such by others as long as these capabilities last. If they can’t so defend themselves, ultimately they receive no such treatment.

Nor is the United States well advised to trample over others’ sovereignty at the drop of a hat – but mainly because there’s so seldom an urgent need for such an existentially secure and prosperous country as America. The Ukraine War, however,  has created the kinds of potential threats to the nation’s safety that haven’t been on the horizon since possibly the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. There are any number of strong arguments for various types of responses. But major concern about the so far chimerical idea of sovereignty, even of friends and allies, isn’t one of them.      

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.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Out of the Mouths of Generals

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alliances, America First, Associated Press, Blob, China, deterrence, globalism, Jim Mattis, Joe Biden, Mark Milley, North Korea, nuclear umbrella, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Poland, South Korea, Soviet Union, tripwires, Trump

Here’s one that genuinely justifies that over-used term, “You can’t make this up.”

Practically ever since President Trump assumed office, his globalist foreign policy critics have been attacking his claims that maintaining the status quo with U.S. security alliances couldn’t be a top priority of American foreign and national security policy. In this vein, they contemptuously derided as “transactional” his belief that rather than viewing these arrangements as vital ends in and of themselves, Washington needed continuously to make sure that they were creating at least as many benefits as problems for the nation.

Indeed, fetishizing alliances was so deeply embedded in the consciousness of the globalist bipartisan U.S. foreign policy Blob that Jim Mattis, the retired Marine Corps General who served as the first Trump Secretary of Defense, based his resignation largely on the argument that the President did not share his “core belief…that our strength as a nation is inextricably linked to the strength of our unique and comprehensive system of alliances and partnerships.”

So imagine my surprise upon reading an Associated Press story Thursday reporting that U.S. Army General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff (the nation’s top military office), has recommended that Washington – obviously meaning the probably incoming Biden administration – should reconsider “permanently positioning U.S. forces” overseas in instances where these servicemen and women are not actively engaged in combat.

Now it’s true that Milley, at least reportedly, was never especially tight with Mattis in particular. But in this age of political generals and admirals, he couldn’t have risen through the ranks this high had he dissented significantly from the globalist line. And Milley has spoken of the need for U.S. alliances in pretty urgent terms himself.

But there he was this past week, giving a speech on the future of warfare that not only called for more selectivity in creating and maintaining an American military footprint abroad, but basing this proposal largely on his unhappiness – and this is the real shocker – that the so-called forward deployment of these units has usually been accompanied by the families of soldiers, sailors, and airmen, and therefore places them in harm’s way.

His position is a shocker because, as I’ve explained before, stationing spouses and children so vulnerably has been a linchpin of globalist strategy toward alliances. They play a crucial role in turning the units they’re linked with into genuine tripwires – forces whose likelihood of defeat at the hands of much larger and stronger invaders like the Soviets or the North Koreans would give an American President little choice but to use nuclear weapons to avert disaster.

Of course, this approach didn’t stem from itchy nuclear trigger fingers in Washington. Quite the opposite: The working assumption was that the high probability of U.S. nuclear weapons use would deter conventional military aggression to begin with. And the probability that their attacks would wind up killing American non-combatants as well as troops was seen as an even stronger forcing event for nuclear weapons use – a situation that, in strategic parlance, would make this contingency more credible, thereby further inhibiting (or, again using strategy-ese, deterring) enemies from striking.

Skeptical? This is exactly why countries like Poland have been urging recent American Presidents to replace the policy of rotating various U.S. units in and out of their lands with big, permanent deployments. And weirdly and alarmingly, Mr. Trump has taken some steps in this direction.

I’ve concluded that, although the creation of such so-called nuclear umbrellas was defensible during the Cold War, when it was used to protect genuinely vital regions like Western Europe and Japan, and when its use in Asia was aimed at prospective foes that lacked nuclear retaliatory forces, it’s recklessly dangerous today. For the Soviet Union is an increasingly distant memory, many major U.S. allies are amply capable of their own defense, Asian adversaries have become able to strike the American homeland with their own nuclear weapons, and the security of South Korea in particular is no longer crucial for the United States’ own safety and well-being (as opposed to Taiwan, which, as I’ve recently argued, has moved into this category because of its world-class semiconductor manufacturing capability).

Not even the America First-y President Trump has gone remotely this far in actually changing U.S. alliance policy. Yet there was Milley, including in his remarks the statement that if war came with North Korea, “we would have a significant amount of non-combatant U.S. military dependents in harm’s way….I have a problem with that.”

The General didn’t make the needed follow-on case that the presence of these civilians has turned these alliances into “transmission belts of war” that could easily go nuclear and bring on the incineration of entire American cities. But an administration that followed his recommendations would greatly reduce this unnecessary potential danger.

So whether Milley recognizes the full implications of his stance or not, all Americans should hope that he keeps pushing this position as he continues as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs past Inauguration Day, and that even some of the globalist enthusiasts of the Biden administration start listening.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Trump’s Potentially Disastrous Germany Troops Decision

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America First, Cold War, deterrence, free-riding, Germany, military spending, NATO, North Atlantic treaty Organization, nuclear war, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Poland, The Wall Street Journal, tripwire, Trump

So where will President Trump send those U.S. troops he’ll be moving out of  Germany? That may sound like an odd question to post about, given the widespread anti-racism and police brutality protests in the United States, still deeply depressed activity across the national economy, some signs of a CCP Virus second wave, and of course the intensifying presidential election campaign.

But precisely because, as Americans hopefully are learning, crises can spring up seemingly out of nowhere, it’s a crucial subject to examine. For if President Trump comes up with the wrong answer – as is entirely possible based on what’s known so far – the stage could be set for a terrifying and completely needless nuclear showdown with Russia that could all too easily result in a nuclear attack on the U.S. homeland. And in a supreme irony, these dangers all stem from what’s been shaping up as one of the President’s sharpest and most dangerous departures from the America First principles on which he’s based much of his foreign policy.

But let’s begin at the beginning. As first reported last week in The Wall Street Journal, and pretty strongly confirmed last week, the President has decided to reduce the numbers of active duty American servicemen and women stationed permanently in Germany from 34,500 to 25,000, and cap this presence at that level.

If the troops would be heading further west on the European continent, or heading back home, that would be great news for Americans, as it would dramatically reduce nuclear war risk. As I’ve frequently written, for decades, (although in much greater numbers during the Cold War), U.S. forces have been deployed in Germany not to defend Germany militarily, but to function as a tripwire.

That is, American policymakers were under no illusion that these units would strong enough (even in tandem with the forces of U.S. allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization – NATO – like Germany) to beat back an attack from the conventional forces of the Soviet Union and its satellite allies. But Washington believed that the U.S. presence in West Germany – which bordered then-Communist East Germany) would deter a Soviet attack in the first place precisely because of its vulnerability. Specifically, the specter of American soldiers being  decimated would force an American President to try saving them with nuclear weapons. The resulting prospect of the conflict threatening to escalate to the all-out nuclear leve – which would destroy the Soviet Union, too –  would supposedly be enough to keep Moscow at bay.

As I’ve also written, this strategy arguably made sense during the Cold War, when its aim was keeping in the free world camp West Germany and Western Europe and all of its formidable economic power and therefore military potential. Today, however, it not only makes no sense from a U.S. standpoint. It has become positively deranged, as the likeliest targets of post-Soviet Russian aggression (and the arenas where the U.S. forces would likeliest be sent if the shooting starts) are not the longstanding NATO members of Western Europe. Instead, they’d be sent to the newer NATO members of Eastern Europe – most of which border Russia, but whose security was never viewed as a vital U.S. interest (that is, worth risking war over), even in the Cold War days.

Even less excusably, sizable American forces have remained in Germany and elsewhere in Western Europe in part because Germany and most of the other allies keep skimping so shamefully on their own militaries – even though most have hardly been short of resources.

No ally has been a more disgraceful military free-rider than uber-wealthy Germany, and the President has been right to complain about German and broader stinginess, and to threaten major consequences if the allies’ defense budgets aren’t significantly boosted. But as I’ve also explained, he’s focused on the wrong objective: securing a fairer deal for U.S. taxpayers.

Instead, all along, he should have been seeking the removal of the American military either from Europe altogether, or its transfer far enough from the front lines to reduce meaingfully the odds of it getting entrapped in a new East-West conflict immediately. For those are the kinds of moves that would shrink to insignificance the chances of the United States getting hit by Russian nuclear warheads because of a combination of its forces being placed in a completely impossible position militarily, and because U.S. allies have been too cheap to pay for their own security.

Worst of all, though, far from moving U.S. forces away from the front lines of a Russian attack, Mr. Trump consistently has been moving them closer, by cautiously but steadily stationing more in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. And numerous reports have suggested that Poland is exactly where at least some of the 9,500 U.S. troops leaving Germany will be heading.

Because a final decision to transfer the troops to Poland hasn’t been made yet, there’s still hope that this potentially disastrous mistake can be avoided. But that outcome seems unlikely without a serious intervention from a Trump advisor influential enough to produce an about-face. Anyone out there know how I can get a hold of Jared, Ivanka, or Melania?

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Trump’s Real NATO Mistake

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allies, Article Five, Baltics, Barack Obama, Charles de Gaulle, Cold War, Europe, France, Germany, NATO, NATO expansion, North Atlantic treaty Organization, nuclear deterrence, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Poland, Russia, Soviet Union, tripwire, Trump, United Kingdom

President Trump’s tireless critics are at it again, accusing him of calling into question America’s “sacred” and allegedly legally binding obligation to come to the military defense of any of its European allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) if they come under armed attack.

As charged by the author linked above (from the reflexively establishmentarian Brookings Institution), the president’s refusal to endorse this obligation explicitly in his speech today at alliance headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, will “raise grave doubts about the credibility of the American security guarantee and provide Russia with an incentive to probe vulnerable Baltic states.” Sounds awful – and unprecedented – right? Actually, not even close.  But as you’ll see, Mr. Trump could be on his way to creating another big – and completely unnecessary – problem.

In the first place, in concrete terms, Article Five legally obligates the United States to do absolutely nothing specifically if one of its NATO allies comes under assault. The clause simply requires treaty signatories to “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.”

And this flexibility-preserving wording is no accident, or product of jargon-addicted diplomats or international lawyers. It resulted from the U.S. Congress’ insistence that the American government and the people to which it owes its first loyalties to retain the legally recognized right to decide when to go to war. And keep in mind: Congress was determined to reserve the right to stay out of a conflict in Europe as the Cold War was reaching its height.

Just as important: The European allies recognized this right – and its implications – as well, especially after the Soviet Union’s development of major nuclear forces greatly increased the risk to the American homeland of nuclear attack if it plunged into war on the allies’ behalf. We know this for sure because the continuing ambiguity ultimately persuaded both the British and French to create their own nuclear forces. As former French President Charles de Gaulle warned, the United States could not reasonably be expected to endanger the existence of New York or Detroit to save Hamburg or Lyons.

Tragically, American leaders were so strongly opposed to its allies taking back control over their own fates that they strove almost fanatically to convince the Europeans that the United States could indeed be trusted. And Washington put its money where its mouth was, stationing hundreds of thousands of American soldiers, sailors, and air force personnel and their families on or around the European continent. The idea was to create a “trip wire” aimed at denying any U.S. President a real choice of rushing to Europe’s defense with whatever threats or means were necessary. For standing by in the face of aggression would mean a slaughter or American troops and possibly innocents by vastly superior Soviet military forces.

Even during this era of high East-West tensions, however, American leaders never completely lost sight of the desirability of shifting as much of the burden of nuclear risk as possible onto the Europeans – while maintaining as much control as possible over nuclear weapons use. The transatlantic feud over intermediate-range nuclear forces – which threatened to confine the nuclear damage of any East-West war to Europe, leaving the American and Soviet homelands unscathed – was only one prominent example. And even this U.S. aim was fatally muddied, or at best thoroughly confused, by the continuing enormous military presence in Germany, directly in the likeliest path of the Soviet conventional juggernaut.

After the Cold War ended, the tripwire was steadily dismantled, but American presidents continued to treat Article Five as an ironclad promise to defend NATO members militarily – as demonstrated by the 2013 Obama statement in the Atlantic article linked above. Moreover, once Russian military and paramilitary activity began to increase in Moscow’s “near abroad,” Washington began, hesitatingly, to be sure, to respond to the demands of the newest NATO members in Russia’s sights for U.S. tripwire forces of their own.

Hence the charges that President Trump’s latest statement could dangerously destabilize NATO’s eastern flank. But there’s far more to the situation. In the first place, there’s much evidence linking Russia’s new revanchism to NATO’s expansion eastward right up to Russia’s borders. Second, if Article Five were rigidly applied to new NATO members such as the Baltic states or former Soviet bloc countries like Poland, the United States would be running the risk of nuclear attack on behalf of countries that (a) are completely un-defendable with conventional military forces alone, because they’re right next door to Russia; and (b) consequently, have never been considered vital or even significant interests of the United States.

Troublingly, however, despite the latest Trump statement (or lack thereof), which arguably could inject the Eastern European countries with a needed dose of realism concerning their real options in dealing with Moscow, the president has so far continued the policy of incrementally responding to these countries’ requests for tripwires.

In other words, his big mistake isn’t casting doubt on America’s commitment to these and other European countries. For if the United States might have balked risking New York or Detroit for Hamburg or Lyons, it’s certainly not going to jeopardize an American city or two to save Warsaw or Vilnius. Instead, Mr. Trump apparently is trying to fence-straddle here, which could well create the worst of both worlds on both sides of the Atlantic.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Desperately Seeking Real Retrenchment

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Afghanistan, American exceptionalism, Asia-Pacific, Baltic states, Bashir Al-Assad, boots on the ground, Charles Lanes, chemical weapons, defense budget, defense spending, Earl Ravenal, George W. Bush, international law, Iraq, ISIS, isolationism, Middle East, multilateralism, national interests, NATO, Nixon Doctrine, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, pivot, Poland, Richard Nixon, Russia, sequestration, Soviet Union, Stephen Sestanovich, Syria, Ukraine, Vietnam War, vital interests, Vladimir Putin, Washington Post

Washington Post columnist Charles Lane has just done an excellent job of demonstrating how powerfully universalist America’s bipartisan foreign policy establishment remains – even as powerful reasons keep multiplying for climbing down from this wildly ambitious approach.

According to Lane, a new book by former American diplomat and Columbia University political scientist Stephen Sestanovich bears out President Obama’s claim to be a kindred spirit with Richard M. Nixon as a “retrenchment” president – one of the chief executives who has sought to “correct the perceived overreaching of their predecessors and free up U.S. resources for domestic concerns.” In fact, says Lane, Sestanovich has written that post-World War II U.S. foreign policy has been marked by a “constant pendulum-swing between administrations that aggressively pursued U.S. goals abroad” (who the author calls “maximalists”) and those Nixon- and Obama-style retrenchers.

I hate to comment on books I haven’t yet read. But Lane’s description of Mr. Nixon and Mr. Obama both qualify as retrenchers reveals a mindset so enthusiastic about massive and potentially open-ended U.S. involvement in literally every corner of the world if necessary that it sees even talk about a more discriminating approach as a major departure.

Judging by the record, it hasn’t been. In fact, both the Nixon talk and the Obama talk about retrenchment have been overwhelmingly that – talk. Just as important, and closely related, what have arguably looked at least superficially like exercises in retrenchment have in fact been exercises in wishful thinking. Both presidents have actually agreed that the security, stability, and even prosperity of the entire world are U.S. vital interests. They’ve simply differed with the maximalists in insisting that these interests can be defended through means that are less dangerous and violent, and more globally popular, than the unilateral U.S. use of military force.

To cite the leading historical example, the ballyhooed Nixon Doctrine of 1970 was never a decision to cross Vietnam or any part of Asia off the list of vital U.S. interests – those whose defense was thought essential for maintaining America’s own security and prosperity. As explained initially by Earl C. Ravenal shortly after the Doctrine’s declaration, Mr. Nixon had decided, in the absence of any evidence, that this vital set of objectives could be defended without an early resort to U.S. military involvement – chiefly, by the militaries of America’s regional allies.

Therefore, Ravenal wrote:

“the Administration’s new policies and decision processes do not bring about the proposed balance [between the country’s foreign policy ends and the means to be used to attain them]; in fact, they create a more serious imbalance. Essentially we are to support the same level of potential involvement with smaller conventional forces. The specter of intervention will remain, but the risk of defeat or stalemate will be greater; or the nuclear threshold will be lower.”

President Obama has given us a different version of such dangerous wishful thinking. More accurately, he’s given us several different versions. His original 2008 candidacy for the White House was largely motivated by a conviction that the overly unilateralist and militaristic tendencies of George W. Bush had produced disaster in Iraq, and were actually undermining U.S. security by damaging America’s international image.

That’s why Mr. Obama focused so much attention on repairing that image. He never indicated that he would scale back that list of U.S. vital interests. He simply suggested that they could be better defended if need be by acting multilaterally, with international approval, rather than by going it alone. And he conveyed the clear impression that challenges could be prevented in the first place if only America became more popular in regions like the Middle East.

Once in office, Mr. Obama did try to establish a hierarchy of U.S. worldwide interests that would have operational impact. He decided that the nation had been so preoccupied with Middle East wars that it had been neglected the Asia-Pacific region, which he considered at least as important. So he launched a “pivot” that would transfer some American forces from the former to the latter.

But the president never apparently judged the Middle East to be less important to America’s fate. He simply concluded that, with the Afghanistan and Iraq wars supposedly winding down, it had become less dangerous. Having been proven wrong by the rise of ISIS. in Afghanistan, he’s (gradually) boosting the American military presence in region again. The president is claiming, moreover – based on as little evidence as Mr. Nixon required – that any remaining capabilities gap can be filled by the armed forces of regional countries. Worse, many of his Republican critics, who are just as reluctant to deploy many more U.S. “boots on the ground,” agree with Mr. Obama’s fundamental assessment.

Further, the president has actually expanded the list of circumstances in the Middle East (and presumably elsewhere) that should justify American military responses – the kinds of chemical weapons attacks launched by Bashir Al-Assad against Syrians revolting against his dictatorship, along with similar major violations of international law.  (This effort, so far, has not yet won over the public.)

Nor does that exhaust Mr. Obama’s efforts to lengthen the list of U.S. vital interests. He has understandably responded to Russia’s recent provocations against allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) by strengthening U.S. forces and deploying them more conspicuously in new NATO members like Poland and the Baltic states, former Soviet satellites clearly in Moscow’s line of fire. Less understandable have been the Obama administration’s numerous suggestions that the security of Ukraine, too, is a matter of urgent American concern – even though this country was actually part of the old Soviet Union for decades with no apparent effects on U.S. safety or well-being.

Yet like the debate over countering ISIS, that over dealing with Vladimir Putin spotlights one major difference between President Obama and his (mainly) Republican foreign policy critics: Many of them have strongly backed big boosts in the U.S. military budget (if not always using these forces), including aggressive moves to circumvent spending caps established by the sequestration process. Mr. Obama has not sought comparable increases.

The president unquestionably has often spoken in terms that seem to support a smaller U.S. role in the world – e.g., his remarks suggesting that America’s exceptionalism isn’t all that exceptional, and reminding that much of the world has legitimate historical grievances against the West, and in some cases against the United States specifically. But his strategic walk has never matched this talk, and the continuing flood of contentions to the contrary in the punditocracy and even academe (if Lane’s Post column is accurate) plainly are serving their (partly) intended purpose of preventing searching debate on foreign policy fundamentals.

Given the nation’s resulting over-extension militarily, therefore, when the chattering class powers-that-be start labeling presidents or most other politicians as retrenchers or minimalists (an improvement to be sure over the hackneyed charge of “isolatonism”), the only legitimate reaction is a thoroughly exasperated, “If only.”