Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Glimmers of Hope on Ukraine?

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Biden, Blob, chemical weapons, cyber-war, David Ignatius, Donbas, EU, European Union, NATO, North Atlantic treaty Organization, nuclear war, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Russia, Ukraine, Ukraine-Russia war, Vladimir Putin, Volodymyr Zelensky

As known by long-time readers of RealityChek (see, e.g., here and here), I’m no fan of David Ignatius. Literally for decades, the Washington Post pundit has veritably personified the Blob – that mainly New York City- and really mainly Washington, D.C.-based mutually reenforcing network of current political leaders and senior bureaucrats, Congressional staff, former officials, other hangers-on of various kinds, consultants, think tankers, academics, and journalists who have long championed globalist U.S. foreign policies despite the needless national security and economic damage they’ve caused.

Not so incidentally, they keep moving in an out of public service so continuously that they’ve not only blurred the crucial lines between these spheres, but they’ve more than earned the term “permanent (and of course unelected) government.”

So imagine my surprise when I opened my Washington Post Thursday morning and discovered that Ignatius had written what may be the most important American commentary yet on the Ukraine War. His main argument is that President Biden and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin have each decided on a set of goals that could reduce the chances of the conflict spilling across Ukraine’s borders, and especially into the territory of neighbors that enjoy a strong U.S. defense guarantee. This chain of events could all-too-easily lead to direct U.S.-Russia military conflict that could just as easily escalate to the all-out nuclear war level.

But the goals identified by Ignatius are encouraging because they indicate that both Mr. Biden and Putin have retreated from dangerously ambitious objectives they’ve referred to throughout the war and its prelude. For the U.S. President, this means a climb-down from his administation’s declarations that Russia can’t be allowed to establish anything close to a sphere of influence that includes Ukraine, and that would prevent it and potentially any country in Eastern Europe from setting its own defense and foreign economic policies.

For Putin, this means confining his aims to controlling the eastern Ukraine provinces with large Russian-speaking populations, not the entire country

Ignatius’ most convincing evidence regarding the American position is Mr. Biden’s statement on Thursday that with its growing military support for Ukraine, the entire western alliance was  “sending an unmistakable message to Putin: He will never succeed in dominating and occupying all of Ukraine. He will not — that will not happen.” As Ignatius pointed out, this statement, “though resolute in tone, left open the possibility that Putin might occupy some of Ukraine, in the southeastern region where Russian attacks are now concentrated.”

Moreover, this Ignatius observation matters considerably in large measure precisely because the author is so well plugged in to the staunchly globalist Biden administration. If he’s putting points like this in print, the odds are good that it’s because he’s heard them from genuinely reliable sources, and even because those sources are using him as a vehicle for trial balloon floating.

Ignatius’ most convincing evidence regarding the Kremlin’s position is Putin’s statement the same day that the Russian forces that have virtually destroyed the southern Ukrainian city of Mariupol have “sacrificed their lives so that our people in Donbas [the aforementioned eastern Ukraine region] live in peace and to enable Russia, our country, to live in peace.”

Those last words in particular suggest that Putin now believes a Russia-dominated Donbas can serve as an acceptable buffer between Russian territory and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) that expanded its membership in the 1990s and early 2000s to countries directly bordering Russia.

On this issue, though, big questions remain: Would Putin permit what’s left of Ukraine join NATO (in which President Volodymyr Zelensky has said he no longer interested) or the European Union (which Ukraine still wants)? Or would Moscow let a rump Ukraine do what it wished on these defense and economic fronts? At the same time, the very uncertainty created by these Russian and Ukrainian (and now U.S.) statements makes clear there’s a deal that can be struck before Ukraine experiences much more suffering.

But as Ignatius himself notes, this week’s Biden and Putin positions are anything but guarantees against disastrous escalation. The reason? As I’ve written, the longer the fighting lasts and especially the more intense it becomes, the likelier spillover gets – whether from air raids to artillery strikes to the spread of toxic clouds from exploded chemical or even nuclear weapons, to cyber attacks (e.g., by Russia against U.S. or other western computer systems intended to interfere with the Ukraine weapons supply effort or with the West’s intelligence sharing with Kyiv).

So the Biden and Putin statements may be necessary developments for securing a non-disastrous end to the Ukraine war, but they’re hardly sufficient. Some serious form of outside pressure looks to be essential — either President Biden on Zelensky, or (seemingly less likely) China on Putin. Without it, Americans — and Ukrainians — arguably are left with hoping for the best, a strategy with an historically unimpressive record of success.        

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 Strongly Does Most of the World Really “Stand with Ukraine”?

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General Assembly, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Russia, The New York Times, Ukraine, Ukraine-Russia war, United Nations, Vladimir Putin

The New York Times deserves a lot of credit for running this article yesterday, which reported that, as the headline observed, “In Some Parts of the World, the War in Ukraine Seems Justified.” At the same time, there’s strong evidence that “some” greatly understates the case – to the point that it’s entirely unclear that the piece’s supposedly context-providing claim that “Most of the world has loudly and unequivocally condemned [Vladimir] Putin for sparking a war with Ukraine” holds much water.

If you’re skeptical, just look at the United Nations General Assembly vote condemning the Russian dictator’s invasion and demanding its immediate end and the total, unconditional withdrawal of Moscow’s forces from all of Ukraine’s “internationally recognized borders.”

Yes, the resolution voted on was sponsored by 90 of the 193 UN members and backed by 141 – more than the two-thirds required for adoption. And yes, only Russia and four other equally reprehensible dictatorships (including satellite state Belarus and client state Syria) voted “No.”

But 35 countries abstained and 14 UN members didn’t vote at all. And the abstaining countries represented a huge share of the world’s estimated population of nearly eight billion. Between China and India alone, we’re talking more than 35 percent of the global total. (These and the population figures below come from the reliable Worldometers.info website.) 

And you can add to these abstainers’ ranks Pakistan (221 million), Bangladesh (167 million), Vietnam (97 million), Iran (84 million), South Africa (59 million), Uganda (45 million), Sudan and Algeria (44 million each). The non-voters, meanwhile, included Ethiopia (115 million).

Do the math, and these countries’ populations sum to just under 3.7 billion. That’s nearly 47 percent of the global total – and it doesn’t even include Russia’s 146 million people

No one’s saying that most of these countries’ governments are democracies that represent the popular will (although India’s clearly is). Indeed, some of their people have publicly protested Russia’s aggression. (See, e.g., here and here.)

But nothing indicates that these demonstrators mirror majority opinion in these countries or even close, for whatever reason – ranging from the kind of sympathy for Russia reported in the Times piece to ignorance or apathy. That is, maybe big shares of these populations haven’t heard about the war to begin with, or if they have, pay little attention to its developments because they’re too preoccupied with struggling to eak out a living.   

By the same token, nothing indicates that Putin’s war enjoys broad, much less deep, support in these countries, let alone in any others, either. And it’s surely significant that the countries that have condemned the invasion account for a strong majority of the global economy. That’s even the case for the smaller group of countries that have imposed various kinds of sanctions.

The UN votes, however, do make clear that, however tempting and inspiring it is to think that  “most of the world” really does “loudly and unequivocally” Stand with Ukraine, as the Times contends, the reality is a lot more complicated.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Will a Russian Victory Really Bring On a World at War?

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Antony J. Blinken, Biden, China, Council on Foreign Relations, East China Sea, globalism, Japan, Kim Jong Un, national interests, North Korea, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Russia, South China Sea, South Korea, Taiwan, The Wall Street Journal, Ukraine, Ukraine-Russia war, Vladimir Putin, war, Xi JInPing

Not only do American leaders seem pretty united on the need for the nation to do much more to help Ukraine defend itself from Russian invaders. They and the (overwhelmingly globalist) American political and chattering classes seem largely in agreement on one of the main consequences either of permitting Russia to win, or permitting him to win without inflicting major, lasting damage on Russia’s economy – a return to a world in which aggressive dictators like Russia’s Vladimir Putin will feel much freer than they have for decades to attack their neighbors.

That fear definitely has a troubling ring of reasonableness – and all the more so since, unlike previous historical eras in which such attacks and invasions were much more common, some of the actors possess nuclear weapons.

But there’s something these warnings are overlooking. However vivid such dangers are in principle, it’s hard to identify actual places around the world where potential conquerors have been bidng their time until receiving just the kind of signal that a Russian success in Ukraine allegedly would send.

If you doubt the prominence of this argument for greater U.S. involvement in the conflict, you haven’t been paying attention. For example, in his first public remarks after the invasion, President Biden claimed that “Putin’s actions betray his sinister vision for the future of our world — one where nations take what they want by force.”

In a speech a month earlier, his Secretary of State, Antony J. Blinken, asserted that one of the post-World War II global order’s guiding principles was a rejection of

“the right of one country to change the borders of another by force; to dictate to another the policies it pursues or the choices it makes, including with whom to associate; or to exert a sphere of influence that would subjugate sovereign neighbors to its will.

“To allow Russia to violate those principles with impunity would…send a message to others around the world that these principles are expendable, and that, too, would have catastrophic results.”

The conservatives on the Wall Street Journal editorial board, who don’t agree with the Biden administration on much of anything, similarly contended that “Whether the West admits it or not, the invasion is setting a precedent for what the world will tolerate in the 21st century.”

But check out this assessment of worldwide hot spots from the Council on Foreign Relations, often called the seat of America’s globalist foreign policy establishment. Where exactly are the Putins of tomorrow whose will to international power would be even be sharpened by a Russian victory in Ukraine?

Certainly not on the Korean peninsula or in the East China Sea. North Korea no doubt has designs on neighboring South Korea, but they’ve existed for decades. Ditto for China and Taiwan. It’s true that Kim Jong Un and Xi Jinping might be emboldened by an inadequate U.S. and international response to Putin’s war. But not from any relief that global norms of behavior that had been holding them back had weakened, or that a Russian victory had set some a kind of precedent – with binding power? Because they take the idea of rule of law more seriously in their treatment of foreigners than they do in their treatment of their own people? Please.

Other than these Asian conflicts – which also include China’s expansionism in the South China Sea, but which also long predate the Ukraine war – where are the aggressors-in-waiting who may feel freer to attack their neighbors? Should we include the other East China Sea dispute, where China is involved, too – even though U.S. allies Japan and South Korea are also contesting each other’s claims to some miniscule islands?

More important, where are the global hot spots where current or potential territorial rivalries could explode into conflict that would imperil global peace and security – including America’s? Nagorno-Karabakh (on the border of Armenia and Azerbaijan, unless you’ve been following this tiff closely)? As Mr. Biden would say, “Come on, man.”

I’m sure that there are flashpoints in sub-Saharan Africa that could eventually embroil entire regions in warfare. But it’s as cold-blooded as it is true that these are regions so chronically dysfunctional (and therefore largely disconnected from the wider world) that even complete chaos has no potential to spread much further – or inspire conqueror wannabees in regions of greater concern.

Closer to home for the United States, according to the Congressionally founded U.S. Institute of Peace, some small countries in Latin America have been quarreling with neighbors over territory since 1990, and if they did ignite conflict, refugees would of course come streaming to U.S. borders. But only once – in 1995 – did one of these feuds result in war (between Ecuador and Peru). And I’m glad I don’t have to make the argument that revanchists in either country are chomping at the bit to get a symbolic green light from a Russian victory in Ukraine.

The big takeaways here clearly are (1) that the world isn’t a tinderbox likely to burst into a series of truly dangerous international conflicts depending on the outcome of Russia’s war on Ukraine; and (2) that the potential conflicts that can affect the United States consequentially are and have long been driven by their own dynamics (including current and longstanding American approaches to these situations).

So as has been the case since Russian policy toward its neighbors became more belligerent, what should be driving the U.S. response should be examinations concerning the nature of concrete, specific U.S. interests that are or are not at stake. Claims that Ukraine’s continued independence and full sovereignty are all that stand between today’s relative calm among countries (if not in terms of civil conflicts) and an entire globe engulfed in war deserve the same fate as previous alarmist concotions like the domino theory – getting tossed onto what former President Reagan memorably called the “ash heap of history.”

Im-Politic: Major U.S. Ukraine Policy Puzzles on the Home Front Remain Unsolved

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Biden, Democrats, gasoline, Iran, Iran deal, Iran nuclear deal, JCPOA, oil, oil prices, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, rural areas, Russia, sanctions, taxes, Ukraine, Ukraine invasion, Ukraine-Russia war, Vladimir Putin

Maybe you readers can help me out here, because I am really confused about what President Biden and other Democrats are saying about the biggest political and ethical issues surrounding his Ukraine war-related decision to ban oil imports from Russia and its likely effect on gasoline prices.

On the one hand, Mr. Biden and his party have portayed the higher oil prices as a sacrifice that Americans should be proud to pay in order to support Ukraine’s unexpectedly stout resistance to the Russian invasion, and one that the nation will agree to pay.

On the other hand, these Democrats have taken to blaming the higher pump prices on the Russian aggression itself, to the point of pushing the social media hashtag #PutinPriceHike.

Unquestionably, the Russian dictator’s decisions are ultimately responsible for the recent shake up in the global oil market that’s driven up prices for oil and all its derivatives (like gasoline) the world over. But now that he’s taken these steps, it seems that some fundamental consistency should be displayed in the Democrats’ case for the response they favor. For example, they could tell the public something like, “Yes, our response to the Russian attack will raise the price of oil. But higher pump prices are a sacrifice we should be proud to make for the cause of global security and freedom.” Why haven’t they?

Something else noteworthy about the stance of the President and his party. The effect of higher oil prices is the epitome of a regressive tax. In other words, because Americans at all income levels will face the same percentage increase when they pump gasoline (and when they heat their homes, if they rely on oil). So the bite on household budgets is deepest for the poorest and shallowest for the richest of us.

Higher oil prices will also surely kneecap any Democratic hopes of improving their political performance in rural America. After all, residents of the nation’s small towns and farming areas use much oil for transportation than their urban counterparts. So do the enormous number of voters in the suburbs, who played such a big role in Mr. Biden’s victory in 2020.

And let’s not forget an mammoth irony about higher U.S. and world prices for oil – as well as natural gas, another major Russian export. As has been widely observed, without steps that dramatically reduce the volume of Russian sales  globally, the more importers pay per barrel, the more revenue flows into Vladimir Putin’s treasury – and war machine. The same goes for Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, along with Iran if the President succeeds in his apparent aim of negotiating a deal aimed at preventing Tehran from building a nuclear weapon in part by lifting economic sanctions on its economy.

Whatever you think of President Biden’s approach to the Ukraine war, it should be clear that it can’t succeed for any length of time until firm support on the home front is secured. These unsolved puzzles and outright contradictions make clear how far his administration remains from achieving that essential goal. 

Following Up: Ukraine Coming to its Senses?

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ABC News, Biden, David Muir, Following Up, Fox News, NATO, North Atlantic treaty Organization, Russia, Ukraine, Ukraine-Russia war, Vladimir Putin, Volodymyr Zelensky

I’m interrupting preparing my regularly scheduled same-day report on the new official U.S. trade figures (for January) to report on a potentially game-changing development in the Ukraine crisis: President Volodymyr Zelensky told ABC News last night that he’s no longer insisting that his country retain the right to become a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

As you may remember, just yesterday, my post made the case that Zelensky’s former position – a main reason cited by Russian dictator Vladimir Putin for his invasion of Ukraine – resulted in part from the alliance’s long-time policy of treating Ukraine as a member in all but name, to the point of conducting joint exercises with Kyiv’s armed forces. At the same time, by declining to admit Ukraine officially, NATO studiously avoided formally committing to come to Ukraine’s defense if attacked. So I concluded that the alliance irresponsibly created unrealistic expectations on the part of the country’s leadership regarding its options as a next-door neighbor of a much bigger, stronger, unfriendly power.

But Zelensky’s statements last night strongly indicated that he’s stepping off that primrose path down which NATO and most recent U.S. Presidents have led Kyiv.

Specifically, he told ABC News‘ David Muir: “I have cooled down regarding this question a long time ago after we understood that … NATO is not prepared to accept Ukraine.,”

He added, “The alliance is afraid of controversial things, and confrontation with Russia.” And given the strong opposition voiced by President Biden and NATO’s leaders to sending military forces to Ukraine to help fight the Russian invaders, or to establish a No-Fly Zone over Ukraine (specifically for fear of igniting direct conflict with Russia), it’s hard to argue with his assessment.

Nor is Zelensky’s position totally out of the blue. In a development I’d missed, three days ago Ukraine’s top negotiator with Russia (and leader of Zelensky’s party in Ukraine’s parliament, told a Fox News reporter that

“The response that we are getting from the NATO countries is that they are not ready to even discuss having us in NATO, not for the closest period of five or 10 years. We would not fight for the NATO applications, we would fight for the result, but not for the process.  

“We are ready to discuss some non-NATO models. For example, there could be direct guarantees by different countries like the U.S., China, U.K., maybe Germany and France. We are open to discuss such things in a broader circle, not only in bilateral discussions with Russia, but also with other partners.”

Those specific ideas sound pretty far-fetched to me, but the signal of flexibility on this crucial bone of contention was unmistakable. So was the scorn displayed in David Arakhamia’s reference to security “guarantees that NATO is afraid of.”

Oddly, (or maybe not so oddly, given the Mainstream Media’s strongly globalist bias on foreign policy issues), these remarks by Ukrainian leaders have gone almost entirely unreported so far. Nor were they mentioned by President Biden this morning when he announced a ban on imports of oil and other energy products from Russia.

Let’s hope that the President’s silence stems from caution and information-gathering that are entirely understandable given the new Ukraine stance’s potential for peacefully ending Europe’s worst and most dangerous security and humanitarian crisis since World War II, rather than embarrassment over evidence that his own stubbornness and fecklessness (along with that of his predecessors and other NATO leaders) on the issue deserve some blame for its outbreak.

P.S. I’ll post the trade report tomorrow!

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: NATO, Ukraine, and the Primrose Path

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Austria, Finland, Finlandization, John Mearsheimer, NATO, NATO expansion, neutrality, North Atlantic treaty Organization, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Russia, Ukraine, Ukraine invasion, Ukraine-Russia war, Vladimir Putin

Lots of attention has focused lately (and rightly, IMO) on whether the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) membership ranks smack up against the Russian border wound up needlessly provoking Russian countermoves that have culminated in the invasion of Ukraine. Generally neglected but also important is examining the conflict and its runup from another angle: whether the West’s post-Cold War policies wound up leading Ukraine’s recent leaders down a primrose path, creating both unrealistic expectations about the alliance’s commitment to that country’s defense, and therefore equally unrealistic expectations in Kyiv about the best options for living on acceptable terms with Russia.

This neglect is surprising, to say the least, because so much evidence for that proposition is available from sources that can’t sanely be dismissed as apologists for Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, or as head-in-the-sand isolationists. (The latter accusation has been leveled against, notably, political scientist John Mearsheimer – who made this argument at length here back in 2015.) In fact, some of the most compelling material supporting the primrose path case comes from NATO itself. Just look at this document posted by the alliance from last month. Here are some highlights:

>NATO has permitted Ukraine to “actively contribute” (that is, fight alongside NATO forces), in “peace-support operations in Bosnia and Herzegovina, NATO’s two missions in Afghanistan, namely the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and the Resolute Support Mission, the NATO Training Mission in Iraq and the maritime operations Active Endeavour and Ocean Shield. It currently supports NATO’s Kosovo Force (KFOR) and continues to provide information in support of NATO’s maritime situational awareness in and around the Black Sea [which also borders Russia].”

>In this vein, “NATO has increased its presence in the Black Sea and stepped up maritime cooperation with Ukraine and Georgia.”

>”Furthermore, Ukraine is building capacity and interoperability through participation in the NATO Response Force as well as through the participation in exercises such as NATO’s flagship annual collective cyber defence exercise ‘Cyber Coalition’”.

>”Given this longstanding support and significant contributions to its operations, NATO offered Ukraine in June 2020 the status as Enhanced Opportunity Partner (EOP). This status works as a facilitator, providing Ukraine preferential access to NATO’s interoperability toolbox, including exercises, training, exchange of information and situational awareness….”

>”NATO supports Ukraine in building capabilities and interoperability through dedicated working groups, such as the Joint Working Group on Defence Reform, programmes….”

>”NATO has significantly stepped up its practical assistance to Ukraine following the illegal and illegitimate annexation of Crimea by Russia.”

This rhetoric and these concrete measures, moreover, have come in the context of the alliance’s landmark declaration at its 2008 summit in Romania that, “NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO.  We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO.”

So leaving aside how Putin might have interpreted these developments, it seems reasonable that they fueled Ukraine’s leaders’ refusal virtually up to the last pre-invasion minute to entertain seriously Moscow’s demand that it rethink joining NATO. (Indeed, in 2019, Ukraine enshrined this goal in its constitution.)

After all, not only did NATO endorse its bid. It was already treating Ukraine, and especially its military, as a member in numerous – and tangible – respects.

Ukraine’s leaders are of course ultimately responsible for their own decisions. And the country’s valiant (and so far seemingly pretty effective) resistance, along with the impact on Russia of western sanctions, may well wind up preserving its right to take whatever national security steps it wishes – including joining NATO.

But when I look at the fates of European countries that have been willing to accept limits on their sovereignty – namely Finlandized and prosperous Finland, and neutralized and prosperous Austria – and compare them with the death and destruction being suffered by Ukraine, I can’t help but wonder if the alliance should have actually focused on convincing Kyiv that discretion can be the better part of valor.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Biden’s Worrisome State of the Union Message to China

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alliances, allies, Biden, China, energy, inflation, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Russia, sanctions, State of the Union, Taiwan, Ukraine, Ukraine invasion, Vladimir Putin, Xi JInPing

Let’s start with a confession: I’m one of the numerous viewers and listeners who has no idea what President Biden meant when he ended his State of the Union address last night with an ad-libbed “Go get him!” right after his usual closing, “May God protect our troops.”

This seemingly provocative placement notwithstanding, it probably wasn’t a suggestion that the U.S. military would be roaring into action to help Ukraine win its war with Russia – which segues nicely into today’s theme of what message China probably gleaned from the speech.

The subject matters greatly because Chinese leaders have been eyeing a takeover of Taiwan and threatening the island’s independence even longer than Vladimir Putin has been eyeing a takeover of Ukaine, and for similar stated reasons. Just as Putin insists that Ukraine historically has been part of Russia, Beijing views Taiwan as a renegade province of China. And although there’s no important connection I can see between Ukraine’s fate and America’s own security and prosperity, Taiwan is the world leader in semiconductor manufacturing technology – which is crucial to U.S. military power and economic well-being.

That’s why I’m concerned that too much of the Biden speech signaled to China that its increasingly aggressive moves against the island can continue and even intensify with impunity.

For not only did the President once again vow that “our forces are not engaged and will not engage in conflict with Russian forces in Ukraine.” He added that “I’m taking robust action to make sure the pain of our sanctions  is targeted at Russia’s economy. And I will use every tool at our disposal to protect American businesses and consumers.”

In other words, although “we the United States of America stand with the Ukrainian people,” that’s only true as long as Americans themselves don’t run any significant risks or pay any significant price.

Nor is this Biden qualification limited to words. It’s precisely to avoid boosting already lofty U.S. inflation rates even higher than the President has excluded energy from his anti-Russia sanctions package so far – even though Putin’s massive earnings from oil and gas exports clearly help finance his Ukraine war. 

Mr. Biden did repeat his pledge that “the United States and our Allies will defend every inch of territory of NATO countries with the full force of our collective power.” But like Ukraine, which is not a member of that North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Taiwan is not an official ally. Therefore, China could well conclude that the United States would stay out of a Taiwan conflict for similar reasons.

The State Department has warned that “We have an array of tools that we can deploy if we see foreign companies, including those in China, doing their best to backfill U.S. export control actions, to evade them, to get around them.”

But if the administration’s top Ukraine sanctions priority to date has been shielding the U.S. economy from their impact, you couldn’t blame Xi Jinping’s regime for not taking seriously the notion that Washington would punish China for propping up Putin.

After all, the United States (unforgivably) has become highly dependent on his economy for a wide range of products. China’s markets for U.S. goods and services simply dwarf Russia’s. And indeed, these links have become so broad and deep that nearly the entire American big business community has become an ardent and highly effective lobby for preventing any boat-rocking. .

None of the above is to say that U.S. rhetoric and moves on the Ukraine, or any other foreign policy fronts, will be the sole or even the main determinants of China’s Taiwan strategy. After all, Beijing has been ramping up pressure on the island long befor the conflict in Eastern Europe broke out – for reasons ranging from concerns about Taiwan declaring its formal independence and potentially exposing China as a paper tiger in the process to Xi’s decision to link “reunification” to his legacy.

But just as American leaders should never make threats they can’t or won’t back up (or make commitments that create many more dangers than they can prevent, which I believe to be the case with NATO’s expansion into Eastern Europe and years of talk about adding Ukraine and other Russian neighbors), they need to be careful about signaling weakness or timidity. And I fear that’s exactly what was conveyed to China by the sharp contrast between President Biden’s apocalyptic warnings about the need to resist Putin’s aggression and the tight limits he revealed to his willingness to do so.              

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: America’s Running Around in Circles on Spheres of Influence

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Antony Blinken, Biden, Biden adminisration, Cuban Missile Crisis, Fidel Castro, Jake Sullivan, James Monroe, Monroe Doctrine, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Russia, Sergei Ryabkov, sphere of influence, Ukraine, Vladimir Putin, Western Hemisphere

Now here’s an utterly whacko turn taken by U.S. policy toward the Ukraine crisis that pretty astonishingly has gone unnoticed: The Biden administration keeps insisting (e.g., in the words of Secretary of State Antony Blinken), that “One country does not have the right to dictate the policies of another or to tell that country with whom it may associate; one country does not have the right to exert a sphere of influence. That notion should be relegated to the dustbin of history.”

At the same time, this same administration has recently reemphasized that the United States will keep exerting a sphere of inflence in the Western Hemisphere – the same sphere of influence that was first declared when President James Monroe laid out his famous doctrine in 1823,and that has been rigorously enforced repeatedly. (Google, e.g., “Cuban Missile Crisis.”)

As Monroe stated:

“[W]e should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety. With the existing colonies or dependencies of any European power we have not interfered and shall not interfere, but with the Governments who have declared their independence and maintained it, and whose independence we have, on great consideration and on just principles, acknowledged, we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European power in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States.”

President Biden’s White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan wasn’t quite so wordy answering a reporter’s question on January 13, but here’s his response when asked to

“address the [Russian] Deputy Foreign Minister’s comments suggesting that the — that Russia could deploy forces — or wouldn’t rule out deploying forces in Latin America?  Is that something that the U.S. is concerned about?  Is that something that came up in those discussions?”

Said Sullivan: “I’m not going to respond to bluster in the public commentary.  That wasn’t raised in the discussions at the Strategic Stability Dialogue.  If Russia were to move in that direction, we would deal with it decisively.”

Do you see any significant difference with Monroe’s remarks? Of course not. But they could not be more different than Blinken’s declaration, especially when you consider that the Russian official in question, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, never suggested that Moscow would send forces to Latin America against a prospective host country’s will.

This last observation matters a lot because during the most important invokation of the Monroe Doctrine – that aforementioned 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and the run up to it – it was Cuban dictator Fidel Castro who asked the Soviet Union to provide him with weapons and even troops to defend his regime (following the failed U.S.-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion by Cuban exiles), not the other way around. And Castro had no problem with the alternative proposed by Moscow – those missiles.

At this point, it’s absolutely vital to point out that I’m not contending here that since the United States has declared – and still declares – a sphere of influence in its neighborhood that Russia or any other country has some kind of innate right to declare one in their neighborhood. I’m not even arguing that the United States is being hypocritical in claiming a sphere of its own while decrying similar claims by others.

That’s because it’s nothing less than inane, and in fact downright childish and often dangerous, to view these matters in terms or rights or even simple consistency. Because in the international sphere — which lacks any commonly accepted, much less enforceable, definitions of acceptable behavior – questions of principle and the like have absolutely nothing to do with a country’s ability to protect or advance interests it considers important, right up to survival. A country either has the power (in any of its dimensions, either alone or in combination with others) or some other capacity (shrewdness?) to achieve these goals or it doesn’t. And relying on these kinds of abstractions (including the illusion, in the security field, of effective international law), as opposed to power considerations, is a surefire formula for failure, defeat, or even worse.

As a result, it is supremely unimportant whether the United States or Russia or any other country or group of countries views anything like another’s sphere of influence as legitimate or hypocritical or downright despicable or possessing any other moral or ethical characteristic. What is supremely important is whether or not the United States or Russia, or any other actors, has the capacity, or determination to create the capacity, to defend its own sphere or any other claim, or to challenge successfully anyone else’s claim.

When it comes to Ukraine, nothing could be clearer than Russia’s ability to defend a sphere and the United States’ inability to bring it to an end it and unwillingness to build the ability to do so. When it comes to the Western Hemisphere, the reverse holds.

Just as important: The consolidation of a Russian sphere in Ukraine or other neighbors not already U.S. treaty allies shouldn’t significantly trouble Americans in the slightest. They literally have no dog in that fight. That’s because, as I’ve written repeatedly, the United States has no vital or even significant stake in Ukraine’s status, and because, as a result, any effort to change this status with the only instrument capable of succeeding (the military), could all too easily amount to suicidal folly given Russia’s conventional military superiority in its own backyard and its vast nuclear arsenal,

By a comparable token, the United States shouldn’t be troubled in the slightest by any arguments by neighbors or others that policies like the Monroe Doctrine undermine their sovereignty or any other rights they think they possess. That’s because the United States does have vital stakes in keeping foreign military forces out of the Western Hemisphere. In other words, those claims by other countries can never be remotely as important to Americans as whatever requirements for their national security or well-being their own political system determines – that is, unless they don’t attach much value to self-preservation and similar goals.

There’s no telling how the Ukraine crisis will turn out, and how Washington will ultimately respond. But it does seem clear that an administration that issues such totally conflicting statements on spheres of influence as those by Sullivan and Blinken isn’t increasing the odds of anything that any Americans could justifiably applaud.