Stanley Sloan and the state of NATO

The "crisis in transatlantic relations" is something that has been part of NATO politics pretty much since the day it was created.

This book was published in 2004 - complete with a blurb at the top from Status Quo Joe Biden himself!

In September 2004, the Wilson Center held a conference on the topic The Crisis in Transatlantic Relations.

The differences over the Iraq War didn't stop the expansion of NATO to include Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia in 2004, followed by Albania and Croatia in 2009 and Montenegro in 2017.

Trump's election to the Presidency has brought a new chapter in the Crisis in Transatlantic Relations. The latest episode made the news again this weekend when Stanley Sloan, a US expert on NATO, was vetoed by the State Department as a speaker at a scheduled NATO conference in Denmark, which as a result was cancelled by the Danish Atlantic Council, which was sponsoring the event. This kind of State Department intervention to veto a speaker with thoroughly Establishment credentials is unusual, as Mariel Padilla reports (NATO Conference Is Canceled After U.S. Ambassador Barred a Trump Critic New York Times 12/08/2019):

Mr. Sloan, a visiting scholar at Middlebury College in Vermont, a fellow at the Atlantic Council and a former analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency, planned to speak about the future of trans-Atlantic relations.

One day before he was set to leave for Copenhagen, Mr. Sloan was informed that the United States Embassy in Copenhagen had vetoed his participation because of his previous criticisms of President Trump, Mr. Sloan said on Facebook on Saturday.

Carla Sands, the United States ambassador to Denmark, did not want Mr. Sloan to participate, and the Danish Atlantic Council “had no other option” than to revoke his invitation to speak, Lars Bangert Struwe, the secretary general of the council, said in a statement.

Mr. Sloan said the decision had left him “stunned and concerned about our country.”

Sloan has been tweeting about the incident.

It is here for your viewing: https://t.co/S2eiZ9ruH0 https://t.co/ZwTAkcmlut

— Stanley R. Sloan - Defense of the West (@srs2_) December 8, 2019

The page he links contains further links to his work, including his notes for the speech that he couldn't deliver because Dear Leader Baby Trump doesn't want to hear people criticizing his bumbling, fumbling, laughingstock of a foreign policy, Crisis in transatlantic relations: what future will we choose? The speech itself is largely boilerplate Atlanticist assumptions and is thoroughly conventional. He states his perspective as follows:

• I support liberal democracy as the best, albeit not perfect, political system for our countries.
• My outlook on how to defend the West is influenced as much by this ideological bias as it is by the need for governments to defend against physical threats.
• Finally, in my years of working on transatlantic relations I’ve analyzed and written about many “crises.”
• It’s my judgment that the crisis currently facing the West is the most dangerous of any seen in the past seven decades.

NATO has never been overly disturbed by incidents of member states departing from liberal democracy, e.g., the military government in Greece 1967-1974, various military governments in Turkey and Tayyip Erdoğan's authoritarian Islamist government today, Viktor Orbán's authoritarian regime in Hungary.

Since NATO is an alliance focused on Europe, he takes a Eurocentric view:

Of course, “the West” is more than the transatlantic alliance

When the term is defined broadly, it certainly includes Eastern democracies such as Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand.

Ultimately, however, the members of NATO and the European Union represent the heart of what we call “the West.’

We could quibble with how he uses "the West" as a normative standard, i.e., Japan is part of "the West" but Russia isn't? But it's not the kind of thing that would raise anyone's eyebrows on Morning Joe.

Sloan makes the sensible point that miltiary budgets are always a matter of political decisions, "so the transatlantic alliance will be perpetually plagued by a 'burdensharing' problem."

He does make an explicit if general criticism of the Trump Administration:

Meanwhile, the American guarantee of European security has, under President Trump, become very uncertain. Mutual trust among leaders of alliance nations is at an all-time low.

The [recent NATO] London meeting did little to reassure us.

And, the threat from Russia has become even more intrusive.

Russia’s Putin is getting a helping hand from our president as well as from radical right populist politicians here in Europe.

He sketches out his (also thoroughly conventional) view of challenges from Russia, China, and international terrorism.

Sloan's description of what he sees as the possibility of a "radical negative change" in NATO sounds like a lazy recitation of decades-old Cold War talk, with Moscow as the mastermind of a European Communist movement replaced by Moscow as the mastermind of a European fascist movement. Actually, Putin's government seems far more interested in encouraging political chaos where it can rather than promoting some ideology encouraging Putin-style governments in other countries.

And what would such a presentation be without an invocation of "Munich"? He describes in his "radical negative change" scenario:

In this hypothetical scenario, Trump continues the process of abandoning US international leadership and decides to remove all US forces from Europe.

Trump tweets that he and Vladimir Putin have agreed that such a move would promote peace and security in Europe.

In response, European allies discuss creating strong, integrated European defense structures to replace the transatlantic NATO one.

But they find it too challenging politically and financially.

Even the overwhelming cost estimate projected in 2019 by the IISS for the EU members to create a defense system as capable as that of NATO turns out to be overly optimistic.

Several member countries suggest that the EU should follow the US lead and sign a peaceful relations accord with Russia, in which both sides pledge to take no aggressive actions against the other.

Even though some commentators immediately label this “the 21st century Munich,” most European governments decide they have little choice.

In addition, this move toward accommodation with Russia strengthens illiberal pro-Moscow parties throughout Europe.

That leads to the election of several national administrations that lean toward fascist forms of governance and away from liberal democracy. [my emphasis]

Not a particularly creative formulation. But, as John Kenneth Galbraith observed, the "comfort of convenient belief" can be very attractive in itself. (The Culture of Contentment, 1992) But it often renders its adherents incapable of recognizing important changes and developments not included int he conventional wisdom.

Galbraith also reminds us of the consequences of the kind of threat inflation previously associated with Western views the USSR and justified by the Munich Analogy:

The natural focus of concern was the Soviet Union and its once seemingly stalwart satellites in Eastern Europe. Fear of the not inconsiderable competence of the Soviets in military technology and production provided the main pillar of support for American military spending. However, the alarm was geographically comprehensive. It supported expenditure and military action against such improbable threats as those from Angola, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Grenada, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Laos, Cambodia and, massively, tragically and at great cost, from Vietnam. From being considered a source of fear and concern, only Communist China was, from the early 1970s on, exempt. Turning against the Soviet Union and forgiven for its earlier role in Korea and Vietnam, it became an honorary bastion of democracy and free enterprise, which, later repressive actions notwithstanding, it rather substantially remains.

Which is also a reminder of the risk of threat inflation in relation to today's Russia. And that's a big issue for NATO, an alliance that has expanded greatly in the last three decades but has nevertheless been an alliance in search of a mission since the fall of the USSR in 1992.

The comfortable conventional view of China that Galbraith described there has now been replaced by China as a pressing threat.

US and NATO foreign policy would be well served by a couple of changes: (1) a more pragmatic and realistic view of threats, which also means one not deferential to profit goals of the armaments industries; and, (2) burying the Munich Analogy, which main consequence has long been to encourage a dangerous habit threat inflation.