Trump has said that he "just liked the expression" America First and denied he is an isolationist. His ignorance of history and foreign policy has led him to simply denounce wars that began during other president's terms because he doesn't know what else to say. But to the extent that he has a philosophy about interventionism at all, it's that America should "win" wars and then "take the resources." Oh, and allies should pay protection money if they want the United States to adhere to its treaty commitments. NATO members have heard him loud and clear when he said this recently:The NATO alliance has been remarkably durable. But the European allies are now marking time until the November election. Even if convicted felon Trump does not pull out of NATO if he’s elected for a new term as President, the Russo-Ukraine War and the increasing instability of American politics with the insurrectionist turn of the Trumpified Republican Party have shown European leaders that US support for European security in case of a conflict with Russia is not something on which they can count as they did before.
One of the presidents of a big country stood up and said, “Well, sir, if we don't pay and we’re attacked by Russia, will you protect us?” I said, “You didn’t pay, you’re delinquent?” He said, “Yes, let’s say that happened.” “No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You gotta pay. You gotta pay your bills.”I'm sure it's not necessary to point out that NATO members don't pay dues and can't be "delinquent. " And it's especially rich for the notorious deadbeat Trump to lecture anyone about paying bills. (1)
The fall of the Warsaw Pact and then the Soviet Union removed the original purpose of the NATO alliance. The European left had generally been suspicious or hostile to the NATO alliance. In the case of the Moscow-aligned Communist parties, that seems understandable, quite apart from the question of to what degree their embrace of the ideology was “sincere” or whether they acted as willing extension of Soviet foreign policy.
As nostalgic as that topic may seem, the position of various EU parties toward Russian policy took on a much higher urgency in 2022 with Russia’s new invasion of Ukraine. Foreign policy is all about assessing threats and opportunities and deciding with which countries to have more friendly relations and which to be less friendly. And, in the real world, countries make great effort to influence the opinions of decision-makers and political actors in other countries.
There are laws regulating what kinds of contacts and activities are considered legitimate and which are not. Ideologies can play a role, as in the current Western narrative about liberal democracies confronting autocracies. NATO also has formal democracy requirements for membership, though the alliance found it convenient to work around backsliding by Greece and Turkey in that regard. This is why diplomats and country specialists are so important in constructing and managing foreign policy. One of the drawbacks of the post-1989 “unipolar moment” of overwhelming US military dominance is that the professional diplomats were too often ignored or sidelined in favor of military blundering under the guidance of characters like Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld.
The decision in the Clinton Administration to expand NATO began a process that eventually ended any near-term prospect of developing what Mikhail Gorbachev had called a “common European House” for security arrangements, in which relations between Russia and the West would be based on agreed-upon principles of international stability and a maximum level of cooperation on world problems from nuclear proliferation and climate change to energy and assistance for development in the Global South.
Could it have worked out differently? Probably, but we can’t turn the clock back to 1989 now. The outcome that culminated, we might say, with the 2022 Russo-Ukraine War does give some validity to the fear of left and realist critics who feared that NATO would be tempted to overreach in a way that led to more military conflict rather than less. The NATO attack on Serbia to support the independence of its Kosovo province was certainly a milestone in retrospect in which the US and NATO became quick to throw their weight around militarily, which ended so badly in the Iraq War.
As a practical matter, NATO since 2022 has become more popular in Europe than ever for the very practical reason that the possibility of a direct conflict between Russia and the NATO powers has now become a much more likely prospect. The decision of Finland and Sweden to become full NATO members is an indication of that shift.
Ukraine debate in current politics
In the debate in NATO countries over aid to Ukraine, the ideological fog has complicated things, of course. Because Russia does promote a political outlook, conservative and authoritarian, with which it tries to influence other countries. Are there are leaders and parties in the EU who look to Putin’s Russia as an ideological model, such as the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), the Alternative for Germany (AfD), and Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) in France.
Since the of internal model today’s Russia’s now looks much more like the capitalist authoritarian model pioneered by Benito Mussolini, it’s not surprising the Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni of the “post-fascist” Brothers of Italy (FdI) party finds affinities to the “traditional family” politics favored by Putin. This was reflected in the recent summit of the G7 countries left out the right to "safe and legal abortion" that had been included in the previous year’s version. “Both France and the US are reported to have been part of a diplomatic tug of war with Italy about whether to mention abortion in the final statement.” (2)
(Since the US headed by the Biden Administration had to sign off on the joint statement, and since abortion rights could very easily be the key issue that keeps the rabidly anti-abortion Republican Party from winning this year’s US election, that also raises the question: What the [bleep] was the White House thinking here?)
But in the case of support for aid to Ukraine, Meloni has been an advocate for it. One of Meloni’s current coalition partners, the League policy headed by Matteo Salvini, signed a five-year friendship agreement with Russia ruling party United Russia, which Salvini formally disavowed just this year.
Salvini, a deputy prime minister in Giorgia Meloni's right-wing government, is a longtime Putin admirer who used to don T-shirts emblazoned with his photo.Salvini also made clear at the time that he supported the government’s policy in favor of Ukraine aid.
He has backed sanctions against Russia since its invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and supported arms shipments to Kyiv, but largely avoided directly criticising Putin. The five-year collaboration agreement between the League and United Russia was automatically renewed in 2022. (3)
But the Western positions on aid to Ukraine have become a kind of weird shadow play. The US/NATO and Russia are playing the old games of threatening and bluffing and testing each other’s response capabilities outside of Ukraine. At least this kind of old Cold War posturing is something that Biden and his team are more capable of understanding and handling in a careful way than a new administration of convicted felon Trump would ever be.
But it’s a dangerous game nevertheless. And the idea of Ukraine driving the Russian forces out of all their sovereign territory and being able to join NATO in the foreseeable future is a bad joke. In 2022, Ukraine did show its ability with substantial Western aid to push back successfully on Russia’s initial advances. But Russia was not only able to hold up economically in face of the West’s much overrated sanctions. It has also mobilized so it can take advantage of its own military production ability and the far greater strength of its economy and its larger population compared to Ukraine’s.
The war in 2023 settled into a war of attrition in which Russia has a substantial advantage. Since Russia does consider keeping Ukraine out of NATO as part of its vital interests, however much leaders in the NATO countries might argue (or even actually believe) that Russia’s view is irrational, there is no short-term solution on the horizon for Ukraine that would quickly return even the areas Russia captured since 2022 to full Ukrainian control.
Whoever much the idea might fire the imaginations of hardcore neocons and even some liberal interventionists, the possibility of direct NATO intervention to fight directly on Ukraine’s side against Russian forces is highly unlikely, because it would be reckless and foolish. Part of the dirty secret of the NATO expansion is that the US war planners viewed it as a kind of a freebie. That is, they saw it as a way of maintaining American dominance in Europe and strengthening it power advantage over Russia. But the idea that NATO needed to be prepared for a quickly-developing conflict with Russia which was central to its planning in the Cold War years was just not part of the picture.
That’s not to say that the US didn’t take the NATO commitments seriously. It did. But now faced with the real prospect that the former huge buffer country of Ukraine will be partly held by Russia in the near term reemphasizes the reality that NATO has to be prepared for the serious possibility of an actual Russian military move on a NATO member state. There is no defense force in place on the borders of Finland or the Baltic states remotely comparable to the preparations that were kept in place to prepare West Germany for a Soviet invasion through the famous Fulda Gap in the center of today’s Germany.
In other words, Russia knows that if NATO makes a direct military intervention in non-NATO Ukraine, it has the capability to credibly threaten a conventional military move against one of the weaker frontline states as a way of forcing NATO to concentrate on its own actual mutual-defense treaty obligations. In other words, NATO expansion always came with opportunities and risks. But Western policymakers persuaded themselves to not take the actual risks as seriously as they arguably should have.
Generally speaking, most NATO nations in Europe for very practical reasons would prefer to see Russia not take full control of Ukraine. Arms manufacturers and their lobbyists always see the upside in military conflicts, of course. But some kind of stable armistice that freezes the conflict in place and allow for meaningful diplomatic negotiations for the longer term would be very beneficial for European countries. Whether either Ukraine or Russia is prepared for such a solution is a huge question, of course. Patriotic and nationalistic motives may be subjective but they are real.
As long as Ukraine itself holds out to continue the war, EU nations are likely to generally see it in their interest to continue to provide military aid and passive support. There is, of course, a moral question whether other countries should be encouraging Ukraine to continue with limited prospects of success and tremendous losses to themselves in the war.
On the other hand, elementary moral considerations would have dictated that the Biden Administration cut off military aid to Israel somewhere around last November 1, once it was clear what a vicious attack directed against civilians it was going to be. Instead, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is scheduled to appear in Washington later this month to address Congress in what amounts to a campaign rally for convicted felon Donald Trump.
If something like Hegel’s World Spirit is directing human history in the background, its moral sensibilities often seem to be not very acute.
If at this time next year, the European members of NATO are dealing with a situation where the US President has announced he will not honor the NATO defense commitment or pulls out of NATO altogether, the European nations will be concentrating ever harder on preparing for a credible defense against a possible future Russian attack. Their willingness to provide continuing aid to Ukraine in a war that Ukraine cannot win in any near term. That’s how alliances work. The actual allies have to take precedent over friendly nations that may be formal allies sometime in the future.
It seems to be a truism among chronic anti-Russia hawks that the US support of the Islamic terrorists in Afghanistan who back in the day the US press cheerfully praised as brave Mujahedeen freedom fighters was what brought down the Soviet Union. Anti-Russia hawks tend to have active imaginations, though not always very creative. Fortunately, the only downside for the West in that process was that the brave Mujahedeen freedom fighters became essentially the founders of what we known today as the wicked jihadist fanatic terrorist movement.
Still, since being wrong tends not to discourage such chronic hawks from repeating their favorite errors over and over, it’s entirely likely that even in the post-US-NATO scenario, many of them will demand that Europe make the war in Ukraine their top defense priority.
By the way, there was just a Ukraine Peace Summit this past weekend. The Quincy Institute discusses it here, with a panel including John Mearsheimer, whose views of Ukraine are chronically, annoying difficult to disregard. (4)
Quick summary: the Peace Summit didn’t amount to much of anything substantive. As Mearsheimer points out in the video, the Ukraine decisions from the G7 summit were more substantive, including the idea of a 10-year security agreement with Ukraine. Which he warns, pretty emphatically, is a bad idea at this moment.
Notes:
(1) Parton, Heather Digby (2024): MAGA marks 80th anniversary of D-Day with vote to defund NATO. Salon 06/05/2024. <https://www.salon.com/2024/06/05/maga-marks-80th-anniversary-of-d-day-with-vote-to-defund-nato/> (Accessed: 2024-05-06).
(2) Armstrong, Kathryn (2024): Italy's Meloni plays down G7 abortion row. BBC News 06/15/2024. <https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c511x7j9j0eo> (Accessed: 2024-17-06).
(3) Italy's League disavows accord with Russia's ruling party. Reuters 04/02/2024. <https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/italys-league-disavows-accord-with-russias-ruling-party-2024-04-02/> (Accessed: 2024-17-06).
(4) The Ukraine “Peace Summit”. Quincy Institute YouTube channel 06/18/2024. <https://www.youtube.com/live/iZUBkAu4VT4?si=pVV7O67H0hDu_OJ9> (Accessed: 2024-17-06).
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