Agnieszka Brugger is the deputy chairperson for the German Green party in the Bundestag (lower House of the German Parliament). She posted on Facebook on August 20 this call for the current government to become more assertive in its defensive posture in relation to Russia.
The current German government is a coalition headed by the conservative Christian Democratic Union (DCU/CSU) with the Social Democrats as the junior partner (SPD). CDU leader Friedrich Merz is the current Chancellor (Prime Minister) and the Vice Chancellor is Lars Klingbeil of the SPD. The Interior Minister responsible for internal security is Alexander Dobrindt (CSU).
It gives us an interesting glimpse at current national and European defense politics in Germany.
My translation to English:
What more still has to happen, Herr Merz and Dobrindt?
Make security the main thing. Be done with the irresponsible slowness, not just since the failed terrorist attack in Leipzig.
Such attacks on our country should not pass without consequences. Everyone who challenges us in this way should have to expect serious consequences.
Our country must become more resilient in the face of Russia’s strategy of testing us with drone overflights and hybrid attacks. We need real technical improvements in defense against drones, very clear responsibility and real consequences. That’s why we have made concrete recommendations in our proposal. The [German] Federal Government keeps on ducking away. And that means that every non-reaction will be read in the Kremlin as encouragement to escalate further to the next step. The necessary actions [by Germany] are missing.
That is not taking adequate responsibility for our national security and our democracy in these serious times. [emphasis added]
The “failed terrorist attack in Leipzig” refers the recent incident with a mystery drone showing up at the Leipzig Airport that I discussed in an August 10 post. Now there have been three drones discovered as part of the same incident. Kate Connolly reported on August 25:
German investigators uncovered a third drone and suspected military explosives thought to be connected to an attempted attack on Leipzig airport, local media have reported.
The drone was discovered in Kabelsketal, just to the west of the airport, along with about 50g (1.8oz) of a suspected military explosive on 14 August, 10 days after the unsuccessful sabotage. Leipzig airport is a cargo and military logistics hub used by Nato and Ukraine’s Antonov Airlines for transporting military supplies.
The office of the prosecutor general, which is leading the investigation, declined to comment on Tuesday. But the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said the government would soon provide information about who it believed was behind the drone attacks.
“They will pay for this,” Merz said, stopping short of naming a suspect, before a cabinet meeting in Brandenburg. He added that the government was “working intensively on this together with the security authorities and we will present our findings and comment on them shortly”.
The German government has so far avoided expressing a clear position as to whether it thinks Russia, or an actor close to it, is responsible. (1)
Based on the reports I’ve seen so far, it’s hard to imagine that the attack was a serious attempt to down or destroy a plane. Because of the Russia-Ukraine War, it’s very plausible that Russia could have been behind the attacks. And the German government of course has to take that seriously. But especially as long as that war goes on, there will be continual instances of Russia and the European NATO allies testing each other over how well the other side is responding to threats, including cyber-attacks of various kinds.
I’m chronically suspicious of the term “hybrid war.” Because acts of war are acts of war, espionage is espionage, and provocations are provocations. But Germany and its European allies are exceptionally unlikely to initiate a major military attack on Russia because of some half-assed drone “attacks” like the Leipzig incident. I’m particularly suspicious of characterizations of refugee flows like the strange recent incident in the Spanish city of Ceuta as part of “hybrid war.” That characterization plays into the lead issue used by far-right parties, i.e., xenophobia.
Agnieszka Brugger’s urgent message about stepping up national defense preparedness is consistent with the position the Green Party has been taking since the Balkan Wars of the 1990s. The Greens started as a militant environmentalist and pacifist party. And they maintain the environmental emphasis. And while they take more of a “realist” position in foreign policy than an aggressively “neoconservative” one, Green spokespeople aren’t necessarily emphasizing cautions against warmonger in the current situation.
With the Trump Administration increasing making disastrous blunders in military and economic policy, the European NATO members are in a serious moment of transition that includes developing more consistent shared European foreign and military policies. And that includes a broad range of risks in striking the right balances of realistic defense and diplomatic posturing, all the while trying to avoid direct military hostilities with either Russia or the US. And it involves complicated challenges in armament policies, particularly with the successful use of drone warfare that Ukraine and Iran have been demonstrating. It also involves messy possibilities and real challenges with the use of new AI technology in warfare. But those are also areas where the manufacturers of the most expensive missiles and airplanes and space-war system may not want to give up some of their very high-margin products for cheaper but more effective systems that may not have such high margins.
And the fact that the foreign policy of the US has to an amazing extent degenerated in ill-informed blundering around by a President seemingly suffering from serious dementia at operating with the mentality of a Mob boss doesn’t make calculations about the immediate future of European security practices any easier!
This is a roughly 45-minute discussion in two parts about Trump’s foreign policy on Venezuela from the MeidasTouch Legal AF “Court of History” podcast with Sidney Blumenthal, and Sean Wilentz (one of my favorite historians) and Jonathn Winer. All three legitimately qualify as “old white guys.” But they are considerably more in touch with reality than Trumpista freaks like Stephen Miller. (1)
Part 1:
Part 2:
Winer’s comments are a reminder that having tremendous oil reserves has been a big blessing and a big curse for Venezuela. An economy so heavily dominated by the oil business struggles with chronic problems, such as strong incentives to neglect less lucrative sectors of the economy (including the public sector) and big temptations for official corruption.
Winer had direct experience at the State Department with US-directed regime change in Haiti, which he discusses here and which like most such operations did not work out well.
The discussion also focuses on what a bonkers claim it is that the (officially asserted) US control of Venezuela “will pay for itself.” And of course Trump’s claim that the US will somehow reap enormous financial benefits from Venezuelan oil is ludicrous in the short or medium term. And profits for oil corporations will depend on their making large-scale, long-term investments. Which at the moment they have little incentive to und,032222222ertake, at least not without massive US governmental subsidies of some kind.
And in another current crisis deliberately generated by the Trump 2.0 regime, the European nations who are technically still NATO allies of the US are working quietly but urgently on how to respond to US military aggression against other NATO allies, with Denmark/Greenland being the most immediate challenge.
Politico EU reports on current developments:
European Union Defense Commissioner Andrius Kubilius has said the bloc should consider establishing a standing military force of 100,000 troops and overhaul the political processes governing defense.
Faced with Russian aggression and the U.S. shifting its focus away from Europe and threatening Greenland, Kubilius argued for a “big bang” approach to re-imagining Europe’s common defense.
“Would the United States be militarily stronger if they would have 50 armies on the States level instead of a single federal army,” he said at a Swedish security conference on Sunday. “Fifty state defence policies and defense budgets on the states level, instead of a single federal defense policy and budget?” [my emphasis] (2)
How to include Britain in a close military alliance without Britain being part of the European Union is a major political and structural issue in changing European defense policies to defend against the US as well as Russia. But international alliances in the face of perceived common threats is hardly a new thing in the world.
British strategists surely want to keep military cooperation with members of the current EU strong. But the country is caught in a dilemma. Like its neighbors in the EU, it needs economic stimulus but is still suffering from the chronic austerity-politics conventional wisdom that has afflicted it since the days of Maggie Thatcher’s premiership.
As Robert Skidelsky has recently noted, Prime Minister Keir Starmer seems to be hoping for stimulative effects from military spending. But Skidelsky warns about how promoting military spending can also lead to threat inflation in evaluating potential external dangers. (1)
Britain is a key ally for the EU countries in preparing the new security architecture in the new environment. But the current government of Starmer and Starmer’s own starkly conservative bent in politics are making Labour’s polling numbers resemble Donald Trump’s. And Starmer’s reckless embrace of rightwing xenophobic political themes is having the effect that such a strategy has had across Europe and also in the US: it is strengthening the far right in British politics.
With the US commitment to NATO and even to traditional nuclear deterrence in relation to Russia no longer as certain as they once were – to put it mildly – Britain’s role as one of the two NATO powers in Europe along with France makes its importance in collective European defense more urgent than ever.
The logic of nuclear deterrence here is not dependent on evaluations of the other side’s intentions. It’s dependent on the grim concept of Mutually Assured Destruction, whose initials MAD are grotesquely appropriate. It refers to the idea that it would be crazy for one nuclear nation to launch nukes against another one because the initiating country would also result in unacceptable destruction to the initiating nation, as well.
Zeteo reports on the messy British political situation: (2)
Poland’s positioning
Poland shares a border with Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and EU member Lithuania. From Poland’s viewpoint, it’s a potentially dangerous neighborhood even in the best of times. Poland’s border with Russia is the enclave containing Kaliningrad, which has no direct land connection to the rest of Russia.
Poland has one of the largest armies in the EU and currently has the most soldiers on active duty. And in the current situation, it’s not surprising that Poland is making more formal defensive preparation against potential Russian threats.
Poland plans to complete a new set of anti-drone fortifications along its eastern borders within two years, a top defence official has said, after a massive incursion of unmanned Russian aerial combat vehicles into Polish airspace earlier this year.
“We expect to have the first capabilities of the system in roughly six months, perhaps even sooner. And the full system will take 24 months to complete,” the deputy defence minister, Cezary Tomczyk, told the Guardian in an interview in Warsaw. …
More than a dozen suspected Russian drones entered Polish airspace in September, in an incident that led to airport closures, fighter jets being scrambled, and damage to buildings on the ground as drones were shot down. The foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski, told the Guardian at the time that the attacks, which involved drones not carrying any ammunition, were an attempt by Russia “to test us without starting a war”. (3)
In the conventional scheme of things, it is the job of the defense ministries to evaluate the capabilities of potential adversaries and that of the foreign ministries to evaluate their intentions.
It’s notable that Foreign Minister Sikorski describes recent Russian drone incursions as being designed to test Poland but not to start a war, i.e., he’s stating his government’s public interpretation of Russian intentions. While the deputy defense minister is quoted as agreeing with Sikorski’s assessment but also refers to Russia’s capabilities:
“The truth is that as long as Ukraine is defending itself and fighting Russia, Europe is not at risk of war in the conventional, strict sense of the word. What we will face instead are provocations and acts of sabotage,” said Tomczyk. But, he said, if the west allowed Russia to win in Ukraine, it could be not long before the Kremlin set its sights on Europe.
That also touches on one of those more-than-one-thing-can-be-true issues. That is, every Western nation from Washington to Warsaw is aware that there are potential geopolitical benefits from weakening and/or distracting Russia with combat in Ukraine, whether or not those potential benefits are consistent at a given moment with Ukraine’s own perceived interests. That calculation would be consistent with need to evaluate the capabilities of potential adversaries.
But that does not mean that the polemical argument used by Russia and its partisans that the US and NATO deliberately provoked the current war in 2022 as a way to weaken Russia is accurate. It could certainly at the same time be true that once the war started, the notion that a war would weaken Russia played a role in the West’s response to the diplomatic initiative that Russia made soon after the 2022 invasion. In that instance, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson apparently persuaded Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to break off the talks that were taking place between Ukraine and Russia over an interim settlement proposed by Russia. (4) Those negotiations are now referred to as the “Istanbul talks.“
(There was a different set of talks in Istanbul in mid-2025 between Ukrainian and Russian representatives.) (5)
However serious or non-serious that Russian initiative may have been, it’s now long since become one of the many “what-ifs” of history.
In a December account of the 2022 “Istanbul talks” experience, Branko Marcetic concludes, “All of this will surely go down as one of the great missed opportunities of history.” (6)
It’s probably too early for “surely.” But it will likely remain an open “what-if” for a long time to come.
The Russian proposal was analyzed at the time by Fiona Hill and Angela Stent in The World Putin Wants. Foreign Affairs Sept-Oct 2022, published online 08/25/2022. <https://www.foreignaffairs.com/russian-federation/world-putin-wants-fiona-hill-angela-stent> They took a notably skeptical approach to the possible seriousness of the proposal and a notably dark view of Putin’s broader territorial intentions. In that article, they accurately predicted, “if Donald Trump or a Republican with views like his becomes president of the United States in 2025, U.S. support for Ukraine will erode.”
(5) Russia and Ukraine discuss more prisoner exchanges at Istanbul talks (Accessed: 2025-27-12).
Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) reinforced the fact that Trump’s meeting with Vladimir Zelensky at the end of February 2025 put so dramatically on display: that Europe can no longer count on the US to fulfill its NATO commitments.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat recently posted this on Substack Notes:
Predicting anything about the erratic and chaotic Trump Administration is tricky. But this is likely to be true for as long as he remains President.
Europe’s efforts to rearrange their security plans, particularly in relation to real and potential threats from Russia, has become the leading security policy issue for Europe and is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. It will be a messy process. And it may or may not work out well. But it’s a big break from the NATO era.
This is a useful discussion on one of the major issues, the military buildup of Germany. (1) Military buildups are never unambiguously good, and this discussion illustrates that:
And it’s also becoming clear that, at least as long as Trump is in power, European democracies will have to give a high priority to protecting their democratic political systems from the open hostility being expressed by Trump and his loyalists. I just posted about a take on the new NSS that indulged in a kind of mirror-image Cold-War-paranoia version of Russia’s efforts to influence Europe politically. It’s important to be realistic about such issues, which actually are complicated. But not hopelessly so.
Countries try to influence other countries. What kind of influence efforts are considered legitimate will vary according to laws and political system. The US Constitution included a provision that the President of the United States must be a native-born (birthright) citizen. This was a barrier against European powers trying to install a foreign official as head of the US government.
There was some maneuvering after the Revolution to install a Prussian prince in exactly that role. Taking advantage of the US Civil War, France installed Archduke Maximilian of Austria as Emperador Maximiliano I de México from 1864-1867. He was the younger brother of Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph. The Mexicans didn’t much like this arrangement. And it didn’t end well for Emperor Max.
If the Mexicans themselves had not overthrown him, the US would have gone to war (again) with Mexico to remove him. The US was not going to allow France to government Mexico.
There’s nothing new about parties and governments trying to affect opinions and form friendly networks. The national representatives in the European Parliament form party blocs with other likeminded EU from other countries. The limits and boundaries of what is proper in such international politics are defined by elaborate sets of laws and practices. American political parties, for instance, are not allowed to accept donations directly from non-US-citizens.
As this report explains, European countries and parties and voters have to be aware about the practical implications of the kind of collaboration between the Trump regime and far-right parties in Europe. (2)
David Cattler of the (Estonian) International Cemtre for Defence and Security (EESTI) provides an analysis of the new NSS that doesn’t rely on paranoid clichees. (3) In international-policy-wonk mode, he writes:
The United States has released its new National Security Strategy (NSS), and for Europe—especially its frontline states—it marks more than a periodic policy update. It signals the emergence of a distinct US strategic doctrine: one that reorders global priorities, reframes Allies’ roles, and seeks stability in Europe chiefly so that Washington can redirect its focus to the Indo-Pacific and the Western Hemisphere. The document will be read in Washington as pragmatic. In Europe, it lands as a strategic inflexion point. [my emphasis]
The shift in US priorities from Europe to power-balancing against China became official in 2011 under the Obama Administration. Formally, that policy isn’t new.
But the level of overt hostility being expressed by the US government against liberal democracies in Europe is new. We did see a preview of that hostility and scorn during the Cheney-Bush Administration and its reckless war in Iraq.
The Guardian editorialized on March 4 of this year:
Mr Trump is in a hurry [on negotiations over Ukraine] – hence his angry threat that Mr Zelenskyy “won’t be around very long” if he doesn’t cut a deal. This came after the Ukrainian president suggested on Sunday that the end of the war was “very, very far away”. ...
The US has already undermined central pillars of Sir Keir Starmer’s approach – maintaining military support for Kyiv and economic pressure on Moscow, and creating a “coalition of the willing” to guarantee Ukrainian security. Mr Vance derided “20,000 troops from some random country that has not fought a war in 30 or 40 years”, then claimed that he was not referring to Britain or France.
European leaders must continue trying to buy time, deferring further US perfidy, and hasten rearmament for themselves and Ukraine. On Tuesday, Ursula von der Leyen, the head of the European Commission, announced a proposal, including changes to EU fiscal rules, which she said could mobilise nearly €800bn for defence spending. A rival operator to Starlink is in talks with European leaders about satellite services. …
[T]his is an administration which moves abruptly and erratically. Ukraine and Europe are racing against the clock, not knowing when zero hour will arrive. It is likely to be sooner rather than later. [my emphasis] (1)
That was an early comment on the policy conception in Europe that they cannot count on the US under Donald Trump to provide the same security commitments for NATO that they did until the Trump 2.0 regime came to power.
Judge Napolitano recently interviewed Alex [bleeping!] Jones which is plain bad judgment. Jones isn’t remotely like an authority or worthwhile analyst on, you know, anything at all. Napolitano also regularly interviews Max Blumenthal, once a talented analyst, but long since a professional crank. The way Max went with his career is a shame. His 2009 book Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party was really a competent piece of work on an important topic. His current Grayzone project has earned a lot of criticism for its lack of journalistic rigor. (1) (I’m trying to be polite here.)
There are various commentators that I would generally call actual “isolationists” who are taking basically a position that the US shouldn’t push back on anything Russia is doing, at least not in Europe.
In my “Generally Dubious” I would include the following: Max Blumenthal, Alistair Cooke, Larry Johnson, Aaron Maté, Douglas Macgregor, Craig Murray, Rand Paul, Scott Ritter, Jeffrey Sachs.
Overlap: Daniel Davis, Gilbert Doctorow, Chas Freeman, Scott Horton (of Antiwar.com) , Michael McFall, Ray McGovern, Lawrence Wilkerson.
Good: William Astore, Andrew Bacevich, Juan Cole, Matt Duss, Tom Engelhardt, John Feffer, Daniel Levy, Gideon Levy, John Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt.
Here is the kind of casting that makes me highly dubious about a podcast: Karin Kneissl, Alexander Mercouris, and Glenn Diesen on “The Duran.” (2)
Who are they, you may ask. Karin Kneissl was the Austrian Foreign Minister under the relative short-lived center-right/far-right coalition government of Chancellor Sebastian Kurz (2017-2019). Kneissel got married when she was in office, and she invited Vladimir Puttin to the wedding. Which Putin attended, and did a dance with her. Which ended with the Foreign Minister literally bowing down on one knee to Putin. She moved to Russia in 2023. Sebastian Kurz is now part of Peter Thiel stable of well-funded serfs. Mercouris and Diesen aren’t quite so dubious as she is. (Yes, I know that’s “damning with faint praise.”)
This interview that John Mearsheimer did on the Trump-Zalenskyy meeting in February (3) provides an example of what I take to be Mearsheimer’s focus on big-picture power-balancing questions, while he seems impatient with analyzing negotiation processes. So he seems sympathetic to the idea that the US needs to improve relations with Russia for the purposes of power balancing against China because that’s what his “realist” theory would lead us to expect to be the direct policy is likely to take.
(2) Europe's Growing Irrelevance - Karin Kneissl, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen, The Duran YouTube channel 03/02/2025. <https://youtu.be/LPN0VmCgTpI?si=-fYHf67ap8iRMhgD> (Accessed: 2025-26-08).
(3) Trump Zelensky Clash - John Mearsheimer In … An Exclusive Interview With CNN-News18’s Zakka Jacob. CNN-News-18 (India) YouTube channel 03/03/2025. <https://youtu.be/o9sVv1Jv_8g?si=aQgKMGuQx_Do3r2c> (Accessed: 2025-26-08). The interview is truncated at the end.]
The Guardian editorialized on March 4 of this year:
Mr Trump is in a hurry [on negotiations over Ukraine] – hence his angry threat that Mr Zelenskyy “won’t be around very long” if he doesn’t cut a deal. This came after the Ukrainian president suggested on Sunday that the end of the war was “very, very far away”. ...
The US has already undermined central pillars of Sir Keir Starmer’s approach – maintaining military support for Kyiv and economic pressure on Moscow, and creating a “coalition of the willing” to guarantee Ukrainian security. Mr Vance derided “20,000 troops from some random country that has not fought a war in 30 or 40 years”, then claimed that he was not referring to Britain or France.
European leaders must continue trying to buy time, deferring further US perfidy, and hasten rearmament for themselves and Ukraine. On Tuesday, Ursula von der Leyen, the head of the European Commission, announced a proposal, including changes to EU fiscal rules, which she said could mobilise nearly €800bn for defence spending. A rival operator to Starlink is in talks with European leaders about satellite services. …
[T]his is an administration which moves abruptly and erratically. Ukraine and Europe are racing against the clock, not knowing when zero hour will arrive. It is likely to be sooner rather than later. [my emphasis] (1)
That was an early comment on the policy conception in Europe that they cannot count on the US under Donald Trump to provide the same security commitments for NATO that they did until the Trump 2.0 regime came to power.
Judge Napolitano recently interviewed Alex [bleeping!] Jones which is plain bad judgment. Jones isn’t remotely like an authority or worthwhile analyst on, you know, anything at all. Napolitano also regularly interviews Max Blumenthal, once a talented analyst, but long since a professional crank. The way Max went with his career is a shame. His 2009 book Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party was really a competent piece of work on an important topic. His current Grayzone project has earned a lot of criticism for its lack of journalistic rigor. (1) (I’m trying to be polite here.)
There are various commentators that I would generally call actual “isolationists” who are taking basically a position that the US shouldn’t push back on anything Russia is doing, at least not in Europe.
In my “Generally Dubious” I would include the following: Max Blumenthal, Alistair Cooke, Larry Johnson, Aaron Maté, Douglas Macgregor, Craig Murray, Rand Paul, Scott Ritter, Jeffrey Sachs.
Overlap: Daniel Davis, Gilbert Doctorow (?), Chas Freeman, Scott Horton (of Antiwar.com) , Michael McFall, Ray McGovern, Lawrence Wilkerson.
Good: William Astore, Andrew Bacevich, Juan Cole, Matt Duss, Tom Engelhardt, John Feffer, Daniel Levy, Gideon Levy, John Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt.
Here is the kind of casting that makes me highly dubious about a podcast: Karin Kneissl, Alexander Mercouris, and Glenn Diesen on “The Duran.” (2)
Who are they, you may ask. Karin Kneissl was the Austrian Foreign Minister under the relative short-lived center-right/far-right coalition government of Chancellor Sebastian Kurz (2017-2019). Kneissel got married when she was in office, and she invited Vladimir Puttin to the wedding. Which Putin attended, and did a dance with her. Which ended with the Foreign Minister literally bowing down on one knee to Putin. She moved to Russia in 2023. Sebastian Kurz is now part of Peter Thiel stable of well-funded serfs. Mercouris and Diesen aren’t quite so dubious as she is. (Yes, I know that’s “damning with faint praise.”)
This interview that John Mearsheimer did on the Trump-Zalenskyy meeting in February (3) provides an example of what I take to be Mearsheimer’s focus on big-picture power-balancing questions, while he seems impatient with analyzing negotiation processes. So he seems sympathetic to the idea that the US needs to improve relations with Russia for the purposes of power balancing against China because that’s what his “realist” theory would lead us to expect to be the direct policy is likely to take.
(2) Europe's Growing Irrelevance - Karin Kneissl, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen, The Duran YouTube channel 03/02/2025. <https://youtu.be/LPN0VmCgTpI?si=-fYHf67ap8iRMhgD> (Accessed: 2025-26-08).
(3) Trump Zelensky Clash - John Mearsheimer In … An Exclusive Interview With CNN-News18’s Zakka Jacob. CNN-News-18 (India) YouTube channel 03/03/2025. <https://youtu.be/o9sVv1Jv_8g?si=aQgKMGuQx_Do3r2c> (Accessed: 2025-26-08). The interview is truncated at the end.]
Timothy Snyder is a great historian and an excellent analyst of the process by which democracies can become authoritarian systems. But his zeal for supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia carries him away on occasion.
In a recent Substack column, he begins with a plausible observation about our current President:
All his adult life, Trump has been ripping people off. That is his modus operandi. Rather than a conscience, he has the habit of displacement. It is not that he is ripping people off. Everyone else is ripping him off.
As he has aged this has grown into an vulnerability. He actually seems to believe that everyone is ripping him off. He makes no distinction between himself and the government. And he has no grasp of how any significant policy actually works. (1)
And he describes how this failing seems to have affected Trump’s attitude toward Ukraine:
Somewhere Trump got the idea that Ukraine was ripping off the United States. And once the idea was in his head, he was its slave. He kept repeating that the Ukraine owed the United States $350 billion.
This made no sense. The assistance in question was aid, not a loan. The value of the aid was about a third of what Trump claimed. Most of the military aid came in the form of spending inside the United States.
But then he veers off track a bit:
And of course the Ukrainians have paid. They have fulfilled the entire NATO mission by themselves in holding off a Russian attack. They have suffered enormous losses of all kinds. And they have shared intelligence and innovations with the United States. But none of that matters to Trump. Once he is told that he is being ripped off, he is helpless, and others must suffer. [my emphasis]
With the NATO alliance as it currently exist now on life support with Trump having convinced all the other NATO countries that the US is currently genuinely unreliable as an ally and even downright hostile to many of its actual NATO allies – notably the two he is threatening with war, Canada and Denmark – clear thinking about how such alliances work is particularly important as European nations make major plans to extract themselves from their current level of dependence on the US.
So it’s important to realize that while Snyder’s comment makes sense as a metaphor, in reality Ukraine is not fulfilling the NATO mission. Ukraine is not a NATO member and therefore has no NATO mission. Yes, it is acting as a de facto NATO ally. But the US and other NATO members have no mutual-defense treaty with Ukraine.
Whether it’s in NATO’s or the European members’ interest to support Ukraine in the war is another question. Despite Trump’s erratic position on the war (like on everything else), the NATO countries including the US are supporting Ukraine in its defensive war against what actually was illegal Russian military aggression.
But NATO members do have a mutual-defense military alliance. One which was always primarily directed toward defense against potential aggression by first the Soviet Union and then Russia – and unofficially to give NATO an implicit threat of aggressive action. Although the only formal invocation of NATO’s self-defense obligation Article 5 came after 9/11 and involved invading Afghanistan. And eventually losing it after 20 years of war.
And while “credibility” may be the most over-used word in the foreign policy vocabulary, when countries make a military alliance like NATO and one of its members is illegally attack by an outside power, any deterrent effect of the alliance does depend on making a credible response to military aggression, i.e., militarily defending the attacked ally. And that was a big problem in the post-USSR-era expansion of NATO, eventually including the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Finland became and member in 2023 and Sweden in 2024.
Most of that expansion of NATO was treated by the US and other member states as “freebies” in the sense that no actual Russia aggression was expected in any immediately foreseeable future. The brief conflict between Russia and Georgia in 2008 and Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 made that risk seem more of risk. And the 2022 Russian invasion even more dramatically so, which is why previously neutral Finland and Sweden joined after that.
If Russia attacked Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, the famous “credibility” of the NATO alliance would depend on NATO prioritizing military defense of the attacked member directly against Russian forces above support of non-NATO member Ukraine. That’s part of the high-stakes nature of the arrangement. So loose talk about Ukraine as though it was an ally on the same level as other NATO countries can be misleading.
In practice, there has been no signs or threats that Russia is intending to commit actual military aggression against any of the three Baltic states. Although there is always some kind of covert operations going on, and not just by Russia and not just in the Baltics. A policy brief last month by the conservative-leaning Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS):
Russia is engaged in an aggressive campaign of subversion and sabotage against European and U.S. targets, which complement Russia’s brutal conventional war in Ukraine. The number of Russian attacks in Europe nearly tripled between 2023 and 2024, after quadrupling between 2022 and 2023. Russia’s military intelligence service, the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (or GRU), was likely responsible for many of these attacks, either directly by their own officers or indirectly through recruited agents. The GRU and other Russian intelligence agencies frequently recruited local assets to plan and execute sabotage and subversion missions. Other operations relied on Russia’s “shadow fleet,” commercial ships used to circumvent Western sanctions, for undersea attacks. (2)
So, Russia is at least reminding NATO that there are actual threats to NATO member countries which they have to take into account. It’s not pretty. But it’s also what the US and other NATO members signed up for when they expanded the alliance to its current size.
The cold-blooded calculation that no one officially likes to talk about publicly
Part of Ukraine’s dilemma is that Western strategists also are very aware of what I think of as the Afghanistan Analogy, based on the idea beloved by neoconservatives in particular that supplying Islamic jihadist fighters in their war against Soviet occupation from 1979 on critically undermined the Soviet Union and was a critical factor in its disintegration. However exaggerated or fanciful that conclusion may be, we still see it pop up occasionally in discussions of the Russia-Ukraine War. And the advantage of doing massive damage to the current Russian military is certainly explicitly discussed in the current situation by strategist and pundits. That calculation certainly seems to have been very much part of the Biden Administration’s approach to the new invasion by Russia in 2022.
Whatever form the new European arrangements are to Trump’s radical undermining of NATO may take, that practical consideration will also be in the background. It was laughably absurd in the 1960s for Vietnam War supporters to say, “If we don’t stop Them in Vietnam, we’ll have to fight them on the West Coast.” A calculation by European allies that the longer the Russians are kept fighting in Ukraine, the less likely they will be to attack Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Finland is a more obviously practical assumption. Coldblooded, too, but an obvious consideration.
I would prefer to see some kind of stable and practical peace agreement that squares the circle with Russian and Ukraine so that the war could stop and the extensive postwar reconstruction of Ukraine could begin, without formally ceding illegal Russian claims to Ukrainian territory. The first months of the Trump 2.0 Administration, though, don’t make such a difficult arrangement look any more likely.
But this is also why it’s important to distinguish between the nature of the Western commitment to Ukraine and the nature of the commitment of European nations to NATO.
And there is a real chance in the foreseeable future that Europe will have to either leave NATO outright or sideline it in practice for a more reliable defense posture not dependent on the United States:
Britain's defence industry is urging the EU and UK to strike a security pact as early as next month and not to make it conditional on a wider reset, so it can access a new €150 billion European instrument to ramp up defence spending.
In a letter addressed to British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, and European Council chief Antonio Costa, the heads of the UK's main aerospace, industry and tech associations say a security pact "must be a central deliverable of the upcoming UK-EU summit" to be held in London on 19 May. (3)
There are likely to be a lot of cold-blooded calculations and decisions made on that front this year. The process will not be entirely pretty. But in the spirit of hope-springs-eternal, we can hope that the outcome will be more good than bad for the world.
The Bruegel think tank and Kiel Institute for the World Economy recently described the challenge:
Europe needs to be able to defend itself against Russia, with or without the United States. ...
For the Russian military, the war in Ukraine has been costly. However, because of the Kremlin’s broad mobilisation of society and industry, Russia’s military is now considerably larger, more experienced and better equipped than the force that invaded Ukraine in 2022. The Russian army and general staff now possess invaluable battlefield experience unmatched by any other military – apart from Ukraine. (4)
A more recent Bruegel study describes these broad options:
First, the role of the European Defence Agency could be broadened, possibly in combination with a new lending instrument similar to the EU’s 2020-22 SURE programme.
Second, a European Defence Mechanism (EDM) could be created: an institution similar to the European Stability Mechanism, based on an intergovernmental treaty. The EDM would undertake joint procurement and plan for the provision of strategic enablers in specified areas, with a capacity to fund these roles. It could own strategic enablers and charge usage fees to EDM members, reducing the budgetary impact of rearmament. EDM membership would entail prohibition of both state aid and procurement preferences that benefit national defence contractors at the expense of contractors from other EDM members.
Of the two options, the second is preferable, as it would (1) create a defence industry single market among EDM members, (2) create a financing vehicle that might make large-scale projects fiscally feasible, and (3) include non-EU democracies such as the United Kingdom on an equal footing, while also giving an opt-out to EU countries that lack the political appetite for more defence integration, or that have national constitutional constraints. [my emphasis] (5)
German military historian Sönke Neitzel has attracted attention by warning that 2025 could be Europe’s “last summer in peace.” He has a new book just published, Abstieg: Demokratische Bedeutungslosigkeit - Ist Deutschland aus der Balance? (Decline: Democratic Insignificance - Is Germany Out of Balance?)
He says in an interview with Deutsche Welle: (1)
[T]here are possible scenarios and if you look at Trump and how he's developing this kind of destructive power [sic] towards NATO. And we have a lot of countries [including] Germany [that] would have some domestic troubles. And if you have possibly a peace treaty, a negative peace treaty in Ukraine which frees Putin with these forces to do other things. [my emphasis]
And he proceeds to talk about the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) who are apprehensive about possible Russian aggression against them.
Obviously, European countries are facing a new strategic challenge with the erratic Donald Trump Administration raising serious doubts about whether the US would defend its NATO allies in case of a future direct war with Russia. Germany’s position in the new situation and how far it is willing to go with increasing its military power and readiness is obviously going to be a major topic in the discussion in the coming years.
But his phrase about how “a negative peace treaty in Ukraine” would free “Putin with these forces [currently in conflict with Ukraine] to do other things” struck me with its double significance.
One of the calculations that has been largely unstated by Western countries supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia is that, while Ukraine has an immediate national interest in fighting Russia and reclaiming the Ukrainian territory it has occupied, the interests of its Western allies are of a more secondary order. Like in every other war, we’ve been hearing a lot about the Munich Analogy which is usually interpreted to mean that if Russia isn’t contained in Ukraine, they will soon be occupying Paris.
But it’s less diplomatically respectable to talk about the Afghanistan Analogy, which is the conviction of neoconservatives and liberal hawks alike that the US support for the brave, fiercely-independent, mujahadeen freedom fighters - we now call such fighters Muslim jihadists - against the Soviet Union in 1979-1989 was a decisive factor in the fall of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union itself.
With the Taliban again in power in Afghanistan today, we can certainly say that the Muslim jihadists won out in the long run. But the claimed lesson of it being decisive in the fall of the Soviet Union is far more dubious. Even highly imaginative.
Neitzel’s comment is a reminder of that perspective. His point in the interview is more directly about the longer-term potential Russian threat. But it is also a reminder of the Afghanistan Analogy. If we have to worry about how Russia might militarily threaten NATO countries once they are done fighting in Afghanistan, then it becomes a coldly practical calculation for NATO countries to keep the Russians fighting in Afghanistan as long as possible to do maximum damage to Russia in the context of that conflict.
Obviously, there would advantages to a stable and constructive peace to the Russia-Ukraine War. Though it’s something Donald Trump and his Special Envoy to Everywhere Steve Witkoff are highly unlikely to achieve. But the advantage to other European countries of a longer conflict with Russia in Ukraine is also something that strategists are surely taking into an account, though it would be undiplomatic for them to direct tout that potential advantage in public.
Not to split hairs too finely over this. But if we count Ukraine as part of Europe – which it is – then wasn’t the summer of 2021 the “last summer in peace” in Europe before the massive Russia conventional invasion of Ukraine in February 2022? Ukrainian spokespeople have stressed the point that Ukraine has actually been at war with Russia since 2014, when Russia seized and annexed Crimea.
That’s why such broad labels like The Last Summer of Peace In Europe have to been scrutinized with some caution.
Notes:
(1) Nobody wants war' but it could still happen, German Military Historian tells DW. DW News YouTube channel 04/07/2025. <https://youtu.be/1jD1c41d3GU?si=v-284DQUqM3Y9Fau> (Accessed: 2025-09-04).
