Has the NATO Turning Point Stopped Turning? “No nation can be trusted farther than it is bound by its interests.” by Bruce Thornton
https://www.frontpagemag.com/has-the-nato-turning-point-stopped-turning/
Remember last year when the NATO nations had a road-to-Damascus moment? It seemed that Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine had awakened the West from its “new world order” dogmatic slumbers, with scenes of death and devastation from a past we thought we had exorcised with the end of the Cold War.
In response to Russia’s attack, last year the air was filled with pledges of military support for Ukraine and blustering denunciations of Putin. Skimpy defense budgets and “postmodern” foreign policy idealism were over. Columnist Michael Barone announced “a vast and historic transformation in Europe . . . that will continue reverberating, no matter what happens in Ukraine.” And according to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, “February 24 marks a turning point in the history of our continent.”
Lately the “turning point” seems to have stopped turning, as the conflict in Ukraine heads for a long, bloody slog, with no resolution in sight. What many thought would be a triumphal confirmation of the “rules-based international order” has instead seen the return of the repressed foreign policy realism dominated by national self-interest.
French president Emmanuel Macron, for example, besieged by riots and protests over a proposal to raise the retirement age, recently visited China’s autocrat Xi Jinping, in a failed attempt to distance Xi from Putin, though he successfully secured a contract worth billions of Euros. He also called for Europe to have “strategic autonomy” from the U.S. regarding China’s threats to Taiwan, and to avoid the “great risk” that Europe “gets caught up in crises that are not ours” and ends up “taking our cue from the U.S. agenda.”
The diplomatic confusion and bluster about Europe’s need for “strategic autonomy” raised questions about NATO “unity.” It seems calm with China is more important than upholding the “rules-based international order.” In that case, as Senator Marco Rubio said, if Europe doesn’t “‘pick sides’ between the U.S. and China over Taiwan, then maybe we shouldn’t be picking sides either [on Ukraine].”
A more significant blow to the renewed martial vigor of NATO was the Pentagon documents allegedly leaked by a recently arrested intelligence operative serving with the Massachusetts Air National Guard. If the intelligence is accurate, our public confidence that Ukraine can stop Russia and recover some of its occupied territory is shaky. That “explains the urgency with which Kyiv has been lobbying the U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies to speed up deliveries of Western-made air-defense systems and to provide Ukraine with Western-made jet fighters, such as F-16s,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
Moreover, the Journal continues, Ukraine in a few months will deplete its stock of Buk and S-300 air defense missiles along with similarly dwindling ammunition stocks. As a result, according to the leaked intel, “most of Ukraine’s critical national infrastructure outside the Kyiv region and two other areas in southwestern Ukraine will no longer have air-defense cover. The number of unprotected critical sites will soar from six to more than 40.” In that case, it’s hard to see a Ukrainian counter-offensive that can push the Russians back, let alone liberate occupied territory.
Obviously, such facts, again if accurate, challenge the exuberant optimism we’ve heard from some politicians and foreign policy mavens over the last 14 months. This also means we the people haven’t been getting a fully accurate picture of the conflict on which we’ve spent multiple billions in cash and materiel.
These recent developments, however, merely expose the fissures and problems within the West that have long vitiated its foreign policy idealism. From the start of Russia’s invasion, much of the rhetoric and new-found martial spirit was less consequential than it sounded. Last month the Washington Post highlighted the gap between feel-good rhetoric and promises, and the sober facts.
According to the Post, those facts show “that for all its wealth, industrial might and sophistication, the [NATO] bloc remains benumbed, oblivious to its sclerotic arms production incapacity and content to continue outsourcing its mounting security needs to the United States. Together they reflect Europe’s cognitive dissonance on security and should amplify the alarm bells set ringing” by Russia’s invasion. . . . “Yet Europe has left unaddressed the corrosive, longer-term problem of defense industries in most E.U. countries that were left to atrophy after the Soviet Union’s collapse more than three decades ago, and today remain supine.”
Typical is Germany’s performance, despite its pledges and talk of a “turning point” from its virtual pacifism and failure to spend enough on its military, despite being the fourth richest economy in the world and pledging to spend $100 billion in defense spending over four years. But Germany, the Post writes, “has been incapable of jump-starting military industrial production on a timeline suited to Ukraine’s dire needs. Although a third of the funding promised by Mr. Scholz has been earmarked, none has so far been spent. That reflects assembly lines that have withered for more than 30 years and a bloated bureaucracy that has contributed to procurement bottlenecks and thwarted years of attempted reforms meant to speed reviews and approvals.”
The NATO nations’ failure to carry their weight on defense has been a problem long before Donald Trump called them out, to the consternation of the bipartisan “rules-based order” champions. But even the Post highlights Europe’s decades of free-riding: “The United States represents about 54 percent of the combined gross domestic product of NATO’s 30 member countries, but accounts for 70 percent of its total defense spending. Besides the United States, whose defense spending is roughly 3.5 percent of GDP, only the United Kingdom, Poland, Greece and the Baltic states exceed the 2 percent threshold, which all the members agreed they would reach by next year.”
Finally, the challenge of Russia’s invasion reflects the decades of idealistic foreign policy, one of the center-pieces of which has been the assumption that the whole world, with its complex diversity of ethnicities, customs, cultures, histories, and faiths want to be just like us: liberal-democratic, secular, consumerist, peaceful, personally free, tolerant of minorities, egalitarian, and believers in human rights for all.
That assumption has been challenged over and over for a century, and is today exposing the weakness of our arrogance. The non-Western world has not rallied around the West to confront and roll back Russia’s adventurism. Most nations in the world are not sending weapons to Ukraine, nor have joined in sanctions against Russia, or stopped trading with it. Like India and Brazil, the 7th and 9th largest economies in the world, many nations have for a while been moving closer to autocratic Russia and China, rather than bandwagoning with the West.
There are several reasons for this shift, but one of the most critical is the West’s “zero-carbon” energy policies that threaten the developing world’s efforts to raise their peoples’ standards of living. That improvement depends on the cheap fossil fuels that the West developed and exploited to become rich and powerful. Nor do these nations appreciate scolding lectures about “climate change” or genetically modified organism or synthetic fertilizers and pesticides that have made the West so well fed that it has turned obesity, once the affliction of kings and nobles, into a disease of poverty.
Such Western “green” sermons, along with our hypocrisy, are alienating some of our allies like India. This January, its Foreign Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar suggested that many non-Western nations are looking for an alternative partner. Pointing out that Europe has imported six times the fossil fuel energy from Russia that India has done, he said, “So if a $60,000-per-capita society feels it needs to look after itself, and I accept that as legitimate, they should not expect a $2,000-per-capita society to take a hit.”
Such friction among allies and friendly nations are normal. Our foreign policy weaknesses come from bad ideas, especially the idealism that drives our de facto assertions that the West’s political order is the default one for the whole world. There’s no doubt that millions of people from all over the world have voted for the West with their feet, and continue to do so. Yes, they come for a better life, but also political freedom and equality which are attractive to people of every ethnicity. But that doesn’t mean everybody wants to live that way, no matter how much they want the prosperity and material abundance the West enjoys.
Our failure of imagination that makes us think that what we consider illiberal or authoritarian governments cannot be legitimate, obscures the fact that millions of people believe it can, and that they don’t want Western freedoms and rights that give scope to behaviors and actions that many in the world find corrupt and destructive of their identities. Yet we sometimes don’t accept that truth, and dismiss it as an ethnocentric or racist slur.
But as New York Times’ columnist Ross Douthat recently pointed out, “Some liberal hawks might like to believe that the challenge of illiberalism is primarily a challenge of regimes imposed on unwilling populations — that Middle Eastern, African and Central Asian elites are favorable to Russia and China because they want to imitate their ruthless mode of rule but that the inhabitants of these countries would be in the liberal camp if only the boot came off their neck.”
Yet data Douthat references from the University of Cambridge’s Bennett Institute for Public Policy report on “trends in global public opinion,” suggest this is not the case. “It doesn’t just show,” Douthat writes, “that non-Western mass opinion is favorable to China and Russia. It also shows an index of socially liberal values (measuring secularism, individualism, progressive ideas about sex and drugs and personal freedom) worldwide across the past 30 years. What you see in the chart are high-income democracies becoming steadily more liberal since the fall of the Berlin Wall. But there is hardly any change in the values of the rest of the world, no sign that social liberalism is taking hold outside of countries where in 1990 it was powerful already.”
This failure to acknowledge the diversity of the world’s peoples and their fundamental beliefs about government, social mores, religion, and political violence, has led to the “rules-based international order” based on Western ideals assumed to be the default destiny of the whole human race. So rather than determine our foreign policy on what contributes to our national security and interests, we go off searching for monsters to destroy.
We don’t know how the Russian invasion will turn out, but all the “new world order” cheerleading will not make a material difference, especially if the leaked intel is accurate and we haven’t been told the truth about where the conflict stands. But we should never forget that, as George Washington said, “It is a maxim founded on the universal experience of mankind, that no nation can be trusted farther than it is bound by its interests.”
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