To all intents and
purposes, NATO is dead, even if that wasn’t quite what the new German
Chancellor said
yesterday. It is entirely clear that members can no longer assume that the US
will abide by the commitment that ‘an attack on one is an attack on all’. Without
the support of the largest and most powerful member, the claimed deterrent
effect of NATO is effectively nullified. To be fair to Trump, all he has done
is to clarify what some of us have suspected for many years under a succession
of US presidents, which is that the US will never commit to all-out war to save
a far-away European country from being wholly or partially eaten up by a larger
neighbour. The theoretical point of ‘deterrence’, however, was about creating a
sufficient degree of uncertainty. Although the supposed adversary, Russia,
might have doubted US commitment, they could never be entirely certain. Trump
has removed that uncertainty.
Putin took a
calculated gamble in Ukraine, mitigated by signalling his intentions well in
advance and assessing the reactions, that the country’s friends would not
intervene actively on behalf of a country which wasn’t even a member of NATO. His
judgement was proved correct on that (even if it was proved dramatically wrong in
terms of Ukraine’s ability and willingness to resist, and the extent to which
the population was waiting to give a warm greeting to the Russian ‘liberators’).
The military types keep telling us that, having got away with taking a big
chunk out of Ukraine, he will turn his attention elsewhere – the Baltics are
the most-often named target. It would still be a gamble for Putin. Whilst he
can now be completely certain that the US would not rush to aid those attacked
(indeed, the current president might be more inclined to sit down with Putin
and decide how to split the spoils), he cannot be so certain about the European
response. Indeed, he would be very unwise to gamble that several other European
nations would not respond to any call for help from, say, Lithuania if he tried
to create a corridor to Kaliningrad, one of the more commonly posited reasons
for starting a war. Scandinavian countries along with Poland would be very
likely to engage (albeit not under the umbrella of NATO (if it still exists),
even if the response of the larger European military powers, such as France,
the UK, and Germany might be less certain. Having already learned, to his cost
– or, rather, to the cost of the dead and wounded soldiers and their families –
that the Russian army isn’t quite the force he believed it to be, why would he
risk such an attack?
That brings us to
the crux of the question of future European security. For those of us who’ve
never been convinced that security comes through ever-increasing amounts of
weaponry, the issue has to be about ensuring that an attack is prevented not by
military means but by ensuring that there is no reason to attack in the first
place. That doesn’t mean following a policy of appeasement, as the warmongers claim. Of course, if
Putin really is the madman as which he is often presented, sitting in the
Kremlin stroking his cat like some sort of Bond villain plotting world
domination, then there is little scope for rational debate and negotiated
common security. (On the other hand, if that is indeed an accurate picture of Putin,
then the history of the film franchise would suggest that we don’t need a large
army to defeat him, just one man armed with a pistol and a few Martinis.)
If we discount the
possibility of simple insanity, the single most frequent cause of conflict,
historically, is access to wealth and resources, even if it isn’t always presented
that way. The second is a fear of attack unless ‘our side’ attacks first: the ‘use
it or lose it’ mindset. Both of those look more likely as causes of the war in
Ukraine, for example, than an insane desire for domination at all costs, with
the idea that Russia and Ukraine are a single historical identity and nation
being more a stated rationalization than an actual reason. Even if the fear of
attack is irrational or unjustified, it still acts as a motivation: fear
doesn’t have to be reasonable to motivate a response. I don’t believe that NATO
ever had any intention of attacking Russia, but it isn’t parroting Putin to
suggest that things might not have looked that way from Moscow.
Most Europeans and
most Russians probably want the same things: peace and prosperity. Both are
being let down by leaders who tell them that those things can only be achieved
by war and impoverishment rather than discussion and agreement. There’s never a
‘right’ time to break the cycle – there will always be unresolved disputes and
arguments. But the ‘best’ time will always be ‘now’, whenever now is. Where are
the politicians able to recognise that?
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment