Time to replace NATO?

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The Trump administration has been roundly criticized for the approach which it is adopting to ending the war in Ukraine. But there are two things which Trump says which are surely uncontroversial in themselves. The first is that the war needs to end, on which most will surely agree. The second is that some boundary adjustments will need to be a part of that, which is much more contentious, but nevertheless a statement of an obvious truth.

Those boundary adjustments, whether permanent or temporary, will inevitably involve Ukraine ceding territory to Russia because, realistically, the only way of returning to 2014 borders is for other countries to commit large numbers of troops and resources to the war alongside Ukraine. A third Europe-wide war doesn’t necessarily have to involve nuclear oblivion, but that’s an obvious risk. And there's surely some doubt about whether the youth of Europe in the twenty-first century are willing to be conscripted and sent to Ukraine to die. Asking, let alone instructing, Ukraine to concede territory is neither fair nor just, and Trump’s rationale – which appears to be that Putin has lost a lot of soldiers to gain the territory so deserves to keep what he’s paid for in blood – is an appalling basis for making a concession to aggression. It’s also very one-sided, ignoring the cost that Ukraine has paid to resist the aggression as though Ukrainian lives don’t matter. It is, though, hardly surprising coming from a man who sees everything in terms of transactions, who believes that the strong should dominate the weak, and who has already made it very clear that he rather likes the idea of emulating Putin’s land grab himself.

Even so, for a man whose self-image is that of a master dealmaker to concede much of what the other party wants in advance of any detailed talks is incongruous, to say the least. He surely realises that any process of negotiation will only involve further concessions, and that far from being a mutual process he has to date extracted precisely nothing from Putin in return. He’s also agreed that Ukraine will not be joining NATO for the foreseeable future. At least that one is within his authority. Since new members can only be accepted by unanimous decision, he can block membership although, again, conceding that publicly in advance of any serious talks doesn’t look like a masterstroke of bargaining. Nor does it suggest that he has thought further ahead than the next news cycle.

Personally, I’ve never been a fan of NATO anyway; the idea that dividing the world into hostile military blocks armed to the teeth is a rational long-term way of preventing war has always struck me as being a curious one. Trump has exposed the essential weakness of the alliance: if the most powerful member goes rogue, the alliance becomes meaningless. By declaring in advance that any peacekeeping forces deployed to Ukraine will not be acting on behalf of NATO, and that no attack on them by Russia will trigger the clause decreeing that an attack on one is an attack on all, he has rendered the alliance in its current form largely pointless and toothless, giving Putin the green light to attack the peacekeepers whenever he wishes. However, in the long term, if we can navigate our way through the period of danger which he has created, he might even be doing us a favour, albeit unintentionally.

The question is about how to respond. Whilst it would have been better to have approached the question in calmer times and with more time to work things through, challenging the whole basis of the alliance is not in itself a bad thing. European nations – including Ukraine – need to think about how best to bring about a secure and peaceful Europe which can co-exist with Russia to the east as well as with the US to the west, rather than simply depending on the military power of the US for the first and subservience to the US for the second. It’s potentially an opportunity to negotiate a mutual downsizing of military forces and to remove actual or perceived threats on both sides by re-establishing a degree of trust and co-operation, alongside a commitment to resolve disputes by negotiation within the framework of international law. It’s unclear whether Russia under Putin (or his successors – he won’t be around for ever, and we’re talking about long term solutions here) is ready to even begin such a process. Maybe it’s naïve to expect it to happen rapidly, but European states are hardly sending positive signals about their own willingness to engage in such a process either. The default position increasingly looks like some sort of attempt to build a replacement for NATO which excludes the US, and continue the armed stand-off, with Starmer's Labour in the vanguard, determined to look tough. That would be a huge missed opportunity to seek to find a long term positive in the short term chaos being unleashed by the madman in the White House.