Connexion
It is important to not merely accept axiomatically that Putin, like all autocrats, is bent on aggression and expansion.
NATO countries must “help Ukraine push Russia out of its territory and end this unprovoked aggression,” U.S. Ambassador to NATO Julianne Smith said on April 2, “because if they do not succeed, of course, the concern is that Russia will feel compelled to keep going.”
Smith is not the first to warn that Ukraine is the dam that is holding back a Russian conquest of Europe. U.S. President Joe Biden told Congress on December 6 that “If Putin takes Ukraine, he won’t stop there…. He’s going to keep going. He’s made that pretty clear.” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin warned that “Putin will not stop at Ukraine.” And Secretary of State Antony Blinken explained that Putin has “made clear that he’d like to reconstitute the Soviet empire.” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg says that, “if Putin wins in Ukraine, there is real risk that his aggression will not end there.” On March 28, Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, insisted that “this aggression, and Putin’s army, can come to Europe.” He said that “at the moment, it’s us, then Kazakhstan, then Baltic states, then Poland, then Germany. At least half of Germany.”
“If Ukraine loses the war,” he said on April 7, “other countries will be attacked. This is a fact.”
Aside from the value these warnings have in convincing the public—and the U.S. Congress—to continue sending money and weapons to Ukraine, the insistence that Putin’s ambitions are not limited to Ukraine but have their sights on Europe is based on two historical myths.
The first is that autocrats by their nature desire conquest and the expansion of their empires. “We have also seen many times in history,” the U.S. ambassador to NATO said, “where if a dictator is not stopped, or an authoritarian leader, they keep going.”
Inconveniently, this axiom is not borne out by history. Nor does the U.S. apply it to several of its contemporary friends; Washington does not assume that the autocratic rulers of Saudi Arabia or Egypt are bent on conquering the Middle East or Africa.
The historical record shows that, in his over two decades in power, Putin has not “kept going.” When Russian forces have been deployed, they have been limited to specific objectives when they could have easily kept going, as in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014, when military conquest could have been accomplished with ease.
The second is that Putin has said as much. Putin is often quoted as saying that “people in Russia say that those who do not regret the collapse of the Soviet Union have no heart.” The second part of his statement is quoted less often: “And those that do regret it have no brain.”
The same selective use of quotations is applied to Putin’s comment that “we should acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster.” Though quoted as proof of Putin’s nostalgia for the Soviet Union and his desire to reestablish it, the strategy requires lifting the quotation from a context that makes it clear that the disaster Putin is referring to is not the absence of the Soviet Union but, primarily, the economic hardship that followed in the wake of its break up. He bemoaned that “individual savings were depreciated” and oligarchs “served exclusively their own corporate interests.” He remembered that “mass poverty began to be seen as the norm.”
There are at least three points that need to be factored into Western calculations of Putin’s ambitions that should temper the confidence of the forecast that he is bent on conquering Europe and on war with NATO.
The first is that there is no evidence for it. After her warning that Russia will “keep going,” Smith admitted that “we do not have indicators or warnings right now that a Russian war is imminent on NATO territory, and I really want to be clear about that.”
The Baltic countries complain that their warnings of the expansionist threat posed by Russia have been dismissed by the West. “For years,” Polish foreign minister Radosław Sikorski says, the West was “patronizing us about our attitude: ‘Oh, you know, you over-nervous, over-sensitive Central Europeans are prejudiced against Russia.’” Estonia’s former President Hendrik Ilves complained that the West does “Russia policy without consulting people who know far more about Russia.”
Smith responded, “I don’t want to give our friends in the Baltic states the impression that somehow war is coming to NATO territory overnight. We take it seriously, but we do not see this to be an imminent threat.”
The second point is that the Western statements of Putin’s ambitions are not consistent with the historical record of Putin’s statements of his ambitions.
Putin has said that “the Ukraine crisis is not a territorial conflict, and I want to make that clear…. The issue is much broader and more fundamental and is about the principles underlying the new international order.”
Those fundamental principles have consistently included a guarantee that Ukraine will remain neutral and not join NATO, a guarantee that NATO won’t turn Ukraine into an armed anti-Russian bridgehead on its border, and assurances of protection of the rights of Russophile Ukrainians.
There is nothing on the historical record to suggest that conquering Europe or confronting NATO have ever been among the stated goals of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
This point has been conceded by Ukraine and by NATO. Davyd Arakhamia, who led the Ukrainian negotiating team at the Istanbul talks, says that Russia was “prepared to end the war if we agreed to, as Finland once did, neutrality, and committed that we would not join NATO.” He says that a guarantee that Ukraine would not join NATO was the “key point” for Russia. Most importantly, Zelensky has said that the promise not to join NATO “was the first fundamental point for the Russian Federation” and that “as far as I remember, they started a war because of this.”
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg recently conceded that a “promise [of] no more NATO enlargement…was a precondition for not invading Ukraine.” When NATO refused to discuss such a promise, Putin “went to war to prevent NATO—more NATO—close to his borders.” Stoltenberg concluded that “Putin invaded a European country to prevent more NATO.”
The third point is that the historical record suggests that Putin went to war in Ukraine, not as a step toward war with NATO, but to prevent a war with NATO.
“Listen attentively to what I am saying,” Putin said just three weeks before the invasion. “It is written into Ukraine’s doctrines that it wants to take Crimea back, by force if necessary…. Suppose Ukraine is a NATO member…. Suppose it starts operations in Crimea, not to mention Donbass for now. This is sovereign Russian territory. We consider this matter settled. Imagine that Ukraine is a NATO country and starts these military operations. What are we supposed to do? Fight against the NATO bloc? Has anyone given at least some thought to this? Apparently not.”
Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine “to prevent NATO…close to his borders” may have been motivated by concern that a Ukraine in NATO that attacked Donbas or Crimea would draw Russia into a war with NATO.
Just three days before launching the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Putin said that “the reality we live in” is that if Ukraine is “accepted into…NATO, the threat against our country will increase because of Article 5” since “there is a real threat that they will try to take back the territory they believe is theirs using military force. And they do say this in their documents, obviously. Then the entire North Atlantic Alliance will have to get involved.”
If Putin went to war in Ukraine to prevent a war with NATO, then it makes little sense that he would use the war in Ukraine as a means to start a war with NATO.
Since the claim that, if Russia wins in Ukraine, Putin will keep going and bring war to Europe and NATO, is wielded to justify continuing the fight instead of encouraging a diplomatic solution, it is important to not merely accept axiomatically that Putin, like all autocrats, is bent on aggression and expansion. The frequently made warning rests uncertainly on myths and misreading of the historical record that, when examined, recommend a less confident forecast of Putin’s intentions.
The post Is Putin Bent on Conquering Europe? appeared first on The American Conservative.
The days of free and cheap riding are numbered.
The wailing is getting louder across Europe. Elites in Brussels and national capitals are clutching their pearls as they view American opinion polls. Their U.S. friends, the usual Masters of the Universe who dominate political and economic affairs, are reacting similarly.
Although the presidential election is more than six long months away and much can happen before November 5, they all are sharing nightmares featuring Donald Trump. Such is the consequence of spending the last eight decades treating Europe’s protection as America’s responsibility.
Europeans are only slowly waking up to reality. For instance, the British historian and journalist Max Hastings observed, “Some of us have repeatedly asserted that without America the Ukrainians could become toast. That proposition looks like it is being tested.” He didn’t blame America. Rather, he admitted that “there is also a realization that the United States has tired, probably forever, of leading and largely funding the defense of Europe.”
Then he criticized Europeans for lagging despite their professed fears of Russian aggression. He wrote “The Germans have discovered a €25 billion shortfall in their defense spending plan, overlaid on national economic stagnation. President Macron is shipping 100 howitzers, but these cannot make good his earlier refusal to back Ukraine.” That’s not all; leading states such as Italy and Spain still can’t be bothered.
Hastings was even tougher on his own nation, citing the ugly truth about its disappointing efforts: “Though successive British prime ministers have professed to embrace Ukraine, which is essentially our proxy in facing down Russian aggression, they have done almost nothing to sustain the supply of munitions, once the army’s cupboard was emptied.”
Indeed, he added, “since the end of the Cold War it has been the all-party fashion to treat defense not as a vital element in our polity but as an optional extra to the main business of government.” He targeted the Conservative Party, the home of Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher: “Since 2010 the Tories have refused to make the necessary defense spending commitments.”
Also credit Hastings for admitting that the Europeans were warned about Russia’s likely response to NATO expansion: “It was recklessly insouciant to take no steps to prepare ourselves, both morally and militarily, to fight if the Russians responded with force.” He called for Europeans to step up: “Europe must send Kyiv yesterday every gun and shell it can purchase—we cannot manufacture the hardware ourselves in real time.”
Finally, and most important, he acknowledged that the continent’s residents must work hard to protect themselves: “If we wish to avoid having to fight another big war we must create a credible military deterrent in which nuclear weapons are the least relevant, though still necessary, component. Even granted the will, which is problematic, Europe requires a decade of enhanced spending to make itself remotely capable of self-defense, in the absence of the U.S.”
Still, the situation is a bit less dire than Hastings suggests. He overestimates the danger facing Europe. Although Russia’s Vladimir Putin is ruthless, the latter has shown little interest in conquest during his quarter century in power. Indeed, he began his presidency friendly to the U.S. and Europe; he was the first foreign leader to call George W. Bush after 9/11 and gave an accommodating address to the German Bundestag shortly thereafter.
Moreover, Putin’s much-cited remark about the Soviet collapse did not suggest recreating the Russian empire, as commonly claimed. He declared,
Above all, we should acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the century. As for the Russian nation, it became a genuine drama. Tens of millions of our co-citizens and compatriots found themselves outside Russian territory. Moreover, the epidemic of disintegration infected Russia itself.
Individual savings were depreciated, and old ideals destroyed. Many institutions were disbanded or reformed carelessly. Terrorist intervention and the Khasavyurt capitulation that followed damaged the country’s integrity. Oligarchic groups—possessing absolute control over information channels—served exclusively their own corporate interests. Mass poverty began to be seen as the norm. And all this was happening against the backdrop of a dramatic economic downturn, unstable finances, and the paralysis of the social sphere.
Far from backing the return of the Soviet Communist Party, he contended that “the time that our young democracy…was precisely the period when the significant developments took place in Russia. Our society was generating not only the energy of self-preservation, but also the will for a new and free life.” His discussion of how “to find our own path in order to build a democratic, free and just society and state” looks ironic in retrospect, but nothing in the speech suggested reconstituting the USSR.
Of course, his attitude hardened over time, but for obvious reasons reflected in his famous talk at the 2007 Munich Security Conference. He highlighted what faithless and dishonest allied officials subsequently sought to deny, Moscow’s displeasure over NATO expansion and Washington’s aggressive military policy. U.S. presidents, secretaries of defense, and secretaries of state knew that they were recklessly crossing a red line for Putin and most of Russia’s top political leadership. For instance, in 2008 intelligence officer Fiona Hill, more recently with the Trump NSC, and U.S. Ambassador to Russia William Burns, currently CIA Director, warned the George W. Bush administration that NATO expansion was likely to spark a violent response.
Two years ago, Putin made the decision for war, for which he bears ultimate responsibility. Yet he is no Hitler. Russia has not found Ukraine easy to conquer. It would be difficult for Moscow to swallow its victim whole. Moreover, Putin acted out his explicit threats, not the West’s imagined fears. Never has Putin or the rest of the leadership shown interest in conquering the Baltic States, let alone more of Europe. The question would be, To what end? Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was criminal, but he did so for reasons known in the West for decades. What would he gain from attempting to overrun the rest of Europe? When asked by Tucker Carlson if he might invade Poland, Putin replied, “Only in one case, if Poland attacks Russia. Why? Because we have no interest in Poland, Latvia, or anywhere else. Why would we do that? We simply don’t have any interest.”
Of course, Europeans should not trust Putin with their continent’s peace and stability. However, they—not America—should make their security their priority.
An important issue raised by Hastings is whether Europe should develop a continental nuclear deterrent. The U.S. promised to use nukes to defend Europe during the Cold War and the Soviets never tested American resolve. Whether or not the continent was worth the risk to the U.S. then, it is not now. Observed the Wall Street Journal’s Yaroslav Trofimov: “Would an American president, especially a re-elected Donald Trump, be willing to risk nuclear war for Helsinki, Tallinn or Warsaw? And if not, could Europe’s own two nuclear powers—France and, to a lesser extent, the UK—provide enough deterrence of their own?”
Both Paris and London have nukes, but their forces are national and independent. Germans have begun to debate contributing to a European arsenal or developing their own. Even the Poles might be on board with a Eurobomb. Friendly proliferation has obvious drawbacks but may be the best practicable option. Today Russia relies on nuclear parity to make up for conventional inferiority compared to America. Europe could do the same vis-à-vis Moscow.
Nevertheless, as the Europeans move ahead, they also should seek a future in which they will be safer and more prosperous, which means reaching an understanding with Russia over a new security structure. Although European officials routinely demonize Putin, they share responsibility with him for the war. Fighting Moscow to the last Ukrainian is not the best means to establish long-term stability and peace.
Kiev’s determination to battle on is understandable and, indeed, courageous, but Ukrainians should remember that the allies have consistently played them false. NATO made a commitment in 2008 that no European government and no subsequent US administration was prepared to keep. For 14 years, every alliance member along with the Brussels bureaucracy lied to Kiev, falsely insisting that they looked forward to Ukraine joining the alliance. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin continued the deception when he visited Kiev in late 2021 in the lead-up to Russia’s invasion. At the same time, the Biden administration refused to negotiate with Moscow when a commitment not to include Ukraine might have kept the peace.
Shortly after Russia’s invasion Washington and London apparently discouraged Kiev from negotiating with Moscow over the same issue, when the conflict might have been ended with relatively modest casualties and destruction. Moreover, NATO members continued to promise alliance membership to Kiev; at last July’s NATO summit Austin said that he had “no doubt” Ukraine would join. Yet the allies steadfastly refuse to enter the war when their support is most needed.
A couple weeks ago Secretary of State Antony Blinken reassured Kiev, “We’re also here at NATO to talk about the summit that’s upcoming in the summer in Washington, celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Alliance. Ukraine will become a member of NATO. Our purpose of the summit is to help build a bridge to that membership and to create a clear pathway for Ukraine moving forward.”
But no one expects a formal commitment this year or next; realistically, Kiev shouldn’t expect one this decade or next. Ultimately Ukrainians will have to make their own deal with Russia. And that will turn out better if done sooner rather than later.
It is Europe’s turn. Observed Hastings: “If Putin or China’s President Xi today demands: ‘How many divisions has Britain?’—or, for that matter, Europe—the truthful answer deserves the scorn it must inspire in both tyrants.” Europeans should act like grownups and take over responsibility for their own defense.
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That won’t stop those who believe in priorities from being dubbed “unpatriotic conservatives” anew.
Longtime readers of The American Conservative are no stranger to making common cause with people on the left when necessary. The effort to forestall decades of disaster in Iraq may have failed, but it was not TAC alone in that defeat; the magazine’s editors were dubbed “unpatriotic conservatives” not only because they were antiwar and David Frum loved the war, but explicitly because in seeking to avert a debacle they had made “common cause with the left-wing…movements.” So doing, it was suggested, and is still suggested, violated a friend–enemy distinction that placed them outside the political bounds of, if not the country, at least the conservative movement. The war party dismissed appeals to prudence and constraints, conflating resistance to the war with terrorist sympathies.
Today, you can be a patriotic conservative and agree with Democrats, apparently, but only if it is about Trump—not about liberal overreach. The war party still resists the prudential recognition of limited resources, and its right wing will find such recognition all the more difficult when it entails agreement with members of the traditional left. But the national political distinction that matters in our moment is between those who put the interests of American citizens and their posterity first and those who don’t, often hiding behind gestures toward an abstract idea of America. This is a distinction that cuts across conventional affiliations, leaving both parties in upheaval, as the Democrats become the party most comfortable with liberal internationalism and the global financial elite. Everyone should be prepared, going forward, to find perhaps temporary allies of convenience to both his right and left.
For those who seek to put America first, NATO reform presents a new risk of being associated with people neoconservatives will dismiss as leftists. So be it. A recent essay in Foreign Affairs by Max Bergmann, currently of the Center for Strategic and International Studies but formerly of the Center for American Progress, argues for a “more European NATO.” His call pairs nicely with what Sumantra Maitra, my colleague both here at TAC and at the Center for Renewing America, calls a “dormant NATO” strategy for the United States, something Bergmann acknowledges negatively, framing his case as a matter of insurance against such policies.
Nevertheless, the two perspectives are harmonious. In a time of limited resources, and thus ruthless prioritization, American policymakers must focus on managing our relationship with China and responding to China’s relationship with the rest of the world. If, as Bergmann suggests and Maitra has proposed, Europe can fulfill the core purposes of NATO without America as principal, then embracing that reality gives U.S. policymakers one less distraction. The benefits are not one-sided in the long term. Bergmann writes that the main problem facing Europe collectively “lies with NATO’s overdependence on the United States.”
In a world where even President Biden’s Democrat administration is preoccupied with the situation in the West Pacific, this is an obvious vulnerability for martially atrophied European member states. The traditional major threat to U.S. grand strategy is the emergence of a hegemonic power that dominates the Eurasian landmass and thus, surpassing the United States in material and cultural resources, can afford to strike North America across the oceans. The reality now of the global political and economic situation is such that this threat slouches not toward Europe, as it did in the 20th century’s conflicts with Germany and Russia, but instead moves its slow thighs in Asia. American focus is turning, if still in starts and stops.
Thus NATO should be, or will be by events, demoted from a critical global institution to a vital regional one. As Bergmann writes, “After decades of drift, the alliance has found new purpose in deterring Russian aggression, its original raison d’etre,” and the European members of the alliance are capable of such deterrence largely without the United States. Bergmann acknowledges that “when Americans travel to Europe, they see sophisticated infrastructure and citizens who enjoy high standards of living and robust social safety nets.”
Being one of those rare professional liberals with enough imagination to model a normal person’s thoughts, he adds, “They cannot understand why their tax dollars and soldiers are needed to defend a well-off continent whose total population far outstrips that of the United States.”
This highlights, however, a peculiar pretense in discussions of NATO’s future. What Bergmann passes over as “decades of drift” have also been decades of enthusiastic enumeration of new responsibilities for the alliance, as it transformed itself from a straightforward defensive arrangement into a full-suite security organization executing military interventions far outside the European theater, let alone the North Atlantic. For decades, NATO has been looking for things to do, and finding some. So when officials outraged by the dormant NATO proposal claim there is nothing to scale down, nothing for America to decline to participate in, that the alliance is just what it has always been, there should be some outrage in return.
In fact, the alliance has evolved, so it can evolve further. Defenders of a smaller role for the United States will have to be prepared, however, just like defenders of the status quo, to set aside compunctions about agreeing with members of “the other team.” As NATO has become so much more than for keeping Russia out, it has not ceased from also being, in Lord Ismay’s famous words, for keeping “the Americans in, and the Germans down.” Conservative interventionists will resist a European-led or dormant NATO with invocations of future war on the continent; reliance on American firepower, they say, is the only thing keeping member states off each other’s throats. In making this argument, they will probably have the support of both small states concerned at the prospect of further dependence on France and Germany and a European left happy to keep the defense burden squarely on American shoulders.
Meanwhile, a coalition for making American troops the backstop of last resort, rather than the backbone of forward defense, will be no less offensive to American prejudices. France may be our oldest ally, but after two World Wars, bickering with Charles De Gaulle, and observation of the country’s creative riot and vacation schedule, her reputation with American conservatives is the stuff of jokes. That reflects the shortness of U.S. memories far more than France’s civilizational status, and will need to be overcome. France has always wanted to play a larger role in NATO, repeatedly snubbed by the Anglo-American special relationship. A French-German-British triumvirate backing up the alliance’s Eastern border states would work as well at preserving peace for the foreseeable future as the current imbalanced consulship.
Foreign policy does not fit tidily within domestic partisan divides, because it deals with delimiting that domestic area. It is too large. Like immigration policy, it conditions these other debates, creating what I have described before as a political order of operations. At the beginning of this column, I defined our new disruptive national political distinction in domestic terms, but I conclude now with the distinction that divides foreign policy, because it is the distinction that bounds other debates. The defining division in American foreign policy today is over the status of unipolarity.
No one denies that, after 1989, the U.S. experienced a period of hyperpower; the question is whether three decades of bipartisan liberal hubris at the end of history undermined that hegemony beyond repair. Committed liberal internationalists believe unipolarity can be salvaged, that America needs only assert herself on the battlefield and further entrench in the multilateral institutions of the last century. They still think in the Cold War terms of “hawks” and “doves,” and accuse those who have come to terms with reality—an increasingly bipolar global order and a multipolar future—of inviting and even ushering in these conditions. (Never mind who has been at the controls for the last 30 years). The advocates of making the best hard choices can be sure they will still be called “unpatriotic conservatives.”
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Macron talks of defeating Russia. Instead, Washington and Brussels should concentrate on bringing the conflict to a peaceful end.
France wants to go to war with Russia, or so it seems. Perhaps the French President Emmanuel Macron imagines himself Napoleon reincarnated in his determination to make the continent a Weltmacht. Macron recently insisted that Europeans “should not exclude that there might be a need for security that then justifies some elements of [military] deployment.” Indeed, not only did he argue that “nothing should be ruled out,” but he added, “We will do anything we can to prevent Russia from winning this war.”
The most important NATO members, led by Washington, rejected his suggestion. Nevertheless, Macron, whose bombast contrasts sharply with his government’s miserly contribution of about a billion dollars to Ukraine, doubled down, receiving support from allies at the other end of the military spectrum, including Czechia, Estonia, and Lithuania. For instance, the prime minister of Estonia, with all of 7,200 men and women under arms, insisted that “everything is on the table to help Ukraine beat Putin.” As in the past, NATO states with the least military capabilities seemed most ready to proffer grandiose plans for using other members’ militaries.
The U.S. and several NATO allies already are deeply involved in the proxy war-plus against Moscow. Providing a plethora of weapons to kill thousands of Russians is provocative enough. In the past, both Washington and Moscow played the game—Afghanistan and Vietnam, respectively, come to mind. Yet in neither case were the neo-belligerents so public about their direct involvement and ostentatious in their celebration of the deadly results.
To start, many foreigners fighting with Ukraine against Russia are unofficially deployed. Explained former Pentagon official Stephen Bryen, “Now the Russians are saying that many of the so-called ‘mercenaries’ in Ukraine are, in fact, highly trained NATO soldiers. They wear Ukrainian uniforms with national patches identifying them. They are ‘necessary’ to operate the high tech weapons NATO has sent to Ukraine. When the Russians recently took over Avdiivka they found bodies of these mercenaries, some American and some Poles.”
A few weeks ago, Russia claimed to have killed French combatants in an airstrike. Paris called the report “disinformation,” but its denial was widely disbelieved, especially now. Added Bryen, “Most of the deaths of NATO personnel are covered up. When they are reported at all, they generally say that the ‘volunteer’ was providing medical assistance.”
Other allied forces operate more openly. German Chancellor Scholz revealed that both France and the United Kingdom had troops assisting in the use of high-tech weapons transferred to Kiev. Observed Scholz: “What the British and French are doing in terms of target control and support for target control cannot be done in Germany.”
The UK admitted the truth, criticizing Scholz only for leaking the information. London has assisted Ukraine in destroying Russian war ships. Moreover, international affairs specialist Michael Brenner explained, the UK’s “specialized personnel have been operating the Storm Shadow missiles (counterpart to the French SCALP) employed against Crimea and elsewhere. MI-6 has taken a lead role in designing multiple attacks on the Kerch Bridge and other critical infrastructure.” Rumors circulated that British personnel were assisting with the air defense unit which downed a Russian plane carrying Ukrainian POWs.
Such activities are widespread. Le Monde reported, “Since the outbreak of the invasion of Ukraine, numerous state actors associated with Western intelligence services, often with military status, have been present in the country. Undercover diplomatic personnel, advisers for Ukraine, and members of special forces have inherently played a role since the start of the war.”
Macron’s proposal to escalate the conflict triggered an allied war of words. He suggested that his critics were craven weaklings: “We are surely approaching a moment for Europe in which it will be necessary not to be cowards.” His government was reportedly considering sending Special Forces to aid Ukraine in its air defense operations.
The U.S. also has personnel on the ground in a training role and more. Two German generals whose conversation was tapped by Russia observed that “we know that many people with American accents in civil clothing are running around there.” Apparently, a lot of them. Explained Brenner:
Roughly 4–5,000 Americans have been performing critical operational functions from the outset. The presence of a majority predates by several years the onset of hostilities 2 years ago. That contingent was augmented by a supplementary group of 1,700 last summer which was as a corps of logistic experts advertised as mandated to seek out and eradicate corruption in the black-marketing of pilfered supplies. The Pentagon people are sown thought the Ukrainian military from headquarters planning units, to advisers in the field, to technicians and Special Forces. It is widely understood that Americans have operated the sophisticated HIMARS long-range artillery and the Patriot air defense batteries. This last means that members of the U.S. military have been aiming—perhaps pulling the trigger on—weapons that kill Russians.
The CIA also has played an active role in Ukraine’s defense:
CIA officers remained at a remote location in western Ukraine when the Biden administration evacuated U.S. personnel in the weeks before Russia invaded in February 2022. During the invasion, the officers relayed critical intelligence, including where Russia was planning strikes and which weapons systems they would use. “Without them, there would have been no way for us to resist the Russians, or to beat them,” said Ivan Bakanov, who was then head of Ukraine’s domestic intelligence agency, the S.B.U.
U.S. officials anonymously but publicly took credit for killing Russian generals and sinking Russian ships. Washington is one of the prime suspects in the attack on the Russo-German Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg encouraged escalation too, arguing that “it will be up to each ally to decide whether to deliver F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine, but the country has the right to self-defense, including striking legitimate Russian military targets outside Ukraine.” The issue is not just the range of the planes, but who would fly them. Moscow assumes NATO would also provide pilots, however unlikely that might seem to Americans. But then, Russians flew planes on behalf of North Korea against the U.S. and Egypt against Israel.
Some Ukraine partisans would push the boundary of potential casus belli outward. Foreign troops could play a variety of non-combat roles in Ukraine, but all would risk drawing NATO into the fray. Paris admitted that one purpose of introducing troops would be the hope that the “presence of French soldiers or [those] of other nations would potentially protect certain areas of the Ukrainian territory.” That is, the French military operating in a war zone would become a human shield behind which Ukraine could freely attack Russia while avoiding retaliation. Rather like President Woodrow Wilson’s ludicrous claim that one American on board immunized a British reserve cruiser carrying munitions through a war zone, one French soldier in Kiev, Odessa, or Kharkiv would immunize an entire city from attack. That would be ridiculous, of course, with French soldiers choosing to enter a war zone. However, Paris already has complained to Moscow about killing its citizens in Ukraine.
The hawkish former Rep. Adam Kinzinger would turn this doctrine into U.S. policy, contending that, with a missile strike some 500 feet away from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and visiting Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis in Odessa, “Russia just got within 150 meters of an article 5, with news of the strike in Odessa almost hitting the Greek Prime Minister.” Even more so, presumably, he would expect America to go to war if a U.S. politician grandstanding with Zelensky in Kiev or U.S. soldiers training Ukrainians elsewhere perished in a Russian strike.
Why the widespread enthusiasm for lighting the fires of what could become a nuclear World War III?
In an odd sense, we are paying a price for the fact that Putin has failed to escalate. Washington and its allies began cautiously, hesitant to act as Ukraine’s armorer. However, as Putin ignored military provocations, NATO governments unleashed a deadly munitions cascade, costing the lives of thousands, and perhaps tens of thousands, of Russian personnel. So far, despite sharp criticism from the nationalist right, Putin has rejected escalation. France’s foreign minister now confidently insists that the allies can send troops “without crossing the threshold of belligerence.”
In similar circumstances, would Washington be as restrained as Russia has been? Four years ago candidate Joe Biden said what many Americans were thinking: “I don’t understand why this president is unwilling to take on Putin when he’s actually paying bounties to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan.” That story wasn’t true, but Washington was filled with demands for retaliation. Imagine if Moscow had emptied its armories and shipped everything to the Taliban, provided missiles to strike U.S. territory, sent personnel to Afghanistan to operate Russian weapons, ran intelligence operations for the insurgents, and openly debated introducing Russian troops to aid the Taliban. Washington would do something, and probably a lot, in response.
In this regard, Western states have benefited from Putin’s apparent belief that Russia is winning, so presumably he refuses to risk widening the war. (The invasion has been costly, but he evidently believes that he will nevertheless achieve his objectives.) Yet the allies say they are determined to prevent Moscow from triumphing. Some insist that sufficient support be rendered to ensure Ukraine can negotiate a favorable peace. Others, like Macron, talk of producing a Ukrainian victory. All of Kiev’s friends hope to expose Putin’s ambitions as folly.
Ukraine’s future obviously is an existential interest for Ukrainians, but is not, despite the florid rhetoric on both sides of the Atlantic, for Americans or Europeans. Indeed, popular support for Ukraine on both sides of the Atlantic is thin and declining. As time passes, this drop is likely to accelerate.
In contrast, the Russian government and its nationalist backers also see Ukraine’s status as an existential interest. So in all likelihood does Putin, in assessing both his historical reputation and, more immediately, his political survival. If the allies openly join the battle or enable systematic attacks on Moscow and other major Russian cities, serious threats against Crimea, or virtual destruction of Russian military units, Moscow’s relative quiescence is unlikely to continue. For Putin, defeat truly is not an option. And given the Russian military’s lower threshold for use of nuclear weapons, the consequences could be dire for all.
Allied aid has helped the Ukrainian people preserve their independence from Moscow’s assault. Yet the Napoleon-wannabe Macron talks of defeating Russia. That is a fool’s errand likely to result in a broader and more destructive conflict. Instead, Washington and Brussels should concentrate on bringing the conflict to a peaceful end.
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European discussions about sending troops obscures the fact that several NATO countries already have boots on the ground.
The war in Ukraine has reached that long-feared fork in the road. Ukraine is losing the war, and no amount of arms or aid is going to change that. The West has to either accept that assessment and nudge Ukraine to the negotiating table or send more than arms and aid. It is going to have to escalate its support and send troops, risking direct confrontation with Russia and the disaster scenario it has tried to avoid since the first days of the war.
This realization has sparked a bitter debate in Europe. Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico said on February 26 that “a number of NATO and EU member states are considering that they will send their troops to Ukraine on a bilateral basis.” That same day, the French President Emmanuel Macron said that, though “there is no consensus today to send troops on the ground in an official, accepted, and endorsed manner…no option should be discarded.”
Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz shot back that the consensus was “that there will be no ground troops, no soldiers on Ukrainian soil who are sent there by European states or NATO states.” Germany, Poland, Sweden, Spain, Italy, the Czech Republic, and NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg all said there was no plan to send troops to Ukraine.
Macron replied that the time has come for a “Europe where it will be appropriate not to be a coward.” The German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said that “talk about boots on the ground or having more courage or less courage…does not really help solve the issues we have when it comes to helping Ukraine.”
The debate over sending NATO troops to Ukraine may be masking the need for more immediate debate about NATO troops already on the ground in Ukraine.
The transcript of an intercepted February 19 conversation between senior German air force officials discussing the possible transfer of German Taurus long-range missiles to Ukraine says that the Germans “know how the English do it…. They have several people on-site.” The revelation that the UK has troops on the ground has now been confirmed by the British Prime Minister’s office: “Beyond the small number of personnel we do have in the country supporting the armed forces of Ukraine, we haven’t got any plans for large-scale deployment.”
The transcript says that “the French don’t do it that way,” but Scholz has hinted that they do. On February 26, the German Chancellor defended his decision not to send Taurus missiles to Ukraine by saying that it would require the presence of Germans in Ukraine to match their British and French counterparts. He explained, “What is being done in the way of target control and accompanying target control on the part of the British and the French can’t be done in Germany.” He worried that “a participation in the war could emerge from what we do.”
The transcript also cryptically alludes to an American presence on the ground. Wondering whether Ukraine would be able to do targeting on their own, one of the officials says, “It’s known that there are numerous people there in civilian attire who speak with an American accent.”
And there are numerous American civilian officers in Ukraine. On February 26, a New York Times report revealed in greater detail than ever before the extent of CIA involvement on the ground in Ukraine. In the days before the war began, U.S. personnel were evacuated from Ukraine—except for a small group of CIA officers whom CIA Director William Burns ordered be left behind, and the “scores of new officers” who were sent in “to help the Ukrainians.” They helped them by passing on critical information, “including where Russia was planning strikes and which weapons systems they would use.” The CIA officers provided “intelligence for targeted missile strikes.” And they provided “intelligence support for lethal operations against Russian forces on Ukrainian soil.”
These recent intercepts and reports suggest that the U.S., UK, and France already have troops or operatives on the ground in Ukraine. Russia has long claimed the presence of a large number of Polish fighters in Ukraine.
Other NATO countries appear open to such direct involvement. Estonia’s Prime Minister Kaja Kallas said that “everything” is on the table when it comes to helping Ukraine, that “I think it is also the signals that we are sending to Russia, that we are not ruling out different things.” Referring to Macron’s comments that sending troops to Ukraine should be an option that is not discarded, the Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis agreed that “nothing can be taken off the table, no option can be rejected out of hand,” adding that “I very much welcome and encourage the discussion that has started.”
And other NATO countries are considering sending troops to Ukraine in noncombatant roles. The Czech President Petr Pavel says that Ukraine’s Western partners should “not limit ourselves where we don’t have to,” including potentially sending troops for “non-combat engagement” like training missions.
Canada’s Defense Minister Bill Blair says that Canada already has a small military presence in Ukraine to protect diplomatic staff (though it had been reported that Canada evacuated its diplomats at the start of the war). He says that Canada has “no plans to deploy combat troops” to Ukraine, but that some Canadian training of Ukrainian troops has been “challenging because it’s difficult to get people out of Ukraine to do the training.” So, he says, there was “discussions that, could we do it more efficiently, and is it possible to do it in Ukraine?”
The West has arrived at a fearful dilemma. Doubling down and sending troops to fight in Ukraine is a dangerous option that could lead to direct confrontation with Russia and an unthinkable war. But it is not the only road that can be taken. The West can also turn off the path of war that has benefitted no one, not send troops to Ukraine and, instead, explore the diplomatic road.
The post What NATO Country Doesn’t Have Troops in Ukraine? appeared first on The American Conservative.
The incumbent EU president has big plans for centralizing power at Brussels.
Ursula von der Leyen’s tenure as the President of the European Commission has been nothing short of tumultuous. Her infamous trip to Israel, marred by diplomatic missteps and controversy, only highlighted the growing discontent among EU diplomats. Even the EU’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, dared to issue a rare public rebuke, questioning von der Leyen’s entitlement to represent EU views on foreign policy. Such open dissent underlines the fractures within the EU’s leadership and the erosion of trust in von der Leyen’s ability to navigate the complexities of the rapidly changing world.
As the dust settles on her first term, it becomes increasingly evident that von der Leyen is steering the EU toward a perilous path—one marked by autocracy, federalism, and a growing detachment from the democratic roots that underpin the European project. The specter of an unelected political elite dictating the fate of member states looms large, casting shadows over the notion of a united Europe built on the principles of collaboration and shared sovereignty.
The unfolding narrative suggests that von der Leyen’s leadership is poised to cement the EU’s transformation into a military-centric behemoth, with foreign policy pivoting towards militarization and defense spending. The ambition of creating a unified EU army has emerged as a potent force, speeding up the federalization process and encroaching further on the sovereignty of member states.
For the first time, in 2021, von der Leyen emphasized that there would be crises in which the EU’s military force should operate independently from the UN and NATO.
“On the ground, our soldiers work side-by-side with police officers, lawyers and doctors, with humanitarian workers and human rights defenders, with teachers and engineers,” von der Leyen said.
“But what we need is the European Defence Union,” she concluded.
Von der Leyen, European Council President Charles Michel, and NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg signed a 14-point cooperation agreement between the EU and NATO in the same year.
Moreover, von der Leyen’s pivot from environmental stewardship to military might underscore an emerging trend towards prioritizing geopolitical interests over global sustainability.
Two converging factors are steering this transformation: the European populace’s discontent with climate policies and the perceived abandonment by the United States, pushing Europe to shoulder a more significant burden in global power struggles. Farmers’ protests, symbolized by tractors clogging city centers, underscore a growing frustration with looming environmental regulations aimed at achieving EU climate neutrality by 2050. Von der Leyen, the Eurocratic populist, appears to adapt to this discontent by prioritizing military might over climate action.
Simultaneously, the U.S.’s pivot to Asia, ostensibly to contain China, has left a void in European–American relations. The call for Europe to continue the Ukrainian proxy war on behalf of Washington, not by being dependent on the U.S. but by investing in American military equipment, is a paradigm shift. In this new geopolitical landscape, von der Leyen seems willing to trade climate advocacy for a military alliance, a decision fraught with implications for the delicate balance between environmental sustainability and global power dynamics.
The notion of a unified EU foreign policy is, at best, a facade. As Margaret Thatcher astutely observed, “Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.” The diverse historical experiences of European nations shape their foreign policy choices, rendering the notion of a monolithic EU stance on international affairs implausible. The discord among member states underscores the inherent tensions between national sovereignty and supranational ambitions.
Despite the grandiose aspirations and rhetoric, the EU’s foreign policy under von der Leyen has failed to yield strategic gains, particularly in its efforts to weaken Russia and resolve conflicts in Ukraine, but instead almost completely destroyed the European economy.
Russia faced harsh sanctions for two years which were aimed at weakening its economy. Nevertheless, the country experienced unexpected growth, with its economy expanding by 3.6 percent in 2023. This growth rate was faster than that of all the G7 economies. The IMF has revised its GDP growth forecast for Russia to 2.6 percent this year, marking a 1.5 percentage point increase over what it had predicted last October.
Moreover, Russia has surpassed Germany, becoming the fifth wealthiest economy in the world and the largest economy in Europe. It is worth $5.3 trillion. On the other hand, Germany is experiencing an end to its title of an industrial superpower due to energy crises caused by declining relations with Moscow. This situation will profoundly impact the economic conditions of the entire region in the years to come.
The portrayal of Russia as a bogeyman serves as a convenient pretext for consolidating power in Brussels, eroding the sovereignty of member states under the guise of greater federalist unity. Democracy is but a casualty in the pursuit of a grander vision managed from the ivory tower of Brussels, leaving European citizens with a diminished voice in determining the course of their continent.
To be more precise, in a bold move towards European federalization late last year, the Committee on Constitutional Affairs of the European Parliament (AFCO) has proposed an ambitious Treaty change. Led by co-rapporteurs Guy Verhofstadt, Sven Simon, Gabriele Bischoff, Daniel Freund, and Helmut Scholz, the AFCO project aims to reshape the institutional framework of the European Union, potentially altering its legal nature.
AFCO’s vision is rooted in the Manifesto of Ventotene and the Schuman Declaration, foundational documents of European federalism. The proposed reform, seen as a response to geopolitical challenges and future EU enlargement, encompasses three key themes: a recalibration of the EU’s institutional balance, a broadening of the Union’s competences in vital policy areas, and increased EU supervision of national policies.
Von der Leyen aims to prepare the Union to take on more responsibility in foreign policy, security, and defense, which is one reason for embracing treaty change.
In the face of such challenges, recalibration and introspection are paramount. Europe stands at a crossroads, grappling with the dual imperatives of unity and diversity. Von der Leyen’s presidency serves as a cautionary tale, a reminder of the perils of unchecked federalism and the erosion of democratic principles. As the continent navigates the complexities of a rapidly evolving geopolitical landscape, the imperative to uphold the sovereignty and agency of member states must not be overshadowed by utopian visions of supranational unity under autocratic rule.
In her recent “State of the Union 2023” address, von der Leyen strategically transformed what is traditionally a legislative agenda announcement into a prelude for her anticipated re-election campaign in June 2024. Drawing parallels with the long-standing “State of the Union” tradition in the United States, Von der Leyen’s speech raised eyebrows as it shifted from the collective “we” to a more self-centric “me.”
The speech unveiled von der Leyen’s ambitions for a second term, with announcements of new roles, proceedings, and appointments, consolidating decision-making power under her authority. Notably, the creation of an EU Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) envoy reporting directly to her sparked concerns of widening the democratic deficit within the EU, favoring corporate interests over the voices of NGOs and civil society groups.
As von der Leyen seeks formal approval for a second term at the European People’s Party congress in Bucharest next month, the debate surrounding her legitimacy and the democratic principles within the EU continues to unfold.
The controversial nature of von der Leyen’s leadership is further accentuated by Martin Schulz, a former president of the European Parliament, who coined the idea of lead candidates (Spitzenkandidaten) in 2014. Schulz contends that Von der Leyen’s appointment in 2019, bypassing the Spitzenkandidat process, was a mistake that undermined the democratic image of the EU. He deems her a “fake” lead candidate and calls for her resignation as European Commission chief.
In the race for the European socialists’ top candidate position, Luxembourg’s Nicolas Schmit emerges as the frontrunner, securing support from both Spanish and German factions within the Party of European Socialists. The 70-year-old EU commissioner for jobs and social rights is currently the sole official candidate for the role. The German Social Democratic Party and the Spanish socialists have thrown their weight behind Schmit, paving the way for his potential candidacy.
The European center-left has faced challenges in rallying around a prominent candidate since the departure of heavyweight Frans Timmermans. Maroš Šefčovič, another socialist figure, lacks recognition outside Brussels and faces scrutiny due to his Slovakian background. The absence of clear-cut candidates further complicates the socialists’ quest to present a compelling alternative to von der Leyen.
Will Europe succumb to the allure of autocracy and federalist enthusiasm, or will it reaffirm its commitment to democratic principles and sovereign agency? The answer lies not in the corridors of power in Brussels, but in the hearts and minds of European citizens who hold the real power to shape the destiny of a continent. And it is up to them if they want Ursula von der Leyen to serve the second term and cement her position as a “Europe’s American president.”
The post Ursula von der Leyen’s Second Term: Toward an Autocratic European Union? appeared first on The American Conservative.
The country lost a sixth of its population to emigration after 1990. Now, thanks to a thriving economy, young Romanians are coming back.
When you tell Romanians you are visiting, their advice is unanimous: “Visit the rustic beauty of Transylvania, avoid the unsightly Bucharest.” Ignoring this counsel, I embarked on a month-long sojourn in Bucharest, wandering its streets in a sort of urban exploration, uncovering the unpolished truths beneath its surface. It’s a dirty, ugly city, they said. Perfect.
My arrival in Bucharest was marked by an almost ritualistic initiation: the airport cab driver ripped me off. This didn’t make me mad, instead I felt like I was finally part of the club, the screwed-by-a-cabbie-in-Eastern-Europe club. Admittedly, my own weariness and laziness made me an easy mark. I thought I was savvy, keeping an eye on the meter, but these drivers have a hidden button to jack up the meter they press when you are not looking. Lesson learned: If you must travel the roads of Bucharest—and Bucharest recently surpassed London as the EU city with the worst traffic—always take an Uber.
My Airbnb was one floor above an establishment whose nature was thinly veiled by a sign declaring, “THIS IS NOT A BROTHEL.” Walking up the stairwell, my path often crossed with young women bearing the weight of sorrow in their eyes and men with a spring in their step. The stark contrast of these encounters, a daily reminder of the moral erosion lurking in the city’s underbelly, was sad in a way that sticks to your soul.
The city is like some kind of mad experiment where communist ghosts and capitalist dreams crashed into each other and decided to coexist. An eclectic mix of Latin warmth, Ottoman tradition, Balkan fire, and Slavic cool is manifest in its architecture. They used to call it “Paris on the Danube” because of grand French-inspired edifices like the Arcul de Triumf, a nod to the iconic Arc de Triomphe, but that nickname no longer sticks after the city’s urban fabric was forever scarred by the cataclysms of World War II. Heavily bombed first by the Allies and then, after Romania switched sides, by the Germans, Bucharest lost many historical buildings and structures.
The city’s landscape was then further transformed under the regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu, Romania’s communist dictator from 1965 to 1989, who ripped out the heart of the city by bulldozing large swaths to realize his utilitarian vision. Parisian grandeur was replaced with grey, grim, dystopian, decaying, crumbling “commie blocks” that look like they’re rotting away. Those things are everywhere, like leprosy eating away at the city, graffiti-laden relics of a city that’s seen too much.
The most emblematic legacy of Ceaușescu’s rule is the colossal Parliament building, the world’s heaviest building, weighing approximately 4,098,500,000 kilograms. In terms of size among administrative buildings, it is second only to the Pentagon. It bankrupted the country to build it. The locals have bestowed upon it the sardonic nickname “Ceaușescima,” a portmanteau of Ceaușescu’s name and the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. According to a survey by Romania’s School for Political Studies, this building is paradoxically regarded by locals as simultaneously the most beautiful and the ugliest structure in the city.
In 1989, the toppling of Ceaușescu’s regime unleashed a maelstrom of revolution in Bucharest that once again destroyed much of the city. My scammer cab driver, who had been a soldier during that revolution, confided in me his act of rebellion: refusing to fire upon the protesters when ordered to do so, a memory he cherishes with a sense of honor. Following the revolution, the city further decayed, but now things are changing. The passage of time (and billions of dollars from the EU) has ushered in a renaissance of regeneration, energy, and progress, reshaping it into a destination of dark allure and electric modernity.
The modernity of Bucharest is somewhat tainted by an overabundance of trivial, vapid, and tacky entertainment. The city is littered with bars, strip clubs, brothels, casinos, and gambling hubs, making it a haven for inexpensive European bachelor parties. This hedonistic façade coexists bizarrely with an abundance of witches, tarot card readers, and fortune tellers. Donald Dunham, an American diplomat stationed in Bucharest in 1948, noted of Romanians, “They are superstitious but religious at the same time.” While 96.5 percent of Romanians believe in God and 84.4 percent believe in saints, an astonishing 60 percent also read their horoscope, even though canon law of the Orthodox Church forbids astrology. In 2011, lawmakers backed down from legislation to tax witches out of fears that they would be cursed
Seemingly the only aspect of the city not to suffer from irrational contrasts is its demographics: Romania belongs to Romanians. In London, you’ll see more Pakistanis than British; Rome is teeming with hordes of selfie-stick-toting tourists. In Bucharest, I didn’t see a single African, Indian, Chinese, or Japanese person the entire month. Ethnic Romanians are 97 percent of the city’s population; 2 percent are Gypsy, Jewish, Turkish, German, or Hungarian; the remaining 1 percent belong to the rest of the world. Because of its homogeneity, the sense of safety in the city is palpable: Bucharest is ranked the 67th safest city in the entire world. There are virtually no pickpockets. With no tourists to prey on, why would there be? The murder rate of 1.3 per 100,000 people is on par with France, Sweden, and Finland, compared to a murder rate of 6.35 in the United States, whose peer countries include Zambia, Yemen, and Uganda.
This modern murder rate is a mere third of where it stood 30 years ago following the fall of communism, which coincides with a remarkable 732 percent surge in GDP per capita. This positive shift has begun to counteract the trend of outmigration that saw Romania’s population shrink by 14 percent during the same span, a trend driven more by emigration than declining birth rates. Approximately 3.4 million Romanians emigrated in the ten years following the country’s entry into the EU. The peak of this exodus was in 2008, when 7.3 out of every 1,000 citizens left, but in 2024 the outmigration rate has dramatically decreased to just 0.7 per 1,000, signaling a significant turnaround.
The profession that was perhaps hit most by this wave of emigration was medical doctors. With the allure of higher salaries and more opportunities in Western Europe, their exodus was further exacerbated by the 2010 austerity measures that slashed public sector salaries by 25 percent. In 2020 alone, 2,173 Romanian doctors requested certificates of conformity to practice abroad, equating to nearly one doctor leaving every four hours.
Bogdan Enache, a millennial cardiologist practicing in Monaco for the last seven years, returned to Romania in 2024 to establish a practice in his hometown of Timisoara. “Mostly for the sake of my family, but in my days of optimism also with a thought that I can improve things here,” he tells me. “I have some reasons to believe that the tide is turning for Romania.”
“First and foremost, the economy has been growing. In the last ten years, the average net income has tripled,” says Dr. Enache. “And check out the fertility rates around Europe since 2000: Romania has gone from 1.3 to 1.8, which is the opposite trend of the rest of the EU, it doesn’t even seem close to others.”
Do Romanians resent the past two decades of mass emigration? “I don’t think there is resentment on a public/societal scale. I think people are still proud when their children go abroad (especially true for education),” says Dr. Enache. However, “there is a whole generation of children, sadly but predictably from lower income backgrounds, whose parents went to work in Europe and left their small children to be raised by their grandparents. They’d send money back and come to visit a couple of weeks per year. There have been some journalistic pieces about this phenomenon.”
In 2018, the Romanian government increased the salaries of medical personnel by up to 287 percent depending on speciality. Did that play a significant role in Dr. Enache’s return?
“Although not a key factor—I’m well aware I’ll be getting a pay cut—it is reassuring to know that I won’t be coming back to frustratingly low wages insufficient for decent living. The costs of daily life are much lower in Romania, so 1000 EUR gets you much further than 1000 EUR in Monaco,” says Dr. Enache. “The aspects most commonly cited by my colleagues [who emigrate] are wages, access to jobs, and an environment with the right infrastructure and equipment necessary to do the thing you’ve been trained for.”
The trend of emigration is reversing. Is it because Romania is more prosperous, or did people get disillusioned with the west and decide it’s not the wonderful golden land they imagined and thus not worth moving to?
“Definitely a bit of both. I think it’s also the case that people moving to another country find out that there’s no such thing as a perfect country and that every place has tradeoffs,” he says. “The cultural, economic, and developmental gap between Romania and ‘the West’ seems much much smaller nowadays than twenty or thirty years ago.”
“In some countries, such as France or the UK, the younger generations feel worse off than their parents or grandparents, whereas in other places, Romania, Poland, Czechia, our parents and grandparents had it so bad that it’s easier for our generation to feel positive progress.”
The post Romania Is Quietly Doing Great appeared first on The American Conservative.
Trump’s rhetoric is unvarnished. He’s still right.
They just can’t take a joke. The former president Donald Trump made a sarcastic crack about encouraging Russia to attack NATO members that didn’t invest in their defense, and hysteria enveloped both Washington and Brussels. For some officials, the imbroglio appeared to signal the end of Western civilization.
Even worse, Europeans realized that they might have to do more for themselves militarily. The continent’s policymakers have begun thinking the unthinkable. Reported the New York Times, “European leaders were quietly discussing how they might prepare for a world in which America removes itself as the centerpiece of the 75-year-old alliance.” What is the world coming to if European governments can no longer cheap-ride the U.S.? The horror!
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has spurred European governments to spend more. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said 18 of 31 members will meet the alliance’s two percent of GDP standard this year, three times the number in 2016.
Trump’s comment should accelerate this process, probably more than all the complaining, whining, and demanding of prior presidents combined. He claimed that the leader of an unidentified large European country asked if Trump would send in the American cavalry if that nation failed to meet its NATO obligations. Trump responded: “I said: ‘You didn’t pay? You’re delinquent?’… ‘No I would not protect you. In fact I would encourage them to do whatever they want. You gotta pay.’”
No serious person should take Trump’s comments as a formal policy statement. Rather, it sounds like a witty riposte to a whiny Eurocrat seeking to justify his or her government’s irresponsible refusal to fulfill a state’s most fundamental duty, protecting its citizens. What American angered by decades of European cheap-riding did not secretly cheer Trump’s statement, especially when a febrile gaggle of European officials responded by wailing that Uncle Sam might stop playing Uncle Sucker?
One of the more stunning admissions came from the usual unidentified source, in this case an anonymous European diplomat speaking to Fox News: “When Trump came along, it woke us up to the fact that the U.S. might not always act in European interest, especially if it goes against American interest.” That was quite the admission, as the source granted: “It sounds naive saying it out loud, but that was the assumption a lot of people made.”
Imagine! The problem is not that Europeans gloried in getting American officials to put Europe first—that is to be expected. Rather, the outrage is that American officials did so. And apparently did so routinely, without the slightest sense of shame. It took the undiplomatic, untutored, potty-mouthed Donald Trump to restore a sense of sanity to the U.S.–Europe relationship.
Treating the Pentagon as an international welfare agency for well-heeled clients is not the only problem with NATO today. Creating an alliance so heavily dependent on one nation encourages other states to fantasize at America’s expense. Their representatives often concoct grand military schemes for “NATO”—in practice meaning the U.S.
For instance, shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, a medley of Baltic government officials proposed imposing a “no-fly zone” over the latter. To be effective, such a ban would require shooting down planes operating over Russia as well, leading to full-scale war. Yet neither individually nor collectively do Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania possess anything approaching an “air force.” Obviously, they wouldn’t be enforcing a no-fly zone.
More recently, Estonia’s President Alar Karis pushed for naval confrontation with Moscow: “Western countries should establish a military presence in part of the Black Sea to ensure the safe movement of commercial and humanitarian aid vessels.” Estonia, however, has precisely six boats, two for coastal combat and four for mining. They are backed by two planes and two helicopters—for transport. Evidently someone other than Tallinn would have to do the confronting.
Foreign commentators promote equally ambitious plans. Simon Tisdall, columnist for the United Kingdom’s Guardian newspaper, decided that the sword was, in fact, more powerful than the pen and wrote a column urging use of “NATO’s overwhelming power to decisively turn the military tide” in Ukraine. Yet the U.K. military is shrinking and isn’t likely to be turning “the military tide” in Europe or elsewhere.
Two weeks ago, Peter Bator, Slovakia’s Permanent Representative to NATO, came to the U.S. to complain to Americans that the alliance—meaning them, the Americans—had not intervened on behalf of Ukraine. Rather melodramatically, he imagined his grandchildren saying, “You were the most powerful military organization in the world and you decided not to militarily support Ukraine. Please explain this to me.” Tragically, he couldn’t. “I would have difficulties,” he admitted. He said he could “find many fine arguments” of a “theoretical rhetorical” nature but would “still have problems just explaining it to myself.” So off to war the transatlantic alliance should go!
Slovakia has only 17,950 people in the military and deploys just 30 main battle tanks, 60 artillery pieces, 19 combat aircraft, and 37 helicopters. Obviously, that doesn’t constitute “the most powerful military organization in the world.” Bator must be thinking of borrowing someone else’s armed forces “to militarily support Ukraine.” Probably not those of the Baltic states or London. I wonder whose?
It is one thing to be self-sacrificing and generous with one’s own life. Indeed, that’s just Biblical. Alas, that’s not what Bator expects. He is offering to sacrifice the lives of others—in this case, Americans. If NATO ends up at war with Russia, we all know who would be doing the bulk of the fighting and dying—Americans. If the conflict were to go nuclear, we know whom the Russian ICBMs would be targeting—Americans again. As for Slovakians, Bator undoubtedly would lead them in praising the U.S. for remaining steadfast for all that is good and wonderful as its cities burn and people perish. After all, that is Washington’s role in NATO, and he would probably express his satisfaction when talking to his grandchildren. What could be better than that?
It has long been evident to all that the transatlantic alliance is unbalanced. When it was created in 1949, even its proponents insisted that the U.S. would not provide a permanent garrison. Dwight D. Eisenhower declared, “We cannot be a modern Rome guarding the far frontiers with our legions if for no other reason than that these are not, politically, our frontiers. What we must do is to assist these people [to] regain their confidence and get on their own military feet.”
Unfortunately, the Americans stayed even as the Europeans recovered. And spent the last 75 years cheap-riding on the U.S. NATO officials are now celebrating that a majority of members, supposedly gravely threatened by Moscow, are finally devoting two cents on the Euro to their defense. Meanwhile, the expansion of NATO helped radicalize not just Vladimir Putin but the Russian public and was an important trigger for Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. Sixteen years ago, Fiona Hill, who gained notoriety after serving with the Trump National Security Council, warned President George W. Bush that inducting Ukraine and Georgia into NATO was “a provocative move that would likely provoke pre-emptive Russian military action.”
Perhaps most perversely, Washington has turned an alliance intended to augment U.S. security into an international dole. In recent years, NATO’s expansion policy has been bizarre, including nations whose militaries amount to rounding errors. Even the latest additions, Finland, added last year, and potentially Sweden, which awaits approval from Hungary’s parliament, are only minor powers despite their PR buildup. (What sets Helsinki apart is its outsize reserve.) Nor do they make America more secure. Rather, the U.S. has again expanded its responsibilities in confronting a major conventional military power which possesses nuclear weapons.
While NATO officials proudly boast about the alliance’s capabilities, many of its members matter not at all. Consider the weakest links which, like Slovakia, sometimes harbor grandiose ambitions that only America can fulfill. Slovakia’s armed forces, as mentioned, number 17,950. Allies with smaller militaries are Croatia, 16,700; Denmark, 15,400; Sweden, 14,600; North Macedonia, 8,000; Albania, 7,500; Estonia, 7,200; Latvia 6,600; Slovenia, 6,400; Montenegro, 2,350; Luxembourg, 410; Iceland, 0. In contrast, America has 1,359,600 men and women under arms.
This didn’t matter so much at the start. No one imagined a Soviet invasion of the original military midgets, Denmark and Luxembourg. They were geographically incidental to defending countries with significant populations and industrial potential, then France and Italy, and later Germany. Iceland offered bases for the West best denied to Moscow under any circumstances.
In contrast, the recent defense dwarfs are concentrated in the Baltic and Balkans, neither of which is of security significance to America. The former is of minimal geographic concern and difficult to defend. The latter still suffers from its toxic history of confrontation and conflict. Europe might believe either or both to be worth defending, despite the famed Iron Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s observation that the latter “wasn’t worth the life of a single Pomeranian grenadier.” It is certainly not in America’s interest to do so. And it is America’s interest that should determine American military policy.
Europe deserves Trump’s harsh words, but diplomacy is necessary to disentangle the U.S. from the continent. Washington shouldn’t withdraw abruptly since its defense dependents have configured their militaries—that is, skimped on outlays and short-changed readiness for decades—in reliance on America’s permanent presence. They need time to adjust. But not too much.
It is essential that the U.S. set a definite deadline for terminating its security guarantee. Subsidizing the indolent and privileged is bad for Europe as well as America. The Western allies should remain close and continue to cooperate on issues of common concern. However, the relationship should be among equals about issues important to all.
Donald Trump’s limitations are obvious, but he understands Europe, its addiction to U.S. military welfare, and the resulting cost to this nation. President Joe Biden expects Americans to die for Europe. Trump believes Europeans should do the dying for their own countries. A serious foreign policy debate on this issue is long overdue.
The post Trump Is Blunt and Right About NATO appeared first on The American Conservative.
Nuclear proliferation is rarely desirable, but it might be the antidote to American overextension in Europe.
Europe’s support for Ukraine in part reflects the fear that Vladimir Putin won’t stop with a victory there. Ukrainians play on that emotion to extract more Western aid; recently, the Ukrainian journalist Sasha Dovzhyk insisted, “It simply won’t stop at Ukraine. Every few days, propagandists on Russian state television fantasize about invading Poland, the Baltic States or Finland.”
Of course, TV fantasies are evidence of neither the will nor the capability for such attacks. In any case, it is well past time for Europeans to take over primary responsibility for their defense. Unfortunately, despite much rhetoric and some action, the continent is little better prepared for a general war than it was in February 2022 before Moscow’s invasion. In fact, the number of NATO members devoting at least two percent of GDP to their defense fell after the Russian attack.
Germany remains a laggard six years after German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared that “we Europeans must now take our fate into our own hands.” The current government has played statistical legerdemain to undercut 2022’s much-hyped Zeitenwende. Nor has Moscow’s assault on Ukraine increased interest among German youth in joining the Bundeswehr. The United Kingdom, too, has abandoned its ambitious spending goals and is shrinking the size of its armed forces.
Naturally, Europeans’ view of NATO grew more positive after the onset of the conflict. Yet before the Russian invasion, popular majorities in only four of 14 European countries polled advocated defending their fellow members. In every case far more people believed that the U.S. would act than believed they themselves should act. It is more than ridiculous to expect Americans to bear the greatest burden in aiding peoples unwilling to defend themselves or their allies.
What to do? Evidently the Biden administration’s policy of urging the Europeans to do more while spending more money on, sending more troops to, and offering endless reassurances for the same people is self-defeating. President Donald Trump demonstrated that raising questions about American commitments is the most effective way to encourage allies to do more. That was evident with Japan and South Korea as well as NATO. (Added to that, of course, is increased fear caused by China, North Korea, and Russia.)
Treating the Pentagon as a welfare agency for well-heeled but manipulative allies would be bad at any time, but it is especially so as Washington’s fiscal position worsens. Uncle Sam ran a nearly $2 trillion deficit in 2023—without a hot war, financial crisis, or deadly pandemic. The federal government’s debt to GDP ratio is already nearly 100 percent and could double by mid-century. Interest costs are rising and entitlement programs are burgeoning, while neither Democrats or Republicans are willing to make tough decisions in cutting popular domestic outlays or raising revenues. When the inevitable financial crisis hits, there will be no more funds for feckless foreign friends.
Washington should start paring military spending today. To start, the U.S. should tell Europe, “No more!” There should be no more extra cash for European operations, no more extra troops to safeguard the population-rich continent, and no more reassurances to governments that Americans will always pick up the slack. Alliances are not intended to be an international dole for other nations, but rather a security enhancement for the U.S. Americans should be placed at risk only if doing so is necessary to protect their homes, their communities, their families, and their Constitution. The Pentagon was not created to be an international welfare agency.
Of course, the Europeans would likely have a tough time providing for their security after spending nearly eight decades on the American defense dole. Today they are scrambling to ensure continued funding for Ukraine’s war effort, as reported in the London Times: “Ministers are desperately trying to ramp up manufacturing capabilities across the continent so they can send weapons and ammunition to the front line and keep Vladimir Putin at bay for at least another year, irrespective of U.S. support.”
Bolstering their own militaries will require even more money and effort. A potential short-cut would be for them to establish a nuclear deterrent. Russia relies on its nuclear parity with America to cover its conventional inferiority. Europe could do the same to Moscow. Nuclear weapons are a military equalizer.
Of course, there already are two European deterrents, but they are national, not continental. Neither France nor the United Kingdom is likely to loose its nukes to defend, say, the Baltic states. A Europe-wide force is necessary, whether through a European-run NATO, European Union, or some other association.
In December, the former German foreign minister Joschka Fischer declared that “the E.U. needs its own nuclear deterrent.” Although he said he disliked the idea, he concluded, “As long as we have a neighbor Russia, one of Putin’s imperial ideology follows, we cannot forego deterring this Russia.” He allowed that German acquisition of nuclear weapons was “the most difficult question.” Hence his preference for an E.U. arsenal. (A couple decades ago he was pushing the U.S. to withdraw its nukes from Germany.) Last year scholars at the Atlantic Council proposed “a trilateral British, French, and German nuclear umbrella, combined with a U.S. umbrella, all under the command and control of” NATO.
The issue is not new. A few years ago, Berthold Kohler, publisher of the influential Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, suggested that Germany develop nuclear weapons alongside France and Great Britain. More sensitive to history, Bundestag member Roderich Kiesewetter proposed relying on the British and French arsenals while adding European-financed weapons. His objective was not to match Moscow but to deploy enough to deter Russian military action. This “German nuke flirtation” was short-lived, but generated a mini-debate for a time.
Poland’s Jaroslaw Kaczynski, head of Poland’s nationalistic Law and Justice Party, recently ousted from power, also urged a European deterrent, one that rivaled Russia’s arsenal. Undoubtedly, even friendly proliferation would be complicated. And designing a collective European system to oversee the use of nuclear weapons would be extraordinarily difficult. Nevertheless, necessity can be a powerful incentive. If the Europeans fear Russia and are incapable of developing an adequate conventional force, then nukes appear to be the only serious alternative.
The downsides would be obvious. More nukes increase opportunities for misuse and leakage. New nuclear powers undermine nonproliferation. A growing European arsenal might cause Russia to increase its own nuclear capabilities. Europe’s possession of a nuclear shield might encourage European governments to take greater risks in dealing with Russia. Nevertheless, to the extent that Europeans fear potential aggression by Moscow, nukes would provide a potent antidote.
Europe’s course should be Europe’s decision. Washington should not attempt to dictate to the continent’s many governments on what they should spend and whether they should go nuclear. Rather, American officials should set forth American policy—what this nation will do. (Which, in the case of foreign wars, should be much less than in the past.) How the Europeans respond, through their individual countries and the European Union collectively, should be up to them.
Washington should facilitate their efforts to generate military power to match their political influence and economic heft. That means encouraging rather than resisting an independent European defense, cooperating on security matters of shared interest, aiding individual and collective military development, and accepting any expanded or additional nuclear programs. While proliferation rarely seems desirable, it might very well be the best of bad options. Worst is having the U.S. forever risk American cities to ease Europe’s military burden. Bad is Europe feeling vulnerable to Russian nuclear pressure. Better is the continent possessing a deterrent to coercion from Moscow or another power.
The world is aflame, but the most serious dangers to the U.S. come from Washington’s determination to make other nations’ conflicts America’s own. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, though criminal, was provoked by the allies’ reckless disregard of Moscow’s security interests and oft-expressed warnings. Although a humanitarian disaster, the conflict does not endanger the U.S. The Middle East is a region of declining interest, and Washington should act on behalf of the American people, not nominal and often authoritarian allies which routinely manipulate US politics to their benefit. China poses an economic challenge to Western states but has shown no interest in assaulting America. Beijing’s rising influence in East Asia is a challenge but threatens no vital American interests warranting war.
The best way to address today’s genuine security challenges would be to return defense responsibilities to the allies routinely labeled Washington’s greatest international asset. Let populous, prosperous nations take over responsibility for their own defense rather than rely on the U.S. If that means more nukes in more hands, so be it. Washington’s defense responsibility is, first and foremost, to the American people.
The post Maybe It Is Time for a European Nuclear Weapon appeared first on The American Conservative.
France’s new immigration law could herald a broader shift in the nation’s politics, and Europe’s.
French politics tends to produce esoteric debates, but perhaps none so outlandish as the furor around the passage of a new law on immigration: did the votes of the far-right Rassemblement National put the legislation over the top? The bill garnered the votes of 349 of the 535 deputies in the National Assembly, including 88 from the RN. Elisabeth Borne, President Emmanuel Macron’s prime minister, crowed that the overhaul had “been adopted without the votes of the RN.” But detractors soon pointed out that the bill would have failed had the RN opposed it. Her response? Had the RN abstained, the measure would have carried based on a lower threshold for passage. Macron and Borne’s hairsplitting, par for the course among such professional triangulates, cannot hide the essential fact: the law needed the backing of the far right to pass. What is more: the legislation demonstrates the public’s gradual alignment with the right on the issue of migration.
The new legislation, the product of months of backroom wrangling, checks off several items on the right’s Christmas list. It eliminates the automatic acquisition of citizenship by a child born to foreign parents in France on his majority; toughens conditions for receiving medical care in the Hexagon; extends the period for newcomers to become eligible for certain social benefits, notably the housing allowance (l’allocation personalisée de logement); makes it harder for immigrants to sponsor family members; permits the government to rescind the citizenship of dual nationals convicted of murdering civil servants and officeholders; and mandates Parliament to set an immigration quota for the next three years.
Reactions to the law broke down familiar lines. Marine Le Pen hailed the bill’s passage as “an ideological victory”; the left and an alphabet soup of pro-migration NGOs assailed the measure as a violation of human rights and a sign of the country’s droitization. Jean-Luc Melenchon, the sulfurous head of the far-left France Insoumise, condemned the formation of “a new political axis” around the passage of this “racist” measure. The outrage extended into the ranks of Macron’s own party, La République en Marche—dozens of center-left deputies abandoned the presidential majority, and the ministers for higher education and health presented their resignations.
Despite the French left’s fury, the measure left much of the right’s immigration program on the cutting-room floor. French law still spares numerous classes of illegal aliens from deportation: clandestine migrants who have persisted in the country for a decade, those married to a French citizen or having a French child, and persons having arrived in France as children are exempt from removal. Removal orders—in administrative parlance, ordres à quitter le territoire français (OQTF)—can take eons to execute. Potential deportees have recourse to interminable appeals in the regular and administrative courts.
France’s Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin, already in hot pursuit of the presidency, has touted himself as an anti-migration ultra. He boasts on X about each week’s slate of deportations, particularly when it comes to criminals and Islamist radicals. But this has so far proven vain bluster. A mere 7 percent of OQTFs were carried out in 2022, leading to the removal of around 15,000 foreigners. And so it shall remain: the right’s initial plans to pare back these protections had to be kiboshed.
Ditto the desire to restrict entry for those purporting refugee status. Around 150,000 asylum-seekers have come to France per annum in the past decade. This represents 60 percent of the number of other migrants (both legal and illegal) entering the Hexagon (around 250,000). The nation’s treaty obligations—which place it under the jurisdiction of European Union tribunals and the European Court of Human Rights—limit room to maneuver on irksome matters like refugees and due process for potential deportees. At the same time, the law accords greater latitude to prefects in giving papers to the undocumented, meaning the number of 35,000 regularizations from last year might increase. France counts between 600,000 and 900,000 clandestine migrants, and one should not expect this statistic to diminish because of this measure.
Some of the right’s gains could also be reversed. The law must be reviewed by France’s highest administrative body, the Conseil Constitutionnel, before it comes into force. Macron and Borne maintain that the bill’s provision for a quota on legal migration (again, excluding refugees) violates the constitution of the Fifth Republic.
Notwithstanding these qualifications, this legislation—and the surrounding polemic—is more than sound and fury. France’s politics are shifting rightward, and particularly so on immigration. Both right and left see this measure as an instantiation of a nascent consensus against mass migration and as a precedent for a broader restrictionist drive. Marine Le Pen could lose again in the next presidential election, but the lepéniste agenda is on the march.
The post Migration Right appeared first on The American Conservative.
The United States must set a clear timeline for Europe to assume the burdens of its own defense.
As of late, I have gained some notoriety in my admittedly niche and nerdy foreign policy circles. It all started with a Rolling Stone essay that argued that one of my obscure research briefs about reforming NATO has made it to the future Republican administration’s inner circle of debate.
“Trump’s idea reflects some of the arguments laid out in a policy brief, published in February by researcher and conservative writer Dr. Sumantra Maitra, titled ‘Pivoting the US Away from Europe to a Dormant NATO’,” the Rolling Stone essay said, adding, “Sources familiar with the matter say that this paper indeed circulated within Trump’s immediate circle earlier this year. ‘There were some ideas in it that the [former] president liked,’ says a former Trump administration official who remains in close contact with the 2024 campaign.”
The New York Times reported on it, citing Constanze Stelzenmüller, director of the Center on the United States and Europe at Brookings, who is worried about the second Trump administration’s position on NATO; followed by the Financial Times. All of them mentioned the concept “Dormant NATO” by name, without explaining it much. Here’s Sylvie Kaufmann at the Financial Times: “Trump-aligned think-tanks advising the US to pivot away from Europe and promoting the concept of a ‘dormant Nato’ have finally inspired brainstorming in Brussels about reinforcing the European pillar of the alliance. ‘Dormant Nato’ should be a wake-up call for Europe. There are only 11 months left.”
The effort to explain the position was slightly made in ECFR, which divided the Republicans into three tribes, “Primacists, Restrainers, and Prioritisers” (the clue is in the names) and categorized Dormant NATO within the restrainer side. “The restrainer’s alternative agenda is to create a new, non-US-centred security architecture in Europe. This would mean pulling out most US troops from Europe and revising NATO rules to create a ‘dormant NATO’, which is to say a NATO led by Europeans in which Americans play only a supporting role.”
But what is Dormant NATO, and why is it the only way forward for any Republican administration?
To understand that, we have to consider three assumptions.
Assumption one dictates that NATO is designed not just to defend Europe, but to neuter European great powers and deter any attempt of having a continental hegemon opposed to the United States. These aims are fundamentally contradictory. On one hand, Americans won’t allow their government to be subservient to any single power in the Western Hemisphere. It is not politically feasible and no candidate arguing for that will win an election. On the other hand, Americans are not socially designed for imperialism with a global imperial officer class, and are therefore not interested in paying the cost in blood and treasure that is required for empire, nor do they gain from any inept form of globalism that is currently practiced. That leaves the U.S. grand-strategists in a bind where reconciliation between these two aims—having Europe both whole and subservient, and having Europe defend itself with America being there only as a balancer of last resort—seems to be difficult.
Assumption two is that Europe is not united and never will be without force. The European Union is a potential trade and political rival of the U.S., and even though it is a political entity that inserts itself as an unwelcome guest in various multilateral forums, it is an entity that exists solely due to the material reality of American martial presence in the continent. That makes it doubly interesting when the E.U. wages punitive tariff wars on American companies or threatens to punish Twitter; it is essentially with tacit American regime approval.
In a world where there is no American military power acting as a glue to keep Europe united by force, the European Union will implode into several pieces, as older powers and territorial interests return to form. It is a doomsday scenario, but if the E.U. ever actually finds itself in a position to threaten the U.S., or plans to side with China in economic warfare against the U.S., all the U.S. has to do is pull the security rug from under Europe’s feet and let it disintegrate. The reason is simple. Rich but demographically weak Western Europe wants to buckpass the security burden onto the United States. Eastern Europe, on the other hand, wants to chain-gang the U.S. to its ethnic conflicts. The expansion of NATO did not just end ethnic European wars; it did so by neutering great powers and destroying “nationalism,” including that within the United States.
This brings us to assumption number three. The structural forces that allowed U.S. hegemony are now gone. America is hollowed out, with a $33 trillion debt: arguably the biggest threat in front of the United States. Put simply, America is on the verge of economic collapse, and a bloated government and defense budget are but one cause of it. That, added to the unprecedented rise of a peer rival in the East, means the challenge ahead of the U.S. is not going to be solved by singing paeans to decades past, but by means of a thorough restructuring of the established alliance system. Burden sharing is out. Burden shifting is in.
In that light, the idea of “Dormant NATO” is relevant. The brief is readily available for everyone to read. Contrary to consensus, it does not call for a total withdrawal of the U.S. from the European continent—far from it. It firmly keeps the U.S. nuclear umbrella over Europe by maintaining the airpower and bases in Germany, England, and Turkey (thereby keeping the button for ultimate deterrence firmly and solely in American hands), as well as the U.S. Navy tied to the European seas (thereby neutralizing any future threats to seaborne trade). What it does, however, is shift the burden.
A Dormant NATO stops all future NATO expansion. It keeps NATO on ice, as the name suggests, only to be activated in times of crisis. It defunds the woke NATO bureaucracy—bloated, independent, self-sustaining, and often hostile to conservative values and American interests. Most importantly, it coerces Europe by fixing a timeframe after which the armor, logistics, artillery, intel, and infantry pass on to European hands in both combination and command, with America staying only as a fireman to be called in times of need. Everything other than American nuclear and naval power will be the security burden of Europe.
This is the most realistic compromise possible, short of total withdrawal. Europe must understand that they cannot be sanctimonious about America while living under American prosperity and generosity.
Secretary Robert Gates was prophetic in 2011 when he warned,
The blunt reality is that there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the U.S. Congress—and in the American body politic writ large—to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defense. Nations apparently willing and eager for American taxpayers to assume the growing security burden left by reductions in European defense budgets. Indeed, if current trends in the decline of European defense capabilities are not halted and reversed, Future U.S. political leaders– those for whom the Cold War was not the formative experience that it was for me—may not consider the return on America’s investment in NATO worth the cost.
That time has already come and gone. The only reason Europeans are not paying their fair share in their defense is because Americans have so far only warned of a world without America in it, without specifying any timeline. “Dormant NATO” fills that gap and provides a last, workable alternative. Future American administrations might not be as generous.
The post The Path to a ‘Dormant NATO’ appeared first on The American Conservative.
Are we worse off than the latter-day subjects of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe?
How does one respond to being made to feel like an unwelcome stranger in one’s own country without losing one’s bearings and dignity?
First, let’s review some of the history of that estrangement. Three and a half years ago, urban riots shook this country in a way not seen in over half a century, yet there was little in the way of any federal response. In 2020 we saw the mandating of lockdowns and vaccines by a bought-and paid-for public health bureaucracy. Today, we have the ongoing efforts by the Biden administration to jail the former (and perhaps future) president as well as hundreds of his supporters implicated in the January 6 riot.
We should view these examples not as disparate events, but rather as parts of a comprehensible whole, as components of a message from the permanent state to the population at large.
That message is an inversion of the traditional way of understanding how this country is supposed to work; citizens, once understood to be the sovereigns of the republic, have been put on notice: The federal government in Washington no longer belongs to the American people in any meaningful sense.
As political analyst Michael Anton recently pointed out, the permanent state, or ruling class, in this country has “captured everything, run everything, and get their way on everything.” And their appetite has grown with eating. Dissenting from the program simply will not do. And so, the unrelenting message from the permanent state to the people: Washington is ours, not yours.
The hold the permanent state and its adepts have on American life, particularly as it pertains to the formulation and conduct of American national security policy, is seemingly unbreakable. What we have ruling Washington is our very own nomenklatura, and these elites are currently in the process—now quite far along—of consolidating its grip on public discourse.
Taken in toto, the very public failures and misdeeds of the permanent state over the past three and a half years are actually a kind of a taunt, a thumbing of the nose, a flipping of the finger, from them to us. And the near daily insults to our intelligence issued forth from the representatives of that same permanent state in the years since 9/11 have become more and more brazen.
Consider:
The message in all of these cases is the same: Washington is ours, not yours.
Those who staff the permanent state to all appearances possess an unshakable antipathy towards the people who remain outside of it. Though nominally Americans, those who staff the permanent state are really proud citizens of The Republic of Merit—the products of the meritocracy. This Republic is borderless; it disdains as quaint and unnecessary the notions of patriotism and community; it is proudly post-Christian, and aggressively, even ravenously, anti-family. Membership is conferred by the right degrees, the right clerkships, internships, and employers, but most important of all—the real key to membership—is holding the right opinions.
The array of forces which are aligned against common Americans, and against conscientious Americans who object to the permanent state, its projects, wars, and Soviet-like hold on American institutions, are only getting stronger. The Trump interlude between Mr. Obama’s second and what is now essentially his third term was the point at which the permanent state disregarded any and all pretenses that it exists to serve American citizens. As became all too clear, it exists to serve itself and feast on the fat of the land while the common American drowns in debt, in drugs, in despair. Those who object to the regnant state of affairs are relegated to the category of thought criminals, or worse.
In 1978, as the Brezhnev regime, and Brezhnev himself, were crippled by sclerosis, the Czech dissident Vaclav Havel penned his famous essay, The Power of the Powerless, with its immortal opening, “A specter is haunting Eastern Europe: the specter of what in the West is called ‘dissent.’” Havel describes a system that “has become so ossified politically that there is practically no way for such nonconformity to be implemented within its official structures.”
In Havel’s telling, Soviet hegemony over the countries of Eastern Europe gave rise to a situation where “the center of power is identical with the center of truth.” The centerpiece of Havel’s essay concerns a manager of a fruit and vegetable shop, a “green grocer,” who places in his window a sign carrying the Marxist slogan, “Workers of the world unite.” Havel’s essay is, in part, an investigation of the peculiar psychology behind the placing of the sign. It is a question to which we will return shortly.
We Americans have, of course, our own signs in the windows, our own quasi-official mantras. Over the past three years, the messages conveyed by these signs seem, on the surface at least, to be unconnected. Beneath the surface, the signs our fellow citizens hang comprise the tapestry of the ideology of the permanent state. And so, down the years, signs and stickers have materialized on the stores and homes and car bumpers on topics seemingly as disparate as racial equality (“Black Lives Matter”); support for non-heterosexual unions and groupings (“Love is Love”); vaccine mandates (“Thank You Dr. Fauci,” “Science is Real”); and foreign wars (the now ubiquitous Ukrainian flag).
Of his own green grocer, Havel asks, “Why does he do it? What is he trying to communicate to the world?” In the Czechoslovak case, this amounted to praising a foreign power that, in 1968, had crushed the nation’s and the man’s own aspirations. So it wasn’t truly a voluntary thing, but the green grocer, in effect, told himself: ‘I don’t like it, but what’s the point of resisting–what can I do? I just want to live and not get in trouble.’
The situation in the United States of 2023 is, in some respects, darker than the situation that prevailed in Eastern Europe in the late 1970s; after all, a key difference between then and now is that people here are not being coerced by the state to post their signs. No, such is the pervasiveness of the ideology of the permanent state: They post their signs quite happily and of their own volition. And ideological enforcement and conformity of opinion is the point. It is how the permanent state shields itself from even the minutest scrutiny. As Havel also notes, “Ideology…offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them.”
Reading Havel in 2023 is jarring not least because his description of the state of affairs under Eastern European communism forty-plus years ago also quite aptly sums up the state of play under the permanent state:
…the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.
For the human being living under such a regime, it becomes imperative to navigate a way forward, to prepare and seek alternatives to the ruling system. The key, according to Havel, is for people of good conscience to revolt against “manipulation.” Fortunately, many of the means by which the permanent state manipulate us are not hidden. They are in full view, all about us, on our screens. In order to break the permanent state’s monopoly on what constitutes “truth,” dissident Americans would be best advised to simply opt out and withdraw their tacit and overt support from those crassest tools of mass manipulation, including, above all, the two major political parties, and network, cable and legacy news outlets. Perhaps the best way to defeat or tame the permanent state is to not play its game. The most powerful, indeed, perhaps the only, tool American dissidents have in their arsenal is their refusal to be manipulated—as Havel put it, to “live within the truth.”
The post The Sources of American Estrangement appeared first on The American Conservative.
Azerbaijan is doing in the Artsakh region what Russia is doing to Ukraine—but the U.S. and Europe are looking the other way.
Territorial conquest is back around the globe, whether we like it or not. For decades, the internationalist fantasies of the bipartisan establishment have driven us to support expensive and unwinnable projects in every place from Kabul to Kiev. Internationalist overstretch weakened America from a unipolar position after the fall of the USSR to the current multipolar order.
In the vacuum left by an America weakened by government incompetence, military overstretch, and economic insolvency, the neocon cousins of the liberal internationalists see the fraying order and believe the solution is indiscriminate American intervention. Yet the right answer to American decline isn’t to waddle even more into peripheral conflicts around the world, but instead to defend our homeland against emerging threats from both near and far.
The internationalists in both parties are intent on convincing Americans to direct taxpayer dollars to Kharkiv that still looks better than parts of San Francisco—at least before Gavin Newsom gave the city an emergency face-lift in preparation for Xi Jinping’s recent visit.
Amid this narrative onslaught, one such invasion has gone conspicuously forgotten: Azerbaijan’s invasion in September of the previously autonomous Artsakh region adjacent to Armenia.
Some context: Artsakh has been populated mostly by Armenians since antiquity. Armenians are Christians who speak an Indo-European language. When the Soviets took control of the Caucasus in the early 1920s, they designated Nagorno-Karabakh as an autonomous oblast within Soviet Azerbaijan, recognizing its unique majority ethnic Armenian character in the otherwise Azeri republic. Azeris are Muslims who speak a Turkic language. This situation held until the late 1980s, when tensions boiled over into violence. It wasn’t long after the fall of the USSR in 1991 that war erupted in the First Nagorno-Karabakh War of 1992-1994.
Against all odds, the Armenians won the war and established control over Artsakh. Azerbaijan worked with its pan-Turkic big brothers in Turkey to slowly rearm, aided by two decades of military assistance from the U.S. American taxpayers were made for 20 years to arm the greatest enemies of the world’s oldest Christian country. Even worse, supporting Azerbaijan seems like the rare case where American foreign policy elites understood the sin they were committing but still did it—and did it for money.
In 2020, Azerbaijan invaded Artsakh and defeated the Armenians in the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War. All of the American military assistance helped. They regained much of their lost territory and reduced Artsakh to a single road link to Armenia, the Lachin Corridor. In late 2022, they blockaded the road and slowly choked Artsakh to death. When Azerbaijan formally invaded again in September 2023, Armenia was completely outmatched and sued for peace after a day. Now, in just a few weeks, over 100,000 Armenians have fled their ancestral homeland in Artsakh to live as refugees in the rest of Armenia.
In other words, Azerbaijan is doing the same thing to the Artsakh region that Russia is doing to Ukraine—but the U.S. and Europe are looking the other way and pretending not to notice. It is because Azerbaijan has one of the most effective lobbying operations in the U.S. and other Western nations.
Bankrolling it all is oil and gas. Azerbaijan’s largest employer, taxpayer, and piggy bank for influence-peddling is the State Oil Company of the Azerbaijan Republic (SOCAR). SOCAR has a fancy office that opened in Washington, D.C. in 2012, right around the time Azerbaijan was campaigning for exemptions in the Iran sanctions that would allow construction to continue on their Trans-Adriatic Pipeline (TAP). If that was the goal of SOCAR’s office, it worked. President Obama’s 2012 Executive Order on sanctions exempted the pipeline, and so did the Iran Freedom and Counter Proliferation Act.
John Podesta, chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and now heading up “clean energy” projects for Biden, was the co-founder of the Podesta Group, the D.C. lobbying firm that represented the Embassy of the Republic of Azerbaijan in the United States from 2009 to 2017. John left the firm early on, but kept close ties with his brother Tony, the other co-founder and principal. In 2016 FARA filings, the Podesta Group made 17 pages of contacts on behalf of Azerbaijan that year. By comparison, another client of theirs, India, had four pages. All of those contacts paid off; between February and June of 2016, the Podesta Group was paid $379,325.73 for its work on behalf of the Embassy of the Republic of Azerbaijan.
All of that caviar has made Azerbaijan a lot of powerful friends. American interests abroad shouldn’t be guided by foreign lobbyists, but all too often, it seems that’s exactly who is making the crucial decisions on how and where to divert our precious resources. Unfortunately, American foreign policy is heavily influenced by whoever can write the largest check—or, in the case of Ukraine, whoever can write the largest check to the President’s ne’er-do-well son.
The right solution isn’t for the U.S. to militarily intervene in Artsakh, any more than we should be militarily engaged to allow Ukraine to recapture the Russian-occupied regions of the Donbas. Rather it is for the U.S. to disengage by ceasing its layers of explicit and implicit support for Azerbaijan.
Chief among these layers of support is Section 907. In 1992, Congress passed the Freedom Support Act. Included in the legislation was Section 907, which explicitly banned the U.S. from sending direct aid to the government of Azerbaijan. This legislation worked as designed until 2001, when the Senate adopted an amendment that allowed the president to waive Section 907, which American presidents have done annually ever since. Put another way, since 2001, the U.S. has provided military assistance to Azerbaijan—our foreign policy elites helped build the war machine used to push Armenians out of Artsakh.
Much of that military assistance would have been beyond Azerbaijan’s means if not for the various gas pipelines they have built with Western assistance. Europe needs gas to fuel its economy, and America sits atop one of the world’s great gas bounties. We could have supplied Europe with a near-endless supply of liquified natural gas, but instead, we acceded to the climate change agenda. We restricted our gas industry at home, while encouraging our biggest oil and gas companies to lead all sorts of projects abroad. The climate cult made Azerbaijan and its petro-pals flush with cash.
All Armenia needs is a fair chance. Armenia needs America to stop enabling Azerbaijan.
The ways to do it are simple. Shut down the Azerbaijan lobby. Cease publishing its lies in the complicit U.S. press. Stop delivering military assistance to Baku’s dictator. Unleash the American energy sector and use our bountiful resources to undermine Azerbaijan’s gas markets in Europe.
This last part is key: Greater American prosperity, made possible by a robust revival of America First policies at home, can usher in a new era of peace around the world. Imagine America unburdened by heavy-handed influence peddling at the highest echelons. Imagine America unashamedly pursuing its own interests.
It’s time to stand up for what’s right. It’s time to stand up for American interests.
The post Armenia: The Forgotten Conflict appeared first on The American Conservative.
As antisemitic incidents spike in the rest of Europe, Hungary’s restrictive immigration policies are vindicated.
As Israel continues to count and identify the bodies of the October 7 Simchat Torah massacre by Hamas, and as the number of civilian victims used as human shields by Hamas in Gaza continues to rise, revolutionary Islamists are now filling European streets and squares, attacking police and synagogues, and, above all, proclaiming loudly: “Here we are, and we stand by what happened.”
This problem stems from both failed demographic and immigration policies. While Hungary’s Viktor Orbán has accepted some level of immigration and has started to let in tens of thousands of third world migrant workers to deal with the ongoing global recession, he has done so under strict regulations. Notably, the immigrants are primarily from non-Muslim countries.
The rest of Europe, however, takes a different approach. A quick glance at British statistics shows that the foreign-born population has been growing steadily since 1921 with a radical jump after 2001. In 2001, there were 1,600,000 Muslims in the U.K.. By 2021, their number had increased to 3,868,000. The Muslim population of the U.K. is expected to grow to 13 million by 2050. West Germany began admitting its first Turkish migrant workers in the 1960s; their number have since ballooned to four million. In addition, Germany has taken in almost a million Syrian migrants, which has resulted in further problems. In 2021, 65 percent of Syrians in Germany were unable to find work, placing additional strain on Germany’s famed social welfare system. These radical changes did not occur in centuries, but in decades.
Hungary and the rest of post-socialist Europe, however, have taken a more cautious pace and some politicians, such as Orbán, or the recently elected Slovakian left-wing P.M. Robert Fico have sounded the alarm on immigration. In response they were criticized by the mainstream press as “extremist,” “racist,” and “xenophobic.” These adjectives are debatable; Orbán regularly connects his strong stance on immigration with protecting other minority groups. In 2016 he declared, “We shall not import to Hungary crime, terrorism, homophobia and synagogue-burning anti-Semitism.”
Their warnings were not cultural “fear-mongering,” as the left-wing press claimed. The European immigration problem has direct ties to real security issues. In 2017, there were over 50,000 Salafists (radical Sunnis) in France; in 2022, 11,000 in Germany. Not all Salafists are jihadists, but many of them are or have such sympathies, and most European countries admit extreme Salafists are a security concern. But they are not the only dangerous group in Europe. Although Germany banned Hezbollah in 2020, there remain about 1,250 members of the Shiite terror group. The constant surveillance of this many people regularly drains resources and manpower from the internal security services. In 2018, the German police were keeping only 774 radical Islamists under constant surveillance. A recent report from the Dutch National Coordinator for Counterterrorism and Security stated that “last year, the terrorist threat from ISIS to Europe increased. Especially since the second half of 2022 there have been ever more clues that ISIS is planning attacks in Europe.” Israel has also warned that there are over 450 Hamas operatives in Germany alone.
Attacks have already taken place throughout Europe in connection to the current war in the Middle East. In France, a mass stabbing occurred at a secondary school in Arras, after Hamas called for a “Global Day of Jihad” on October 13. A French language teacher was killed, while several others were injured. The perpetrator, a Muslim from Russia, was known to the French security services for being a radical and was affiliated with ISIS. Three days later, two Swedes were shot dead in Brussels by a Tunisian migrant who had previously been flagged by Belgian authorities for potential jihadist activity. Again, ISIS claimed responsibility.
Meanwhile, illegal migration continues. Last month, around 7,000 migrants arrived to the island of Lampedusa, Italy, in a span of only 48 hours. The island normally has a population of 6,000. Lampedusa is a well-known transport hub for would-be-terrorists. The Tunisian who shot two Swedes in Brussels arrived there on a boat in 2011. The island is “overwhelmed” and “in a crisis,” according to its mayor who spoke with Reuters. A staggering 2.3 million immigrants entered the E.U. from non-E.U. countries in 2021, an increase of almost 18 percent compared with 2020. This does not mean that a real far-right threat does not exist in Europe; it is not, however, coming from populists but from mushrooming neo-Nazi groups. The world is destabilizing at an alarming rate and there are increasingly strong signs in Europe which point towards a looming civil war or bloody social unrest; there are fewer and fewer signs that this scenario can be avoided.
The problems described above affect the European Jewish community in a particularly dangerous manner. The mere fact that a very large proportion of immigrants come from countries where anti-Semitism is deeply ingrained in society should be reason enough for strict border controls. According to ADL data for the Middle East and North Africa and Asia, 80 percent of the population is anti-Semitic in Morocco, 87 percent in Algeria and Libya, 71 percent in Turkey, 60 percent in Iran, and 92 percent in Iraq. But Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza beat them all: Ninety-three percent of their population is anti-Semitic. In the summer of 2015, the ADL conducted a survey focusing specifically on Muslim communities in Western Europe, which found that 68 percent of Belgian Muslims, 62 percent of Spanish Muslims, 56 percent of German and Italian Muslims, 54 percent of British Muslims, and 49 percent of French Muslims held anti-Semitic views. In general, 55 percent of Muslims in Western Europe were found to be anti-Semitic. In terms of attacks, Germany saw 2,480 anti-Semitic atrocities last year; the UK, 1,652; France, 436. Attacks have sharply risen since the outbreak of the war between Israel and Hamas.
But this may not be all that surprising. A report by the Community Security Trust, a Jewish NGO in the U.K. explained that “the single biggest contributing factor to the record number of antisemitic incidents recorded in 2014 was antisemitic reactions in the U.K. to the conflict in Israel and Gaza.” How could the current protests and atrocities catch European authorities unprepared? This is not to say that some countries have not acted. French president Emmanuel Macron recently banned pro-Hamas protests. On October 13, France raised its security alert to the highest level and deployed 7,000 soldiers following the aforementioned school stabbing. Viktor Orbán also banned all pro-Hamas demonstrations in Hungary. But in the rest of Europe, hatred took the streets.
Ten thousand pro-Palestinian demonstrators sided with Palestine in the Netherlands, as Jewish schools closed around the country. Thousands protested against Israel in London. Jewish schools in the U.K. also stepped up their security or shut down altogether. Parents kept their children away. Pro-Palestine protests were held in Germany as well; some local Arabs openly support Hamas. But this is nothing compared to what German media reported: some Jewish homes had been marked with the Star of David, reminiscent of the Nazi era. One German synagogue was firebombed.
How could Europe’s liberal leaders have turned a blind eye to the dangers of Muslim immigration for decades? How could they commemorate the Holocaust every year, while allowing the mass arrival in Europe of people who see the Holocaust not as a story of a horrific genocide, but as the story of a brave man—Hitler—who tried to defeat the evil Jews, and failed? The West’s fear of being branded ‘illiberal’ has given free rein to anti-Jewish hatred on the streets of Europe.
The post From ‘Never Again’ to ‘Now and Again’ appeared first on The American Conservative.
As America grows apart from Europe, where does that leave Germany? An interview with the German AfD politician Maximilian Krah may help answer that question.
Maximilian Krah, 46, is part of the national leadership of the German political party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and is a member of the E.U. parliament. During the July 2023 nominating convention of the AfD, he was elected to be the party’s lead candidate for next year’s elections to the E.U. parliament. He is the author of the book Politik von rechts. Ein Manifest (Antaios, 2023).
You open your book Politik von rechts (Politics From the Right) by distinguishing the political Right from other terms that are often used synonymously, such as “conservative” or “libertarian.” What in your eyes is the essence of the Right?
It is the will to live in accordance with the natural order, with both empirical nature and with the metaphysical structure of being that is inherent to nature. This distinguishes 19th century conservatism, at least in its European variant, from liberalism. We believe that from being arises an ought, and we want to live in harmony and identity with that which we are and with creation. That is why the Right is identitarian.
Anglo-American conservatives will be bewildered by this. They often say they are “classical liberals,” which to them means to defeat identity politics and to defend the autonomy of the individual.
First of all, let’s make plain that I seek identity with reality. Leftist identity politics is chimerical. If I were to suddenly say that I’m no longer Maximilian, I’m Melinda now, that would be ridiculous. In other words, for the Left, identity is a code word for something that isn’t there. It’s an attack on reality. The problem with classical liberalism is that it misunderstands the concept of freedom. And it’s a misunderstanding that it shares with the woke. So if I want to be Melinda now, it’s my own free decision. But once we say that Maximilian cannot be Melinda, we draw on a principle that is more fundamental than freedom. We on the Right understand nature normatively, which quite obviously limits our freedom. Once I grant that there are limits to my freedom due to a normatively understood concept of nature, only then do I prevent freedom’s misuse. And only then does freedom become a positive value.
You also write that identity “always also excludes.” Let’s use that statement to segue toward addressing the elephant in the room. By seeking to exclude, for example in its views on immigration, the AfD is viewed by many at home and abroad as the rebirth of National Socialism. Is it?
It’s a giant problem in the Western world today that it cannot bear differences. But we need to learn to like differences. We aren’t all the same. Difference is a gain. Traditionally, Germans have been an innovative, industrious, orderly people. But it’s just as good that elsewhere in the world people have a higher musicality or a higher appreciation for the aesthetic. If we give up on difference, we give up on tremendous wealth. And then we arrive at a horribly mediocre common denominator. But we need the highs and the lows. This appreciation of difference is definitely crucial for right-wing thought, simply because you find difference in nature too.
Regarding the charge that the AfD was the second coming of Nazism: To say “long live difference” means also to accept that others have their own qualities and that we don’t say we’re the best. In other words, the problem emerges when I group people in a hierarchical way by saying: “Our way of life is much better than that of others and that’s why they have to follow our lead.” And so, 20th century European fascism lacked the appreciation of difference. That, I think, is the key distinction and that’s why I don’t think we are National Socialism reincarnated.
Let’s talk about whom to exclude from the European continent. You draw on Carl Schmitt to call for a “Ban on Intervention for Spatially Foreign Powers.” The United States is spatially foreign—so Yankee out?
Geopolitics means that politics is bound geographically. It’s bound to place, locally specific cultural characteristics, to the economy, to natural resources, and so on. In short, it’s crucial to reconnect politics with space and the people that live there. Whereas a politics that doesn’t deal with real spaces and real people, but just with abstract values, is a politics that leads to forever wars. This is what we’re dealing with today. In cultural and ethnic terms, the United States was once a European power. Americans were the descendants of Europeans. By 2045, it will no longer be European.
Which leads to this question: How can a country that is moving away from Europe dominate it at the same time? This question poses itself very concretely in Ukraine. Obviously you see that the United States does not have the well-being of the Ukrainian population on the top of its mind. After all, we are right now sacrificing the Ukrainian youth in this moronic war: a war that could have easily been avoided. Clearly, this war is about America’s ambition to push back against Russia. It is a war for world order. And Washington has effectively taken over Kiev which cannot do anything without American approval. The U.S. finances Ukraine, arms it, makes strategic decisions on its behalf.
Has Berlin also been taken over by Washington? Does Germany operate as a sovereign state, independent of American will?
Berlin is in a different weight class. We are, for one, capable of financing ourselves. But the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines means that the United States has decided that Germany cannot buy its gas from Russia and has simply created a fait accompli. And our government in Berlin knows this and is silent. Is this how a sovereign state acts or a vassal? But I don’t like the concept of sovereignty because it is too binary: sovereign and not sovereign. Whereas I think sovereignty falls along a spectrum. The highest level of sovereignty would mean that you can do as you please without consideration for others. That applies only to the United States, China, and Russia. Thus, if Ukraine would join NATO, Russia would no longer be on this level of sovereignty. Russia is no longer capable of defending itself when there is a foreign power in Kharkov. And so, Russia is fighting in Ukraine for its ability to maintain the highest level of sovereignty.
Germany has never been on this level, not even before World War I. It was always bound up with its neighbors and needed to consider their interests. That was a good thing. It was a mistake to want more. It cost us the 20th century. I like to say “sovereign is the one who has alternatives.” I need to be able to have choices in the most crucial matters, such as energy and technology. Germany wanted to order 5G technology from Huawei, and the United States forbade that. Much of German gas once came from Russia. The United States forbade that. Now we are one-sidedly dependent on energy imports from America. This knocks us down quite a bit on the sovereignty spectrum.
What about the European Union? Do you advocate a “Dexit”?
I do not. Precisely because the world will be multipolar in the future, Europe needs to be an autonomous pole. All states, except the U.S., China, and Russia, can only achieve security through systems of collective security. If there were no European federation, no E.U., no replacement organization, then each European nation would have to seek a security agreement with the United States. A country like the Czech Republic can’t defend itself; nor can Hungary. The experience of the Cold War has taught us that Russia is unattractive.
But I just said America was growing apart from Europe. And we can see in the example of Ukraine that such a security agreement can be pretty sobering. I, for one, would not like to end like Ukraine. Charles de Gaulle advocated for a “Europe of the fatherlands,” whereas right now we have a bureaucratic unitary entity. So, drawing on de Gaulle, I’d say that internally we need as much freedom and sovereignty as possible and externally as many commonalities as necessary. Right now Europe acts chaotically toward the outside and internally it is incredibly centralized. I’d like to invert that.
How should Europe position itself toward the emerging BRICS coalition?
First of all, let’s push back against a widespread misconception on the right, that right now the U.S. is hegemonic and that the only alternative is Chinese hegemony. Even Brzezinski wrote that that’s nonsense. China and BRICS are an anti-hegemonic coalition. So I’d say it’s this way: We either have a Pax Americana, which I believe is necessarily woke and bellicose, or we have no sole global hegemony but regional hegemons instead who rule according to their own local preferences. And I’m not even saying that this latter model is better than the former. It’s just inevitable.
In 1913, the West was 30% of the world’s population; today it is 16%. And we’re aging fast. There are no demographic and economic foundations to believe that the West will govern the world uniformly according to its own universalistic ethos as a Kantian world state. The thing that remains is military power. In short, the multipolar order is inevitable. This means in turn that the E.U. will need to become its own pole and foster relations with others like the United States but also Russia, China, India, and so on. And these need to be mutual relations. We can’t order these states around and tell them how they should live.
I wanted to shift to the domestic policy views of the AfD: The party was founded by liberal economists and some prominent members belong to the free-market Friedrich von Hayek Society. But other party leaders seek to present it as pro-worker. Alexander Gauland said the AfD should “not fall below Bismarck’s social reforms.” You’re often associated with his wing of the party, but in your book you bemoan “the sinister power of the unions” and say the welfare state was throttling growth. Sounds like libertarianism to me.
The German welfare state has failed. It is oversized and its benefits act like a magnet for migrants. We can’t solve social problems with even greater redistribution, which would accelerate immigration even more and thus cause further problems. But privatizing social welfare would cause problems too. The Right has lost elections wherever it ignored the social question. Our novel contribution is that we need to connect the social question to immigration. In other words, we need a model of social solidarity that prevents most of the benefits from going to immigrants. In the AfD we call this “solidarity patriotism” (solidarischer Patriotismus). Current upheavals—such as immigration, A.I., the demographic crisis—lead decent individuals who belong to our people to experience hardships. And they have a claim to solidarity.
Are you concerned about competition from the popular left-wing politician Sahra Wagenknecht, who is also critical of open borders but is attractive to working-class voters? She will found a new political party, and according to some polls, could attract many current AfD voters. She said she will not collaborate with the AfD, though.
That’s precisely why Wagenknecht poses no threat to the AfD’s success. Wagenknecht and we say that status quo mainstream policies are running this country into the ground. And so we ask Wagenknecht: Are you ready to form a coalition with us? She says no. So everyone should get that she is nothing but a plant of the Social Democrats. We need to communicate that Wagenknecht cannot solve the immigration problem because she is a leftist. Just 50 percent of welfare recipients are German citizens. The German welfare state already ethnicizes the social question, only that it does that in favor of immigrants. And so, a vote for Wagenknecht would be a lost vote. Our voters know that. I believe that ultimately she will fail.
The post Europe After America appeared first on The American Conservative.
What seems impossible today will be routine tomorrow.
The American foreign policy establishment, a.k.a. the Blob, is like the drunk who is looking under a streetlight for his car keys. He knows he did not drop them there, but it is where he can see. In identifying threats to America and its vital interests, the Blob can only see those that arise on an east–west axis, i.e., China and Russia. But the mortal danger to the U.S., Europe and most of the rest of the northern hemisphere flows from the Global South. To that danger the Blob is blind.
What is that danger? Mass immigration from places with dysfunctional cultures. Despite the “multicultural” baloney, only two cultures have proven successful over time, Western and Chinese. That is why Chinese immigrants quickly become successful middle-class citizens in Western countries. People pouring over Europe’s and America’s southern borders come from places where nothing works. The cause of their failure is, at root, cultural. Climate change, shifts in world trade patterns, socialist governments that destroy the local economy, etc., are all factors. But functional cultures can deal with these problems. South American, African, and Islamic cultures cannot.
So their people flee, seeking a place where things do work. But they take the culture they are fleeing with them, because it is all they know. Wherever they settle in large numbers, crime, dishonest dealing, disregard for civic duties, and general decline follow. What was our country slowly becomes theirs.
The Blob cannot perceive any of this, partly because of their cultural Marxism, partly because they only recognize threats from other states, and mostly because an east–west orientation on threats from Russia and China keeps the money flowing. Defending borders does not demand trillion-dollar fighter planes (like the flying piano that is the F-35). It does not offer cushy jobs to foreign service bureaucrats. It does not generate useless conferences where think tank “experts” can justify their existence to their donors. So the political establishments here and in Europe leave the pet door open and millions of skunks invade our living rooms.
The Blob’s east–west fixation represents the highest level of foreign policy error, a false orientation at the grand strategic level. We have seen the consequences of such error before, in 1914. The three Christian, conservative monarchies of Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary all focused on each other as the prime threat. The real threat was secular democracy. Had they united against it, they might still be with us today. Instead, they destroyed each other, and the victors were America’s worst ever president, Woodrow Wilson, and a guy named Lenin sitting in a cafe in Zurich. That is the scale of catastrophe a false orientation at the grand strategic level can bring.
As Lenin asked, what is to be done? An answer is rising in Europe: re-immigration. While both Europe and the U.S. face massive invasions by immigrants, their problems are not identical. Most of those swimming the Rio Grande are Christian. Those from Venezuela were in many cases members of the middle class until socialism destroyed their country’s economy. They are coming faster than we can acculturate them, but with time and sharp restriction of the flow rate most can become Americans.
The Moslems pouring across the Mediterranean into Europe are a wholly different matter. They will never acculturate. Their religion forbids it. When in Britain parading Moslems carry banners saying “Islam: Our Religion Today, Your Religion Tomorrow,” they are not suggesting Britons will have a choice in the matter.
European conservatives are proposing the only answer that can preserve European civilization: re- immigration. Re-immigraiton means sending them back.
Here is how it might work. As soon as an illegal alien lands on a European shore, he or she is put aboard a ship. Containerships with bare-bones living accommodations made from shipping containers can hold many people. When the ship or ships are full, they carry the would-be invaders back to a non-European shore. Ideally, it would be the shore from which they sailed for Europe, and the country there would willingly receive them. If it won’t, European navies suddenly have a mission. They make an amphibious landing, dump the illegals ashore, and leave. The message would soon become clear; if you make it to Europe, your stay will be measured in hours. In the face of that reality, the flow across the Mediterranean would dry up.
Is Europe capable of this? Physically, yes. Politically, not yet. But Europe’s real right is rising, and invasion from the global south is putting wind in their sails. What seems impossible today will be routine tomorrow.
The post Re-immigration appeared first on The American Conservative.
Allies, friends, and partners fear the end of Uncle Sucker.
There is a fearsome specter haunting not just Europe, but the entire globe: a Donald Trump victory in next year’s presidential election.
The Europeans are the most alarmed, though. The Financial Times’ Gideon Rachman detailed their conundrum: “Many European decision-makers admit that they were caught unprepared by Trump’s election as U.S. president in 2016. They are determined not to make the same mistake again. But knowing that Trump might win the presidency back in 2024, and knowing what to do about it, are different things. That is all the more the case since a second Trump presidency would probably be even more radical and unpredictable than the first.”
Bronwen Maddox of Chatham House was refreshingly honest in admitting that Europeans take American coddling for granted. She explained:
British foreign policy, like that in much of Europe and many democracies beyond, is based on the presumption that the US in some sense always remains the same. Its presidents, its policies, its wars of choice come and go. But America upholds the principle of international institutions even if it rails against some of them or funds them sporadically. It continues to pick up the giant’s share of the tab for NATO, above all.
For a good time, call Uncle Sam!
No wonder the thought of losing the privilege of being a U.S. security dependent is so daunting to so many. For decades, countries enjoyed an essentially free or at least cheap ride, recovering economically behind an American defense shield. In recent years, Europeans have continued to prosper while leaving the heavy lifting of war and peace to Washington. That allowed the continent to concentrate on fun stuff, like creating a bountiful welfare state and carping about American policy priorities.
The first military outlay on the chopping block if Trump regains the presidency probably would be aid to Ukraine. Noted Rachman, “Led by the U.S., NATO nations say repeatedly they will do ‘whatever it takes’ to help Kyiv win. But if Trump subjected Ukraine to an Afghanistan-style aid cut-off, the Europeans would not have enough military materiel to keep Ukraine going.”
Yet the continent has been backing away from the many fevered promises to devote significantly more money to Europe’s defense. And European states might not even be willing to fight for each other. The Pew Research Center found that more Europeans opposed going to war on behalf of their NATO neighbors than fighting for them. After all, the Biden administration remains ready to underwrite intervention on the continent’s behalf, no matter how miserly its efforts.
If Washington is on its way out, Rachman warns, withdrawing Ukraine support “would leave the countries closest to Russia, including Poland, high, dry and on the front line.” However, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the Europeans continue to advertise their helplessness when it comes to defense. After all, Americans are soft touches, having been ever willing to subsidize their wastrel, derelict Atlantic cousins.
Alas, the problem goes beyond guns to butter. Apparently, European governments can’t even meet soft targets. After all, European taxpayers insist on bulking up their welfare states first. And the U.S. can be counted on to step in financially. Indeed, Washington has provided some $25 billion in economic assistance to Ukraine “to help farmers, subsidize small businesses and pay the country’s first responders.” All this for a country with a well-earned reputation for corruption.
Even more distraught about the impending advance of the new Dark Age if Americans go home was Ed Luce, also of the Financial Times, who bewailed the potential return of “isolationism” under Trump. It was a bizarre charge then, and it remains a bizarre charge today. Trump spent more on the U.S. military than his predecessors, added more troops to and devoted more money to Europe, left Washington even more entangled in the Middle East, launched economic war on China, and revived the Ugly American in Latin America. He was no isolationist.
However, to Luce increasing popular pressure in the U.S. to reduce the amount of money going to the allies’ increasingly dangerous proxy war against Russia is evidence enough of impending doom. He insists that “today’s rising isolationism”—meaning reduced funding for Ukraine, nothing more—“is not about even-handedness between Russia and Ukraine; its driving force comes from Republicans in sympathy with Russia’s Vladimir Putin.” With CNN finding a majority of Americans opposed to more aid, there must be a very large number of Russian sycophants and stooges in the U.S. Who knew that more than half of the population had gone over to the dark side?
There is much disquiet at the prospect of “isolationism” in Asia as well. Reported the Wall Street Journal: “For many foreign capitals, the possibility of a second Trump administration is a source of anxiety. Allies from Paris to Tokyo regard Trump, the front-runner for the GOP nomination, as an erratic leader with little interest in cultivating long-term ties to counter Russian and Chinese expansionism.”
True, Trump talked about withdrawing troops from South Korea, but he never acted on those threats. He formed a tight bond with Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and never pushed for the withdrawal of much of anything from Japan. Trump also deployed the U.S. Navy to counter Chinese maritime activities. His secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, led the anti-Beijing campaign and now advocates for an independent Taiwan. These positions do not bring “isolationist” to mind.
Where the term might be more accurately tossed at Trump is on trade. Nevertheless, his policies look little different from those of his successor. Trump has promised to impose tougher restrictions in a second term, but the Biden administration’s investment and technology controls on China go much further than anything promoted by Trump.
Indeed, Maddox reluctantly conceded the policy convergence, adding: “these are just awkward policies—and the U.K. has not found the current administration easy on that front either. Biden ordered the precipitate exit from Afghanistan which upended 20 years of British efforts in that country. The Inflation Reduction Act, a subsidy of hundreds of billions of dollars for green technology, has been drawn up with blithe disregard for the way it will suck investment and manufacturing from U.S. allies.”
Still, even if the Yanks continued to defend her country, there’s something about Trump and his Yanks she obviously doesn’t like. He “would have an utterly different conception of America’s role in the world and the nature of its democracy at home, of the rule of law at home and abroad. And so would the U.S. voters who elected him.” At which point “the implications for global institutions, for international law and order, for predictability of a world superpower are stark.”
America’s nervous dependents are pursuing two different strategies. The first is to cozy up to the very people they despise. Reported the Journal: “Leading members of the three parties of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s governing coalition have been jetting across the Atlantic ever since they took power in late 2021, meeting with GOP officials and Trump confidants. A key Scholz aide, Wolfgang Schmidt, has made regular visits to Washington, forging links with key Republicans. In September, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock will embark on a 10-day visit to the U.S., including an extended visit to Texas, a GOP bastion, to familiarize herself with the party.” Visiting Texas! Such is the sacrifice made by German grandees!
Still, even an artful “suck-up” can only go so far in delaying the inevitable. The other strategy is to embrace reality. Unfortunately, some countries, such as the United Kingdom, have been pulling back from their promises to do more. Germany, with Europe’s largest economy, also has been a disappointment. Admitted one analyst, there was hope that “Germany would leave the comfort zone and start to take security more seriously. But I don’t see any game changer.”
Other governments, however, may be ready to take a more responsible position. For instance, Poland is contemplating a major military buildup: “Poland’s military expansion plans would make the country Europe’s leading military power by raising its long-term defense spending target from the current 2.4% to 5% of gross domestic product. Warsaw wants to increase spending to 3% of GDP as early as next year to kickstart an armament overhaul as well as a huge expansion in troop numbers to 400,000 from 150,000.”
Despite Berlin’s poor performance, the senior German parliamentarian Norbert Röttgen urged the creation of an independent foreign policy. Paris, too, is pressing for more: “French officials have been warning European allies that the possibility of Trump’s return requires the continent to significantly expand arms production, from artillery to missile defense systems, so it can supply Ukraine on its own.” After decades of enjoying a cheap ride on America, it is time for Europe to start doing something “on its own.”
Will doing so be easy? No, of course not. Nevertheless, as revolutionary hero Thomas Paine reminded us: “What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: It is dearness only that gives everything its value.” Josep Borrell, the European Union’s “High Representative” for foreign policy, declared that “Europe is facing an existential threat.” If so, the EU’s twenty-seven member states should act accordingly, investing in their militaries, improving continental coordination, and establishing a multilateral framework for operations.
No doubt, Donald Trump was and again would be a difficult partner even for a friendly government. He would be a particularly unwelcome ally for those used to playing the helpless dependent to take advantage of Washington’s foolish tendency to turn the Pentagon into an international welfare agency. Say what you will about Trump, he doesn’t suffer this sort of fools gladly.
Rather than strategizing how to best “play” Trump if he again ends up in the Oval Office, foreign officials should begin to act as leaders of important and capable states. The U.S. remains the world’s richest and strongest nation, but no longer can afford to play military nursemaid to Europe and the others. Governments which took over their own security would no longer need cower in fear of what the next American election might bring.
The post Hedging Against a Trump Victory appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: European actions contradict European rhetoric.
Is Russia a continental hegemonic threat or not? Every good foreign policy doctrine is hinged on a proper threat assessment. However, while listening to Europeans lamenting, one gets contradictory ideas.
The Financial Times quotes Nils Schmid, an MP for the German left-wing Social Democrats and the party’s spokesman on foreign affairs, warning that “Ukraine is at risk of becoming a victim of radical Republicans”, and adding, “I hope the majority in both parties in Congress, which wants to continue supporting Ukraine, will quickly pass a resolution to this effect. Otherwise the credibility of U.S. foreign policy will be badly damaged.”
This, readers, is a German left-wing MP we are talking about here, a politician from the most formidable economy in Europe, and arguably the most powerful state, albeit one whose defense spending never quite seems to reach the required levels.
Furthermore, the Washington Post reports, “But the failure to push the aid through Saturday could still have consequences for the war effort…giving America’s European allies an excuse to pare back their own financial commitments…” The Wall Street Journal adds, “European leaders face a question they had hoped to avoid: If the U.S. steps back from leading Western support for Ukraine, could they fill the gap?”
All these are, of course, flawed questions. The real questions are as follows: Do Europeans think Russia is a major continental hegemonic threat or not? If they don’t think Russia is a continental threat, then why is America there? And if they don’t step up to share the burden equally, even when they think Russia is a continental threat, is that really worth prioritizing further engagement in Europe, at the cost of local threats such as the Mexican border?
Europe has four times the manpower and ten times the GDP of Russia. It can, if it so desires, balance Russia on her own. West Germany alone had a twelve-divisions army in 1989. If the Europeans think Russia is a major threat, they’d “internally balance” any potential American retrenchment. That is the standard hypothesis. And that would be visible, in potentially massive and rapid rearmament and production. It is not. In fact, America is taking the burden even on non-military matters, such as providing money for, quite literally, the salary of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian government servants, and first responders.
Alternatively, if Europe is correct that Russia is a regional power, they will either free-ride on the U.S. and enjoy the fun while it lasts in a regional war, or throw Ukraine under the bus. Either way, if Europe cuts back on its effort, mirroring American retrenchment, then their “revealed preferences” show something else. Every pro-Ukraine hawk should go back to the drawing board and question his priors, or take a long hard look in the mirror for threat inflation.
The post Europe’s Revealed Preferences appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: The real purpose of NATO isn’t just to oppose hegemony in Europe, but to discourage independent thinking and nationalist impulses.
Aris Roussinos wrote an important column for the British website Unherd that explores how the European tail wags the American dog. “Far from the United States forcing European states into a stance of radical and self-defeating hostility to Russia, it is European states that have consistently pushed a reluctant Biden administration into delivering ever-more deadly and sophisticated weapons systems to Kyiv,” Roussinos writes.
The pattern of hawkish European states browbeating their cautious and reluctant overlord into greater escalation echoes the dynamic of the Libyan intervention, wherein which the bright-eyed and idealistic Cameron and Sarkozy pairing cajoled Obama into what he later termed the Libyan “sh*tshow” against his better judgment. If anything, NATO displays the European tail wagging the American dog: Instead of keeping Europe subordinate, weak but ambitious European states use the NATO alliance to advance their own foreign policy ends—ends that, in Libya, would prove disastrous as a European failing rather than an American one.
Roussinos is, of course, partly correct. Reactionaries, especially in America, are blindsided by two major handicaps: first, the inability to see that the institutions that they once considered the bulwark of a conservative order are actually now a radical and expansionist bureaucracy; and second, a blindness to the fact that both NATO and a nascent EU changed character, especially after the collapse of the USSR, with former communists cleverly changing jerseys and taking positions of power in both.
Peter Hitchens warned us about that in 2001: “The new Nato, inclusive and politically correct, was being used to sweep aside obstacles to the interests of the European Union. And the EU had metamorphosed from capitalist conspiracy to multinational, multicultural socialist state—a smiley-badge version of the USSR they missed so much.”
But there’s a greater theoretical assumption which is often left unsaid.
As I wrote in a short policy brief, for the Center of Renewing America,
There are several reasons why the Baltic states are playing a high-risk game of doubling down on their grand strategy. First, a small state in a large alliance often perceives that it risks no real dilution of influence within the alliance if the alliance gets larger. In fact, the larger the alliance, the bigger the constraint on the hegemon. Expanding an alliance would, in turn, consolidate the liberal-internationalist orthodoxy and multiply an imperial, self-sustaining and expanding bureaucracy, making it more difficult for a hegemon like the U.S. to act on its own interests as opposed to the interests of the group. The bigger the alliance and the worse Russo-American relations are, the better the deal for protectorate states. And with more states in the alliance, the greater the chance of the Russo-American friction growing.
NATO is not just there to protect Europe or dissuade any hegemony in Europe. It is there to discourage any nationalist and isolationist impulses in the former great powers of Europe and especially in the United States. Understand that, and European small states’ support for NATO makes a lot more sense.
Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote that “marriage is the moral death of every proud soul, of all independence.” America’s marriage to Europe perhaps was reasonable after the end of the Second World War and especially after the collapse of the Soviets. But it thereafter altered the character of the republic by ignoring any caution about permanent and entangling alliances.
And, in the process, America lost her independence.
The post European Tail, American Dog appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: European unity was, and remains, a historical and unnatural accident.
Poland’s President Andrzej Duda said yesterday, “Ukraine is like a drowning person who can pull you to the depths. If a drowning person causes harm and drowns us, he will not get help. We have to look after our interests, and we will do it effectively and decisively.” Poland, alongside Hungary and Slovakia, is planning to implement protectionist policies to safeguard their farmers from Ukrainian grains flooding the market. Poland also is currently refusing to send any further weapons to Ukraine.
It is darkly comical. Socially-conservative Poland has always been an enemy of Western liberals and neoconservatives, but the Ukraine war temporarily changed that, given Polish antagonism towards Russia, another socially conservative power. It might change again soon.
The history of Polish–Ukrainian relations is, however, long and cruel. Ukrainian nationalists sided with the Nazis to commit pogroms and massacre both Poles and Jews. All that bad blood cannot be swept under the rug. The Nazis among the Ukrainian population remain a sore issue between the two countries. Recently, Ukrainian missiles killed two Poles, which Ukraine continued to deny, bizarrely, given that NATO can track flight patterns and coordinates. Ukrainian entitlement, on the other hand, continues, even against its strongest backers, such as Britain.
The wartime unity has always been about to collapse, given diverging interests between Ukraine, European countries, and the United States. But a greater point sticks out.
European unity was and remains a historical accident. It is unnatural and essentially a result of benevolent American conquest. To maintain it would necessitate a true imperium. One should let nature take its course, allow a natural equilibrium to return, and only intervene in extremis. George Washington’s Farewell Address should remain a guiding star for American policy. Europe has a set of interests alien to America’s interest (or even survival). Unless the continent is threatened by a single hegemon that is not just willing but actually capable of taking over the entire continent, threatening the Atlantic and the sea routes, it’s best to leave them alone with their historic grievances.
The post Polish Patience Runs Out appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: The new trade route between India and Europe, through the Middle East, marks the return to a historic norm.
“Every year India, the silk-growing country of northern China, and the Arabian peninsula take from our Empire. Such is the cost to us of our exquisites and our women,” the philosopher Pliny once wrote, channelling his inner Ross Perot to describe how Roman ladies are bankrupting the empire by indulging in Indian clothes. The trade imbalance between the East and Europe isn’t something new. In fact, the East being the powerhouse has been the historic norm: Things were different only when parts of the East were under direct governing of the West. The growth of sea routes was a sign of two specific historic developments: The rapid rise of seafaring technology and maritime great powers of Europe, and the lawlessness and disorder of the land routes due to the power vacuum in Asia.
The Periplus Maris Erythraei, written in first century AD, voices an anonymous author charting the activity of a bunch of Roman and Greek trading partners, including from places as far as the land next to the Ganges, and of all places, a distant land of Thina (the Th pronounced as a lispy C), which was a closed but powerful and expansive empire producing silk and yarn. The Romans needed olives, glassware, amber, corals, and heavy metals such as lead and copper; as well as exotic animals including peacocks, tigers, and Indian elephants; and, of course, spices and stones, including but not limited to amethysts, beryl, sapphire, ruby, pearls, ivory tusks, cotton, indigo dye, south Indian pepper, betel leaves, ginger, and turmeric.
Historic evidence suggests that upper caste Indians from the Greco-Bactrian as well as Kushana times loved Roman wine, as evident from Roman coins and Roman artefacts excavated in various parts of the subcontinent. (They called the land India, east of Indus, and not Bharat, just for the sake of historical record.) It was also a time when the Hans were aggressively expanding in the Central Asian vacuum. That brought them into repeated contact with the West, as they started exporting fine expensive Chinese silk. The East was bigger in size and produced more. The West consumed and conquered.
A memorandum of understanding signed at the recent G-20 summit states that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the European Union, the Republic of India, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the French Republic, the Federal Republic of Germany, the Italian Republic, and the United States of America pledge to “commit to work together to establish the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC).” Bypassing China, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, it would have two segments: One from India to the Middle East, and from the Middle East to Europe. It would cut down time and generate jobs, but mostly, it would create an alternative to the Chinese Belt and Road initiatives. Almost immediately upon election, the current rulers of Rome decided to softly drift away from their commitment to Chinese infrastructure development.
My colleague, Jude Russo, is inclined to rightly demonstrate how history rhymes. With China returning to its historic form, it was interesting to see how Europe (and the U.S.) are returning to the historic partnerships as well, except, this time the trade with India is purely to balance the rise of China.
The actors might change; however, the game remains familiar.
The post Return to the Roman Routes appeared first on The American Conservative.
Right-wing parties are on the rise across the Old Continent.
Across Europe, right-wing and national-conservative parties have scored remarkable victories in recent elections and are riding high in the polls. Disgruntled voters come in droves. Some liberal observers express fear of a coming right-wing “tsunami” in Europe.
Establishments have for a long time excluded right-wing newcomers from power. But that is changing. Italy has had a staunchly right-wing government since the fall. The right is now on a roll in many countries of Europe, from Germany to France and Spain, as well as in Scandinavia and central-Eastern Europe. The “firewall” or “cordon sanitaire” policies to keep right-wing parties away from power have failed or are set to fail.
The main driver of support for the right in Europe is opposition to out-of-control mass immigration. Rising costs of living and high energy prices since the Ukraine war have also fueled discontent. Most right-wing parties are also skeptical of the E.U. But foreign policy leanings are not always consistent; attitudes towards Russia since the war in Ukraine have been a source of discord among the parties of the right. I will return to the issue later in this essay. First, let’s go on a short political tour d’horizon to acquaint readers with the scale of changes in the “Old Continent.”
We’ll begin in Germany, a country that, until ten years ago, did not have any noteworthy party to the right of the ruling Christian Democrats (CDU), then led by Angela Merkel, and their Bavarian sister party the Christian Social Union (CSU). Merkel made the strategic decision to shift to the left, abandoning the traditional conservative wing and creating a vacuum on the right. This was filled by the Euroskeptic newcomer party Alternative for Germany (AfD), founded in 2013 during the Euro crisis. Merkel’s decision in 2015 to keep the borders open for more than one million migrants and refugees from the Middle East and Africa boosted the challenger party. Despite headwinds and ostracism from the political establishment and the media, the “far right” AfD entered the federal parliament, the Bundestag.
In recent polls, support for AfD has doubled to 20 percent or more, boosted by public anger at a controversial proposal for a gas boiler ban by the Green Party minister of economics and climate. In polls, AfD is now clearly ahead of the ruling Social Democrats party of Chancellor Olaf Scholz. His three-party coalition government (made up of the SPD, the Greens, and the liberal Free Democrats Party) has plunged to unseen levels of unpopularity. A full 79 percent of voters say they are unhappy, a recent survey for public broadcaster ARD revealed.
The rise of the right in Germany has generated alarm and even hysteria among the other parties. They almost suffered a stroke when an AfD candidate gained a historic first district election victory in Sonneberg, in the eastern state of Thuringia. The Verfassungsschutz (a domestic spy agency tasked to “protect” the constitution, but prone to political abuse by suppressing inconvenient opposition groups) has denounced AfD as a “suspected case” of extremism. But official stigmatization appears to have become a blunted weapon. Voters simply don’t care anymore about such a public warning.
The CDU is trapped in a difficult situation. They have pledged to uphold a brandmauer (firewall) against the right-wing rival. But this policy is getting increasingly harder to sustain, especially in the eastern states of Germany, the former GDR, where between a quarter or even a third of voters support AfD.
Strategies of total exclusion, whether named “firewall” (or cordon sanitaire as they called it in France and Belgium), are bound to fail if they run against political reality. When a rival party on the right gets too big, it cannot permanently be excluded from participating in legislative and executive power in a democracy.
We are witnessing this in France. An Ifop poll in April found that Marine Le Pen was now the most popular politician in the country, ahead of President Macron, who is seen as aloof, especially by the ordinary people struggling with his unpopular pension reforms. Now France is again faced with violent unrest in the banlieues, the suburbs, predominantly populated by migrants of African and Arab descent. Race riots have recently erupted in Paris, Marseille, Lyon, and many smaller places.
The nights of anarchy and fiery vandalism confirm Le Pen’s case that something has seriously gone wrong with immigration and integration. Amid widespread pessimism about the future of France, Le Pen might well become the next president. In mid-June, before the riots broke out, Jacqueline Maquet, an M.P. with Macron’s “Renaissance party,” told the Sunday newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche: “I have the impression of a tsunami advancing.” Faced with this tide shift, the cordon sanitaire will break.
Likewise, in Sweden, excluding a successful right-wing contender to the status quo has not worked. After years of fighting among immigrant drug gangs, with almost daily shootings and explosions, voters’ anger about lax migration and security policies has strengthened the right-wing Sweden Democrats. To gain respectability, they opted strategically for moderation in language and removed some of their more radical elements. Eventually, the firewall against them crumbled.
The Sweden Democrats broke through in the elections last September. Now, the new center-right coalition depends on their support. Neighboring Finland has also turned to the right with the “populist” right-wing Finns Party last month becoming a formal part of the new coalition government (though they are already embroiled in scandals about alleged racism).
Most remarkable of all recent right-wing successes, Giorgia Meloni’s party Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) also achieved their breakthrough in September, and as first female prime minister she has since led a remarkably stable right-wing government. Despite being vilified by the left as being “post fascist,” the smart, hard-nosed, and charming Meloni gained a broad following, confronting the “woke” left, their ideas of social engineering, and LGBT propaganda.
Her party is by far the most popular in Italy, out-flanking Matteo Salvini’s Lega and the late Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia. Her government combines traditional social conservatism with a harder line against illegal immigrants. The recent decisions of the E.U. leaders to redouble their efforts to halt small boats with asylum seekers in the Mediterranean reflect a shift in the consensus. What was once a “far right” demand is now the new normal.
Spain is the latest case-in-point of a turn to the right. Recent regional and local elections have handed the conservative Partido Popular (P.P.) huge gains while the more hard-right Vox party, established in 2013, greatly increased its number of councilors. Embattled socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez was forced to call a snap general election. The likely outcome of the election on July 23 is a victory for P.P., led by the moderate conservative Alberto Nunez Feijoo, and a coalition with VOX (“Vox” is Latin for “voice”). Under the leadership of Santiago Abascal, it has rapidly become Spain’s third-largest party. Despite the left’s cries about a return to “Franco-era” politics, VOX is now becoming socially accepted.
This short journey through several European countries shows the extent to which right-wing movements are on the advance. We see signs of an emerging “Conservative International” or “Right-Wing International.” This was evidenced at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) gathering in Budapest in May. More than 600 conservatives from Europe and North America attended, seeking common ground and understanding. Hungarian Prime Minister Orban opened the event with a speech entitled “No migration, no gender, no war.”
There is consensus on the European right against mass migration and the aggressive promotion of gender ideology. However, what exactly Orbán meant by “no war” was left in limbo. He evaded explaining how to stop the war in Ukraine. This is one of the current key issues that divide the different rightwing parties or prevent them from effectively forming a true “Right International.”
In the European Parliament in Brussels, the rightwing parties have failed to form a unified group. Instead there are two major competing rightwing factions: the Eurosceptic ECR and the more hard-right ID (plus a dozen non-affiliated MEPs from Hungary’s Fidesz party, which got expelled from the center-right European People’s Party (EPP). All these parties are opposed to the formation of a European super-state to replace the nation-states, and all of them are opposed to the left’s social engineering experiments.
If they would combine, an allied right would easily secure around 150 seats in the Brussels parliament (of the total 705), becoming the second-largest faction right behind the European People’s Party—the party of Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission. A combined right could be far larger than the Socialists and Democrats (S&D) faction.
However, a unification of all the parties on the right is unlikely to happen. There are too many differences of opinion. During the Euro crisis, those differences were mainly about the Euro, ECB policies and fiscal transfers and subsidies, and now, since the war in Ukraine started, there is major dissent on foreign policy and Russia.
Some right-wing parties are vehemently pro-NATO and support the U.S. foreign policy line. Poland’s conservative PiS party is the most vocal proponent of large arms supplies for Ukraine’s fight against Russia. (Ironically, a national-conservative, anti-woke government in Warsaw finds much common ground in foreign policy with the woke Biden administration, which does not reciprocate the favors and has supported LGBT protests in Warsaw against the PiS government.)
Other right-wing leaders side strongly with Ukraine as well. Italy’s Giorgia Meloni has made this clear; she does not waiver in her support for NATO. On the other hand, Hungary’s Victor Orban (with whom both Meloni and VOX’s Abascal are good friends) has been reluctant in his support, and many other right-wing parties like Germany’s AfD are opposed to weapons deliveries fearing that the war might escalate and become a pan-European conflict—a war of Russia against the West waged on Central European soil. Some currents on the right also harbor Russian sympathies.
Some of the skepticism of the war is a reaction to the overbearing enthusiasm for the conflict on the part of the left. Germany’s Greens have turned from pacifists to bellicists; left-wingers who refused to serve in the army now call for the most lethal tanks, fighter jets, and long-range missiles for Ukraine. It could be argued that their stance is irrational and inconsequential because it contradicts their otherwise anti-nationalist attitude while Ukrainians are fighting a nationalistic fight to defend their homeland. Ukrainians at the front are not rainbow warriors but nationalistic patriots, which the Left usually loathes.
But because support for Ukraine is now, in the eyes of many, intertwined with other woke causes such as diversity, LGBT rights, and the rest of the Biden administration’s globalist agenda, some on the European right believe that Russia might be a counterforce against a woke West. For years, some European right-wing parties, like the Austrian FPO and France’s National Rally (R.N.), entertained close relationships with Putin’s party. Le Pen’s party even received a large credit from a Russian-affiliated bank.
Many have come to regret this. At Rassemblement National (R.N.), the young president Jordan Bardella acknowledged “a collective naivety” concerning Putin’s intentions with the R.N. Since the invasion, the party has somewhat departed from its traditionally pro-Russian course and pledged to support Ukraine while at the same time not falling for absolutist, hawkish rhetoric.
Other right-wing movements are, however, more confused. You find odd neo-neutralist ideas and even absurdly naive pacifist musings in some corners of the European right. Some advocate “Eurasian” conceptions, some dream of a dissolution of NATO without giving any realistic answer about what might replace it. Albeit relatively marginal, these voices obscure the debate and, at the same time, underscore the need for an authentic and realistic conception for a common European security policy.
The right in Europe does not have one. They lack serious think tanks and thinkers on security policy who could lead a conversation about a future European security architecture that would be less dependent on the dominant influence of Washington. While American cultural and military hegemony is waning globally, the E.U. does not appear to be in a position to become a real foreign policy power that is able to define and pursue its geopolitical interests. First, they lack the necessary military power; second, they lack a clear conception of their geopolitical interests. Some on the left even deny that one should pursue geopolitical interests beyond the spreading of human rights globally.
Germany, the economic heavyweight but militarily a sick man of the continent, is a case-in-point. The industrial powerhouse (now struggling because of irrational Green energy policies and waning traditional sectors like the car industry) is a country that is intensely insecure about its approach. It has long generated resentment among its European neighbors who feel dominated and, in turn, seek ways to make Germany the paymaster in the E.U. At the same time, Germany has attracted the largest numbers of (irregular) migrants and has destabilized the continent with an irrational open-border policy. With its more generous social benefits, “Germoney” is a magnet for migration. And Berlin left the dirty work of securing the outer borders to others in Southern Europe while simultaneously accusing them of racism.
For decades, Germany naively believed they needed neither borders nor a proper military. The Bundeswehr, Germany’s army, is in a pitiful state after 30 years of underfunding. Former U.S. President Donald Trump was right when he accused Europeans, and Germans in particular, of underinvesting and free-riding in defense matters.
In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Chancellor Scholz announced a zeitenwende, a turning point in history. More investment in security and the army was promised, but it has not yet materialized. One also hoped for a more realistic foreign policy. But this hope has been dashed. Germany’s foreign minister Annalena Baerbock from the Green party, a relatively young politician, is taking pride in her “feminist,” human rights-based approach. Unfortunately, Baerbock is also very inexperienced and gaffe-prone.
In January, she declared out of the blue, “We are fighting a war against Russia,” a statement that her aides quickly dismissed as “lost in translation.” Luckily, not too many take her words seriously. Baerbock is considered a bit of a joke by quite many in Germany. Her English-language mistakes are regularly mocked. Two weeks ago, in Pretoria, she congratulated South Africa for being a “bacon (!) of hope”. The German Green party exemplifies an embarrassing mix of ignorance and arrogance when lecturing others on becoming enlightened, modern, diverse and post-national world citizens.
For decades, Germany’s left-liberal intellectual and political elites indulged in the fancy dream of a pacifist, multicultural, post-national identity, as advocated by philosopher Jurgen Habermas. Berlin’s morally arrogant posture and even bullying against those who do not share those ideas (such as Hungary and Poland), and those who resist mass migration and the woke progressive agenda have since backfired and generated resentment against Germany.
At the heart of the problems lies a broken national identity on the part of Germany, which is incapable of seeing itself as “normal nation” with national interests. Therefore, Germany is also incapable of understanding why other nations—the East Europeans, Italians, Spaniards, French, etc.—want to be nations and want to preserve their nation-states, independence, and self-government. Germany’s elites now look with horror at the wave of right-wing governments in several neighboring countries. But Germany must come to terms with its own identity and cease trying to escape reality into post-national fantasies.
Europe will be transformed if the center of political gravity shifts towards more conservative, realist positions. At the same time, the world is moving from American dominance towards a multipolar geopolitical setting, with the U.S. being challenged by China. This poses huge challenges for Europe, and Germany—whose industries, like the car manufacturers, have already become dangerously dependent on the Chinese market—especially. Europe needs to devise a security strategy that promotes competitiveness, greater innovation, and resilience, while decreasing dependencies on Chinese markets and critical raw materials.
Europe cannot abandon the alliance with the U.S., since that would expose European military and economic weaknesses and might exacerbate internal rivalries or struggles for preeminence. But Europe must emancipate itself from ill-judged interventionist U.S. military adventures. We should become more restrained and more focused on solving our problems—and America should, too.
The post The Rise of the European Right appeared first on The American Conservative.
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