Terrific! It’s good to know that the USA is merely “disputed territory” between Canada and Mexico.
The invasion of Crimea didn’t cause a nuclear war, but it did create sanctions and elevate the level of international concern, which sends a message that further expansionism is going to result in rapid escalation. It’s not always about nuclear war.
Well, they might feel they were swindled on that deal they made for Alaska. Which in fact they were. And it’s annoying for them because I understand you can actually see Alaska from Vladimir Putin’s front porch in Russia, so they keep getting reminded of their rotten deal.
But on a slightly more realistic and serious note, there are all kinds of disputed rights in the Arctic and various border areas. As a matter of fact, right now Canada is involved in a minor kerfuffle over fishing rights with whatsisname, that big place down south, oh yeah, the new Trumpian United States.
I don’t think those countries would do well enough under Russia, but I’m not clear that on balance those countries doing less well under Russia is worth direct military conflict with Russia should Russia attack one of its neighbors.
I absolutely agree that as long as we are a member of NATO we should honor our commitment, and that the agreement does act as a deterrent. Simultaneously we don’t need NATO to step in to defend other nations when our interests align. My simplistic view is that we don’t need NATO any longer, however I expect there’s a whole lot of complexity and downstream that I’m missing.
The thing is, we don’t necessarily need a military alliance to have international cooperation…it’s not a mutual exclusive or inclusive thing, where you have to have a military alliance to have cooperation between the US and Europe, or if we don’t have an alliance we are automatically advisories and at each others throats.
I disagree with your position that everything can be blamed on the US wrt the current state of affairs globally, though some of what you say is certainly true and the US is certainly not blameless. Iraq was certainly a cluster fuck. But I don’t think the US was or is solely responsible for everything bad that’s happened since or during the Bush presidency. It is worrying that Trump is just one of several seeming right wing authoritarian types or groups in power, though I’m more worried about Xi and Putin than Trump, all things considered. YMMV and certainly I’ll be happy when we shake the dust of Trump’s presidency from our collective boots and relegate him to the ash heap of history.
I’m afraid your rather poorly informed opinion that NATO nations must just look the other way to a Russian invasion is patently absurd, and apparently the product of not really understanding the issues at stake.
Well…I agree and disagree. It’s really not as simple as you make it out to be. I’ve seen polls from western Europeans talking about what if scenarios where Russia invades one of the Baltic states and what should (or shouldn’t) be done. In theory, what SHOULD happen is that the mutual defense treaties should go into effect and the other members of NATO should start to mobilize to take the country back. And I think that at the higher, government levels that’s what most likely will happen. But in the current situation? What will Trump do? Because even if the US supports taking the Baltic states back it’s going to be a hard sell for several of the western European nations, especially wrt their citizens. But I don’t have any freaking idea what Trump would do…and without US support I really don’t see the other members presenting a unified front to take back one or all of the Baltic states, no matter what the treaty says. Hell, given the state of several militarizes of the larger European states I don’t know if they actually have the ability to project enough force to do anything substantial. Germany is the largest economy in Europe, and I saw an article from a year or so ago that said when they deployed for exercises they couldn’t even fully equip those troops. Poland doesn’t have the military projection capabilities. France has downsized, and while formidable in their own sphere on the defensive I doubt they could project much to help in the short or even medium term. The UK? They have a pretty good military that they have kept up, but they are a bit far away.
Which brings me to the other reason I think NATO is probably at least a 50/50 bet for extinction: our president is at best a useful idiot, and at worst, a willing asset to Vladimir Putin. And it is increasingly apparent that the Republican party machine is controlled by oligarchal interests with ties to the Kremlin. American isolationism benefits one person more than any other, and it’s not Xi, it’s Putin.
Nobody actually understands the issues at stake because they’ve never been tested. We know more about the atmosphere of Jupiter and the rings around Saturn and the existence of black holes, than we do about what a war with Russia would entail. It’s abstract theoretical prognostication that we can do because we’re lucky enough to live in comfortable countries with computers and electricity and running water and refrigeration. Please watch the BBC film Threads and you will see what the practice - as opposed to the theory - would entail.
Naw, it benefits both. China would LOVE an isolationist US for much the same reasons Russia would…it would give them a free hand in their sphere of influence. China is currently putting a lot of pressure on it’s neighbors, and it’s been the US that’s been a thorn in it’s side (well, until Trump). They would have already annexed the South China Sea region but for the US and our pressure for freedom of navigation in international waters. Taiwan would have been annexed by now but for the US, and most likely Japan would have had to give up their claims of the Senkaku islands and be totally on the defensive…Taiwan in mainland hands would be a dagger pointed right at their heart, especially with no US in the way. You could reel off similar things for just about every country that borders China. So, no, Xi would be VERY happy with an isolationist US…as much or more than Putin. At least Putin doesn’t have to worry about a trade war with the US destabilizing his nations economy and setting back his planned for expansions.
Yeah, I’m pretty familiar with nuclear weapons and the catastrophic and horrifying effects of their use. But because of the nature of the security dilemma (google if needed), the most rational way to avoid a major nuclear war in the foreseeable future is for both sides to be effectively deterred from the use of the weapons. This leads to the unsettling paradox that the best way to never use nuclear weapons is to be prepared to use nuclear weapons. And from my side, the willingness of the Russians to engage in nuclear war is, indeed, an extremely powerful deterrent from us using nuclear weapons first.
You can damn sure bet that I’m 100% in favor of the treaty commitment of the United States and all other major nations to seek the eventual complete and total disarmament of all nuclear weapons under verifiable and irreversible conditions.
You might be right in time, but China needs our consumer purchasing power right now. No other country has as much of it, so from their point of view, our isolationism is destabilizing. Like any country, they have their own idea of just how involved we should be.
Do you really trust that they’re actually going to abide by the treaty about disarmament? I don’t. I’m not a conspiracy theory guy, but I would bet my last dollar that whatever world powers are claiming about decreasing their stockpiles of nuclear weapons, they are hiding hundreds or thousands of them in secret locations that nobody will ever be able to find. The “inspectors” might as well be out there with dowsing rods; whatever nuclear weapons they think they know about, there are many more that they do not and will not ever find out about until and unless they are actually deployed.
If NATO allows one of its member states to be invaded without responding, then NATO is a dead letter, not just for “the Baltic States” but for the whole 29-member alliance. Of course some of those 29 member states (like the USA) are not going to be invaded at any point in the foreseeable future due to a combination of being militarily very powerful in their own right, and being very large and not easy to get to by any other country in their weight class.
One thing to consider, though, is what would be the effect on the European countries themselves if NATO is allowed to collapse, and Europe goes back to being the sort of neighborhood where sovereign states routinely invade each other and take bites out of each other’s territories. There are already three nuclear states in Europe (Russia, France, and Britain), but I’m sure multiple other European countries have the technological and industrial base to get nuclear weapons if they had the political will to do so. As long as people like Angela Merkel are in charge, such a thing is unthinkable. But as much as we think of Europe as being this civilized, cooperative, vaguely socialist (or at least social democratic), prosperous, and maybe a little bit wussified part of the world, historically Europeans have been capable of extraordinary aggressiveness and outright savagery. There’s a reason why people worked so hard after the end of World War II–after the end of the most destructive conflict in human history, and the introduction of new and ever-deadlier weapons capable of threatening civilization itself–to create institutions like NATO and the European Union. But those institutions didn’t spring up out of nowhere, and they aren’t just somehow part of the natural order of things. People worked hard to build them, and they won’t last if people don’t work hard to sustain them.
If we allow the institutions–NATO and the EU–that sustain the modern, peace-loving, socially advanced Europe we all know and love to be subverted and destroyed, then even if that doesn’t lead to World War III next Tuesday, maybe 20 or 30 years from now we could be looking at a Europe with half-a-dozen nuclear-armed states all eyeball-to-eyeball across hostile, fortified borders.
Europe has a very long history of dragging the rest of the world into its internal conflicts, from the 18th century on down to World War II. If those intra-European conflicts involve nuclear weapons, it could make the wars of the 20th century look like playground shoving matches.
So, yes, we need to make 100% crystal clear to Vladimir Putin that
Means exactly that. There is no asterisk after “one or more of them*” (“*except for the countries on the list in the Secret Protocol of the Putin-Trump Pact”). If that is made clear, there will be no nuclear war, not now and not in 2039.
Unfortunately, Trump (aided and abetted by the oh-so-uber-patriotic Republican Party) has already dangerously weakened the institutions the United States and the world depend upon for their peace and security.
Nothing to worry about. It’s all going to be under water in a few years anyway.
As for the OP, I actually do think NATO serves a purpose, even with its flaws. Sort of like the UN, but not as bad. It helps keep Europe together and serves as a check on Russia. Would NATO attack Russia if Russia invade Estonia? I don’t know, but I reluctantly say “I hope so”. It’s a tough call, but if NATO doesn’t act in any given case, then it might as well not exist at all.
But I don’t like seeing NATO taking aggression against threats to non-member states. That’s where the UN comes in, flaws and all. Besides whenever “NATO” does take such action, it’s really just the US with maybe a little help from a few other NATO members.
The United States has a defensive alliance with Latvia. So Latvia is invaded by Russia, we should defend Latvia and fight Russia.
My hope, as I expressed above, is that by making our willingness to defend Latvia clear, Russia would choose not to attack it and we could avoid such a war.
And don’t pretend this is all on us. The United States isn’t risking a nuclear war by defending Latvia. It’s Russia that risked a nuclear war by attacking Latvia.
I don’t see any desire in the United States or other western countries to restart the Cold War. What I do see is that Russia appears to be willing to restart it.
As I’ve said, I think we should discourage that. A new Cold War wouldn’t be in our interests or in Russia’s interests. And I’ve described how I think the United States should act to discourage Russia.
About 20% of my ancestry comes from the Baltic region. I’d like to visit there someday and not have to worry about having nerve agents sprinkled on my gravlax, ok, so it’s not like I like the idea of Russia taking over this territory. But really. Really. If Russia decided to annex one of these countries, what would actually happen?
Let’s assume a force of NATO peacekeeping troops are sent there. What do they do? Do they march up to the Russian encampments and give them an intimidating stare? Do aircraft enter into this equation? If they do, they’re asking to be shot down. If that happens, then what?
In 2015, a Russian plane was shot down in Turkish airspace, by Turkish government authority; as the crew ejected, one of them was shot at and killed by small arms fire from Syrian rebels, which is a war crime. Because there were Syrian “rebels” involved, there was apparently enough plausible deniability and “fog of war” for the situation to not escalate any further. Russia moved some ships somewhere, Turkey moved some missiles somewhere…and that was basically all that happened.
There would be no such complications in a Russian-American confrontation in the Baltic - and Russia knows it doesn’t really have anything at stake in Turkey or Syria. What happens when American planes or helicopters get shot down by Russian SAMs? What does America do then? They can’t just let it go; that would be acknowledging bitch status. They would have to retaliate. Now we’re not talking about Syrian “rebels” or Russian mercenaries like the ones recently killed in an American airstrike. We’re talking about Russian and American commissioned officers killing each other. Does anyone seriously think they would just let that go?
Say during the midst of all this, Russia decides to poke America or NATO somewhere else, just for the hell of it. I don’t know…Bulgaria? Romania? Who the hell knows? But now NATO has conflict on two fronts. What do they do then?
You understand that the converse is also true, right? If we are talking about an attack on a NATO member Russia has to worry about similar things…AND they have to actually be able to mount such an attack and then support and sustain it. I seriously doubt they have the logistics to support a huge force in one of the Baltic states in the face of a unified NATO response, especially with the US involved. As for nukes, again, Russia has to worry about that as well…more so, really, since I doubt they are in all that great shape after a decade of neglect and even today a pretty lean budget.
Why do you think Russia capable of poking NATO on two fronts and stretching NATO past it’s ability to respond?? You think Russia is capable of projecting that sort of power but you feel NATO isn’t? Yes, such a thing could easily spiral out of control…but as Little Nemo pointed out, it would be on Russia. They would be deliberately courting total destruction. Hell, their economy is on pretty shaky ground just from annexing the Crimea and screwing around in the Ukraine…imagine how wonderful it would be if it was a full on war, not just some economic sanctions? I think Russia is far more vulnerable than you think they are, and are pretty unlikely to push NATO unless they know for sure the US will bow out and leave it to the Europeans to figure out.