The salient point is that Ukraine wasn’t part of NATO. So it got salami’d and gobbled up, because Russia has finally got the soulless ambitious autocrat it’d been missing ever since old man Josef keeled over. Which is also why you don’t hear many Latvians, Estonians or Poles wondering whether or not NATO is obsolete.
Okay, that’s just absurd.
The militaries of the West, through NATO did little else but think and plan for war with Russia for 46 years. And the politicians of that era spent drastic sums on the issue- both on equipment, but on doctrine, planning, modeling, etc…
And we have what… 100+ years of modern warfare experience to draw on in terms of logistics, planning, organization, etc…
I think the militaries and governments involved have a very good idea what war with Russia would entail, and in large part, that’s why they formed NATO.
And saying that people fighting each other is insane, and that everything can be solved diplomatically is frankly, a stupid set of statements. We literally have thousands of years of international warfare and tens of thousands of years of inter-tribal warfare to draw on. If there’s one thing you CAN count on, it’s that people and nations will fight over stuff if they think they can get away with it. Again, that’s the point of NATO- to make sure that nobody thinks they can get away with it.
Shades of the Delian League
Then tell Russia not to start one.
Well, I think you’re the only one in this thread at least. Alliances mean something and invading Latvia is a direct declaration of war on the United States and every NATO member. Russia would be going into this with their eyes wide open to that fact and yes I think NATO would declare war under those circumstances. As they should. If you don’t want to defend Latvia, don’t make an alliance with them.
I think you are vastly over-rating the tactical capacity of Russia, which is a pale shadow of what it once was. Still probably the second strongest on the planet in terms of force projection( land and air, anyway ), but a very distant second. NATO as whole is much, much more powerful.
I also think you are vastly overestimating the possibility of a serious nuclear exchange in a shooting war. Putin et al aren’t idiots. They are almost certainly only likely to resort to that sort of thing if they fear violent regime change ( i.e. a NATO invasion of conquest in Russia ). NATO command are also not idiots - they’ll act to expel Russia, not go for the jugular a la a WW II unconditional surrender scenario.
Regarding the whole two or more front issue, it seems it would be Russia that has a lot more to worry about than than NATO. Even without the US, Canada could attack Russia from the east. In the event of a basically worldwide conflict I doubt that South Korea, Australia, and even Japan would stand by idly as well. Those nations would be able to attack Russia from the east as well if things really hit the fan.
No; you are being a coward. And an immoral one at that. You have all but affirmed that you are willing to let the world be taken over piece by piece by a (potentially) evil empire with all its features in order to avoid a war. There are things worth fighting for and dying for and NATO was created to defend them.
Were you around during the Vietnam War? I assume you would have supported it if you were. Most of the comments here seem to essentially along the same lines of the “domino theory” that the proponents of that war espoused.
America could have stopped Communists from taking over North Korea LONG before they had nuclear bombs, and we didn’t. Nobody did anything, Republican and Democrat alike. They allowed that regime to become more and more powerful until now they have nuclear bombs and we’re forced to negotiate with them as if they’re a legitimate political entity.
You’re probably thinking, “well, Korea isn’t part of NATO.” So? You say that “evil empires” need to be stopped…shouldn’t we start with the one that only has a few nuclear bombs instead of thousands of them? And what about China? They, too, are trying to occupy other countries like Tibet, and the Republic of China does not recognize the Peoples’ Republic of China and would surely describe the latter as an evil empire…why aren’t we doing anything about that?
I’m 32 years old. I grew up watching the U.S. try to be the “world’s policeman” and all it has accomplished is leaving a trail of death, destruction, and chaos in its wake. Haven’t we had enough of this?
Let me just say for the record here I’m not even saying that NATO is obsolete or that it doesn’t serve a useful purpose. I’m just not sure what exactly they can do in this situation without courting disaster.
Pretty sure we did something about Korea. When North Korea invaded South Korea, we sent troops and fought a war. The result is we drove the invaders out and preserved the independence of South Korea.
This example isn’t doing a lot for your Latvia scenario. We pretty much did exactly what you said we shouldn’t do and it worked.
Hmmm…no, I don’t see that analogy working at all. That was an ideologically driven geo-political theory. An invasion of a NATO member is a straight up and down proposition - either you honour a defensive alliance or you don’t. If you don’t the alliance is essentially useless.
I really don’t see how. MacArthur tried and got his ass handed to him on the Yalu River by the Chinese. After that the war settled into a stalemate and after the war nothing was subsequently possible partly for the same reason invading East Germany wasn’t feasible - realpolitik( in this case involving China ). Partly because North Korea adopted the poison pill strategy of being able to bombard Seoul if attacked.
Further as Little Nemo noted, South Korea was preserved to become the miniature economic powerhouse it is today.
Because the situations are not even remotely comparable. Defending an allied country in Europe from invasion in 2018 is not the same as intervening over the Himalayas through another country or two to liberate a former autonomous protectorate that was conquered in 1950 and which the United States had been happy to concede to Chiang Kai-Shek several years earlier. There is idealistic, there is reasonable and then there is dumb. Getting into a probably unwinnable fight over Tibet is dumb. Defending an ally from invasion is reasonable.
I’m the same age as you and I’m also tired of seeing the US trying to be the world police, but I completely disagree with you. There’s a VERY big difference between responding to aggression against a country with whom we have a mutual defense treaty and attacking a country to prevent them from doing something in the future. The latter means acting as the aggressor, increasing global instability, and risking other countries turning against you. That’s your “stop North Korea from getting the bomb” scenario. The former deters aggression, keeps the moral high ground, and, at worst, uses a small, localized, limited conflict to prevent WW III. That’s the “defending Latvia” scenario.
Also, if you think that Russia can overwhelm NATO you’re wrong. That’s the whole point of NATO, to make sure that Russia can’t use their population and industrial base to steamroll Western Europe.
On another note, any comparisons to Europe just prior to WW II are seriously flawed. The only major power that was ready for war was Germany. Britain knew their air and ground forces weren’t sufficient, the USSR was ready to stab Poland in the back but wasn’t sufficiently mobilized for total war, and the French high command had their heads so far up their asses they couldn’t even think about looking for the right questions to ask.
There’s your problem. You weren’t old enough to understand when Russia occupied most of Eastern Europe. Putin wants to restore the Soviet Empire.
I advise you to visit Estonia, Talinn in particular, and to to the Museum of the Occupation. That has all the facts on what the Russians did there. It would open your eyes, which need opening. Then hop over to Berlin and see the Berlin Wall, what’s left of it, and read the stories of those killed trying to escape.
Sentencing Eastern Europe to a repeat of slavery is an immoral position to take.
I’m over twice your age. When I was in school we had Civil Defense drills all the time. If you actually have paid attention to the effects of a nuclear war you’ll see how useless they are. We called it “put your head between your legs under your desk and kiss your ass goodbye.”
MAD almost certainly prevented the nuclear war most people expected in the early 1950s.
If you want another movies about it, try “The Day After,” and something similar made in England whose name I forget. Or the countless sf novels about a nuclear war. And, most importantly, “Hiroshima” by John Hersey, which described the effects of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in all the horrid detail you need. And that was real. Nobody was unaware of what a war would do, except maybe Curtis LeMay.
Living under the threat of war was bad, but it sure beat the alternative. And it worked.
As for the question in the OP, if there was Russian aggression in Europe we would be involved, NATO or no NATO. I think two world wars prove that. So why not be sure that we have practice working with out allies, to the point of compatible communications and weapons. A lot of the detail work is in that area.
What are you talking about?
Did you… did you just compare Trump to fucking Pericles ?
… well, I mean, the latter was famous for having built a great wall I suppose…
I think the point is that, with the distribution of nuclear weapons as it is, NATO more or less as presently constructed creates a stable security structure where everyone knows where they stand, and which supports the rules-based international system of which the Helsinki agreements are a prime example. Take that away, and we potentially revert to the instabilities of the 1920s, where despite the hopes of the League of Nations and all that, there was still an inherent potential of a war against all, whether it be trade wars in response to economic upheavals or revanchism over borders. We’ve seen where that led twice in the 20th century, only now there is almost unimaginably more destructive potential to hand.
It is precisely the fact that, economically speaking, the relative weight of Russia’s total GDP (about the size of Italy, slightly less than either France or the UK and substantially less than either Germany or the US) is so much less than the relative international weight of its nuclear weapons that makes Putin a touchy character and difficult to deal with, unless we do so together.
It’s not obsolete but it doesn’t have the value it once did either.
Trump has a point.
Only five of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s 28 member countries last year met the alliance goal of spending at least 2% of their gross domestic product on defense.
We pay 3.61% of our GDP. Other nations far less and need to pull their weight to hit 2% of their GDP. The USA pays for nearly 25% of the entire funding.
France, 1.78%.
Turkey, 1.56%.
Norway, 1.54%.
Lithuania, 1.49%.
Romania, 1.48%.
Latvia, 1.45%.
Portugal, 1.38%.
Bulgaria, 1.35%.
Croatia, 1.23%.
Albania, 1.21%.
Germany, 1.19%.
Denmark, 1.17%.
Netherlands, 1.17%.
Slovakia, 1.16%.
Italy, 1.11%.
Czech Republic, 1.04%.
Hungary, 1.01%.
Canada, 0.99%.
Slovenia, 0.94%.
Spain, 0.91%.
Belgium, 0.85%.
Luxembourg, 0.44%.
Not at all; LeMay was probably MORE aware than anyone else what a war like that might be, since he’d been heavily involved in the European bomber offensive and part of the turnaround in that force before becoming the commander and architect of the strategic bombing campaign against Japan.
LeMay was an extreme hard-ass, and well aware of the effects of nuclear weapons and conventional bombing. He wasn’t really a politician though, and his comments underlie that- his comments about bombing Vietnam back to the stone age are those of a very hard-nosed USAF General talking about how to actually win a war, not those of a politician who cares about public opinion. If you look at history, the bombing of North Vietnam was a non-trivial factor in getting them to the negotiating table.
And to some extent, it probably was a good thing in the age of MAD to have LeMay scowling and making comments like those that the Soviets had little doubt that he would carry out.
This ^
I don’t know much about any of the three, but Estonia in particular knew better than to assume that Russia wouldn’t at some point want some of its former territory back. At the same time, the example of former Soviet states in NATO is somewhat reassuring in the sense that Vladimir has limits to his brinkmanship.
Putin is a criminal running a global criminal enterprise disguised as a nation-state, and that will never change. He’s in too deep to relinquish his grip on Russia, and there’s a good chance that whoever assumes his role after his exit will inherit his kleptocracy and become just as committed to working within that system.
But the chance for peace exists with every regime, and Putin’s no different. It requires on the one hand a level of honest self-assessment and self-awareness about our own behavior (I’m referring to the US here), but it also absolutely requires drawing lines in the sand and making it clear that lines will not be crossed without consequences.
That is very, very obviously not true, AND it misses not jusst the point, but several points.
First of all, the United States does not spend 3.61% of its GDP on NATO. It spends 3.61% of its GDP on defense - much of which has nothing to do with NATO. The U.S. Pacific Fleet, the invasion of Iraq, and stuff like that has nothing, or close to it, to do with NATO.
Obviously, some nations’ defense expenditures are entirely devoted to NATO in any practical sense; Norway, Latvia, Poland and the Netherlands expend very little money on military things that ISN’T part of the defense of their homelands, which happen to be located in Europe and the North Atlantic. Some nations, like France, Canada or the UK, do expend money on defense that cannot reasonably be attributed to NATO, and the USA spend quite a lot of money on defense that isn’t NATO-related. I don’t think you can attribute an absolutely solid percentage one way or another but it is clear that it ain’t one hundred percent.
Secondly, the twpp percent target is a rough guide, not something anyone owes.
Look, that should be REALLY obvious. For one thing, it’s not going to make a difference if Luxembourg spends 0.5% or 5% of its budget on defense. It’s barely a country. It’s like if Des Moines was a country.
It starts to matter if Canada or Italy don’t spend 2%, but again, let’'s get real;
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The effectiveness of NATO’s alliance doesn’t matter much if Canada spends 1.3% (which it now does) or 2% (which it hopes to in 2024) and
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Determining your defence spending based on an arbitrary number is very stupid. Defense spending is about a balance between what you can afford and what you need. What level of readiness and capability does NATO actually require? THAT is the measure of Canada’s, or Italy’s, contribution. If your expectation is that Canada be able to provide substantial interceptor capability in the Arctic, or that Italy be able to exert a given amount of surface naval superiority in the Med, that’s what you’re going for; if Italy’s Ministry of Defence can get a good deal on its next generation of missile destroyers and save a few bucks, what does anyone care as long as those ships work and are on the sea?
I am not suggesting that NATO countries should not make a substantial contribution. Canada absolutely needs to up its game, though, speaking as a Canadian, I can tell you that a lot of it is not a lack of will but political ineptitude in terms of actually buying stuff. Whatever. However, what Trump is doing - shaking the perception that the alliance is an alliance - is hideously dangerous.
Let’'s be really honest; the value of NATO is very straightforward, and boils down to two things:
- If you attack any of us you attack all of us.
- Three of us have goddamn nuclear weapons.
As long as those things are clear everything else is detail, and we can work it out. NATO is a tripwire; it is a deterrent. War after war after war has been started and killed God only knows how many in part because one side convinced itself the other side would not fight. The idea behind NATO is to really, really convince the other side we WILL fight. That is the absolute, paramount feature. When you start raising questions about that, you put the world in danger.