It’s been in the news quite a bit lately. The President of France, Emmanuel Macron, has called NATO basically ‘brain dead’. What he seems to mean by that (beside the obvious dig at the US and, specifically Trump) is that NATO has no over arching political will these days. It’s just kind of going through the motions. According to CNN:
I want to quote some other things from CNN that will tie the OP together, at least what I’m wanting to discuss and think about:
So, to condense that somewhat, France (and Europe) need to keep their options open with respect to Russia and, specifically, China, so that they can have closer relations with those countries instead of having to pick a side. The EU has already had a lot of inroads made to it from China. Russia is and has been more problematic, and Macron is pretty cautious about that himself in the article, saying he is waiting to see what, if anything Putin puts on the table in the up coming summit with the Ukraine, France, Germany and of course Russia.
Lastly there is this:
That’s the key piece that I think we can debate, as well as just generally about NATO. So, for debate. Is NATO ‘brain dead’? If so, what should the Europeans do about it? Should they do it collectively or individually? If individually, what should specifically France do? Is it wise to keep their options open and perhaps distance themselves from the US and form closer ties with Russia and China? Perhaps because a 3rd (or 4th I guess) major player and break with the US completely? Is there still any value in NATO at this point? And what concrete things can and should be done (individually or collectively) to make this happen? What will/would it take for Europe too do anything concrete about this?
Bottom line…do you agree with Macron? If so, what do you think is the next step? If not, what should Europe be doing to strengthen NATO and bring the US back into the fold? Or SHOULD Europe be bothering with the US at all, and instead be looking for closer ties to Russia and China, perhaps in a NATO that doesn’t include the US?
What Macron said was short sighted, if not in fact “brain dead”. It’s foolish to risk a traditionally close and stable economic and strategic relationship with the US in order to hedge a bet with authoritarian states like Russia and China. The US economy still dwarfs that of Russia and remains much greater than that of China. Trump’s presidency is unlikely to last another 12 months. But even if re-elected, Trump is demonstrably easier to manipulate for another 4 years than Putin or Xi Jinping.
It’s unclear to me what Macron’s game is. He has not struck me as being particularly foolish on an international scale. I realize that a threat of 100% tariff on French goods into the US would be a hard hit on France’s economy, but he could have tried to finesse this more diplomatically. He is choosing not to. I’m not quite sure why yet. Perhaps he thinks that using the Chinese hard nosed approach to Trump’s aggressive trade policies is a winning strategy. Let’s see.
NATO is a relic. It was created to keep the USSR out, the US in, and Germany down. Now the USSR is gone and Russia is in decline, Germany has taken over Europe via the EU and a military alliance with the US has no applicability to that situation, the US is going to inevitably shrink military spending as healthcare spending soars.
European nations are going to have to decide who their enemies are and what their interests are. As the US withdraws around the world regional hegemons will arise. Each European country will either need to come to an agreement with the hegemons or outsource their foreign policy to Germany via the EU.
Europe as a whole needs to upgrade their military to the point that they have a credible threat of force in international affairs. Europe, either within the NATO framework or in some other structure, should be able to deal with situations like Serbia and Syria without relying on US help - but in both cases, it was quite clear that non-US NATO could not act effectively. They also need to provide a credible threat of force against Russian ventures, and again it’s pretty clear that without the US there isn’t much ability to respond to Russia. The present situation isn’t good for anyone, the US is essentially funding Europe’s defense, Europe has limited ability to define their own foreign policy, and now the US is proving to be extremely unstable. While Trump is making a royal mess of things as is his way, Obama, W. Bush, and Clinton have all said variants on that theme, this isn’t a recent development (before Clinton was still the Cold War era so Bush, Reagan, etc. were not dealing with the same strategic reality). And this doesn’t even mean the end of NATO, just the end of Europe relying on the US for defense and force projection capability.
The idea of cozying up to Russia is foolish, but I think it’s just attention getting rhetoric. Europe having the ability to decide on policy with respect to Russia instead of relying on the US, a country that has shown itself to be completely unreliable with regards to Russia (Trump could not be doing all that he is without Republican support) should be an important goal for them. And scaling back US military spending should be a goal for the US, especially as domestic spending skyrockets.
Trump may not read newspapers but he has people drawing him pictures of what’s written about him. This reverse psychology trick might play for a day but not much longer. So I sincerely doubt Macron would be playing this sort of got-your-nose game with the orange toddler. Much as we could all use a good laugh, I just don’t believe the NATO summit has turned into a giant episode of, “Punked: Trump Season”.
Among other things, because NATO is a military alliance, not a political organization. It was born of a specific political situation, but that doesn’t mean its nature is itself political.
Maybe I’m weird, but I prefer military organizations that stay the hell away from politics. I was going to write “until the politicians tell them to jump in”, but I must admit I’d rather live in a world where the military spend a lot of time being bored.
The Eurozone should be looking to exit the Nato framework in a decade, just to put a time frame out there and decide what their common defense commitments look like. Russia should be re-engaged so that it finds its proper place once Putin steps down, as a strictly European partner.
They currently have no relevent mission, no real enemy threat and their main partner being a continent away with Nato being one mission among many and its hard to come up with a reason to reach out to Euros to spend their tax dollars. Mac is probably only saying what everyone else is thinking.
We, as in everyone in the Alliance need to start thinking about what a post Alliance world looks like.
I think Macron is simply trying to ape Charles de Gaulle.
Unfortunately for him, he’s not Charles de Gaulle. de Gaulle had the gravitas, the street cred, and the guts to actually pull off (albeit with difficulty) the whole “Great and Glorious France stands apart and has its own destiny” myth. Macron doesn’t have a quarter of what de Gaulle had.
There are politicians in Europe who disagree with the manner in which the U.S. has handled various international problems since the end of the Cold War, especially those situations where instead of acting within NATO’s organizational framework the U.S. chose to create ad hoc coalitions and ignore the opinions of its NATO allies in Europe. It looked like the U.S. preferred to put NATO on hold as long as it did not serve its purposes 100%, and it was due to this approach of the U.S. and the cold relationships within the alliance resulting from this strategy that Russia and China managed to boost their international influence and candidate Donald Trump obtained a political platform to claim that “NATO is obsolete.”
When Macron states that “NATO is brain-dead” on the one hand he is voicing the frustration of the European politicians mentioned above and on the other hand he feels he has an obligation to do so because (1) he wants to point out the responsibility that the U.S. has in the leadership crisis within NATO, and (2) he is expressing his doubts that this issue will be properly deal with under Donald Trump’s leadership.
It is all groups with different interests. NATO is a defensive alliance, it is not supposed to have “political vision”. Expecting a military alliance to have a political vision groups it with the Warzaw Pact, which was fundamentally a Russian imperial project. “Strategic vision” is a different story.
The French never really accepted their demotion to the second tier of powers. In that respect, they are much like the Russians. With the US declining, Marcon wants France (and Europe incidentally) to regain prominence. NATO would be a great toll for that, if it can be shaped the way he wants. Expressing doubts about NATO is a way to gain more control, because with the UK Brexiting, France will be the biggest military power that is both in the EU and NATO. And the EU drive for their own armed forces will accelerate without the British to impede it. (I sometimes think that was a big part of why they joined in the first place)
To most of the smaller NATO nations, many of which borders Russia, NATO absolutely has a mission and a strategic vision and it is just as important today as it ever was. Russias military power is often overestimated, but they are still a great power and far stronger than most of the nations on their borders. These nations may well agree to let Marcon use NATO more actively to keep a big ally.
Russias behavior is peculiar and does not seem to align with their long-time strategic needs. I believe it is indicative of power struggles under the surface, and that Putins control is not as strong as it appears.
Macron is right. The key nation of the alliance is currently led by a doofus who can’t wake up in the morning without doing something to benefit Putin, and the southern flank is protected by a country that has abandoned democracy and now sees the rest of the alliance as a hindrance.
And meanwhile, the alliance is faced with a Russian threat that’s greater than any time in the last 30 years, and growing substantially. And most absurd, Trump is probably ready to throw the Baltic states and Poland to the wolf because he has a vague feeling based on his horrible business sense that the US is being ripped off, when in fact NATO is our greatest military advantage.
Yep. The main NATO stakeholder has no brains, and that’s impacting the alliance. What Macron said isn’t controversial, it’s a stone-cold fact.
I do agree with Macron in that NATO is sort of strategically rudderless, in that the Russians aren’t the threat they once were, and most, if not all of the former Warsaw Pact nations are now NATO nations. NATO’s role in the world is kind of weird now in that clearly the Baltics need NATO to keep the Russians honest, but for say… the Netherlands, what exactly do they get out of it?
I’d think that going forward it might make sense to transform NATO into more of an EU-centric alliance, and not a US-dominated one, and then negotiate a separate alliance with the US. That way, you’d have the structure that would allow the EU to act as a pan-European military power if necessary, without reinventing the wheel in terms of standards, etc… and you’d also have the alliance with the US, without the US being involved in all the solely European aspects.
My suspicion is that the EU project is a long-term-state-building exercise of the ‘United States of Europe’. There is currently free movement of people across state borders, a unified currency that a lot of member states use… one of the obvious next steps would be a European army; something that has been mooted a number of times over previous years.
I believe that Macron is a pro-EU guy; why not slag off the current multi-state defence strategy organisation if you would want to promote an EU Army?