It means the Constitutions of the individual states. It wouldn’t make sense that it would mean the US Constitution. This is the Supremacy Clause, which makes federal laws supreme over the laws of individual states. That includes being supreme over the Constitutions of the states.
Does anyone know if/how NATO defines miliary spending?
What if one country designates it’s coast guard as civilian and another has it as a branch of the military? What’s to stop a county saying it’s police force is a branch of the military because they will have a role to play if invaded? Or pensions that get paid to ex-service members? Or the million other accounting tricks that could be done to satisfy a target?
Then what’s to stop Trump pointing at a country that meets its 2% obligation but which is some of that for something he considers to be non -trivial? He can find just as many ways to wriggle it if a commitment as the accountants could use to meet that 2% threshold.
Trump has got NATO countries looking at each other rather than at Russia.
Though in the short/medium term the alarm this causes in Europe may force them to build up A greater amount of security. If Trump doesn’t get it this could make NATO and Europe stronger - though it doesn’t help the US and the power and trust it has built. The US is slightly weaker this week than it was before that speech IMHO.
Is declaring war even a thing anymore?
“Special military action” is the new freshness. (Do people still say that either?)
The last formal declaration of war was World War II, because that was the last time the US was engaged in a full-scale massive war that required all of the country’s military resources.
For every military engagement since, either there were political reasons to not go that route or (more often) the US was fighting a much smaller foe that just didn’t need anywhere near the same kind of commitment that WWII did.
Note that legally, the US does not need to formally declare war to be considered to be engaged in war.
18 U.S. Code § 2331 has a definition for an “act of war” that says:
the term “act of war” means any act occurring in the course of—
(A) declared war;
(B) armed conflict, whether or not war has been declared, between two or more nations; or
(C) armed conflict between military forces of any origin;
And remember that the US has engaged in multiple “wars” since WWII that did not include a formal declaration of war. In this thread I used “declare war” in the informal sense, where the US engages in a prolonged military conflict with another military force.
There is a difference between making idle threats, withholding funding and encouraging war crimes.
Yeah, except those idle threats become MAGA chants and MAGA chants have a way of feeding orange egos.
Thanks! And apologies for the bad spelling/mistakes in that post above - I was writing on my phone.
Geopolitics expert Anders Puck Nielsen believes that Russia may try to test NATO by some small scale aggression against a “minor” NATO country. His theory is that NATO will inevitably break apart if a country tries to trigger article 5 and is ignored by the rest of the bloc - so this what Putin will seek to achieve. This is why NATO often says it will defend every inch of territory.
He also says that if the US pulls its support from Ukraine then Europe’s defence production will go towards helping Ukraine and this might create a dilemma between helping Ukraine or prioritising NATO and their own collective defence.
So (and this is my take) there may be an incentive for Putin to attack a NATO country, especially if things start to look desperate in Ukraine. It would be a gamble for sure, but if he’s about to lose the house anyway…
Putin- Russian president
Ukraine started the war; Russia’s goal is to stop it. Ukrainians still consider themselves Russians, what is happening is an element of a civil war. The 2014 coup d’etat in Ukraine was accomplished by the opposition with the help of CIA. “NATO has options to recognize Russia’s control over the new regions. Russia had to take Crimea under its protection in 2014. We have made so many gestures of goodwill, that we’ve exhausted all limits. Nobody responded to our goodwill gestures with similar gestures…
Yep, for the USA. Other nations have occasionally done so- such as the Iran–Iraq War (1980) - Iraq declared war on Iran
He is, in my opinion, simply wrong. This was one of those ideas floated around in the years before the invasion of Ukraine, i.e. would the US and the rest of NATO actually go to war over Estonia, which the NATO and world geopolitical response to the invasion of Ukraine has pretty solidly put to rest. NATO has forward deployed troops to the Baltic states and five other eastern NATO nations in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a non-NATO member. As of December 2023 an invasion of one of the three Baltic states would immediately put Russia into direct combat with NATO forces from the following countries:
Host nation: Estonia
Framework nation: United Kingdom
Contributing nations: France and IcelandHost nation: Latvia
Framework nation: Canada
Contributing nations: Albania, Czechia, Iceland, Italy, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia and SpainHost nation: Lithuania
Framework nation: Germany
Contributing nations: Belgium, Czechia, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway and the United States
Nothing gets across the notion that NATO will defend every inch of NATO soil with collective defense quite like having warm bodies from NATO collectively defending them in peacetime. Stepping over that border means they are going to be in immediate combat with multinational NATO forces.
This is just a reiteration of the argument against providing support of those who wanted to stick their head in the sand when the invasion happened and not provide aid to Ukraine. There was a lot of claimed worries about NATO not having the stockpiles to both send aid to Ukraine and provide for their own collective defense. This is both a) not true and b) ignores the elephant in the room, which is the question of who NATO would need these stockpiles to collectively defend themselves against. The answer is of course Russia. Sending military aid to Ukraine directly weakens the threat that Russia could pose to NATO. NATO built those stockpiles to destroy first Soviet and later Russian military hardware and kill Soviet/Russian troops. Which is exactly what they are doing in Ukraine.
Those very nations ‘most at risk’ of some kind of Russian test of NATO resolve, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania aren’t worried in the slightest that they are endangering themselves by providing aid to Ukraine. They are actually per capita providing the highest amount of support to Ukraine. The six states providing the highest % of their GDP in aid to Ukraine are the very ones who actually have the most to fear from Russia, and they have been in lockstep in providing aid.
In January last year, Estonia provided Ukraine with its 155mm howitzers. There’s not a word missing there, it didn’t provide it with some of its 155mm howitzers, it sent all of its 155mm howitzers to Ukraine.
As to the idea that Putin might gamble on attacking NATO if things look bad in Ukraine, they don’t look better NATO, they look a hell of a lot worse. Apart from the conventional angle, Ukraine at least doesn’t have nuclear weapons since it voluntarily gave them up in 1994. Something it might be regretting today.
You mean the world geopolitical response that didn’t happen until eight years after the invasion?
No, I mean the world geopolitical response that didn’t happen until 105 years after the invasion.
You clearly knew what I was talking about.
Well, I assumed you meant the invasion that started the current war. Which, I think, illustrates the point quite nicely: The world will, in fact, tolerate Russia cutting slices off of the salami, so long as they don’t try to cut off too much at once.
So, your point, if there is one, about the largely uncontested occupation of Crimea and the Donbas 8 years ago and how it pertains to the current situation is what, exactly? You’re in the position of arguing that the world will, in fact, tolerate Hitler cutting slices off of the salami as long as he doesn’t try to cut too much at once. I mean after all, he remilitarized the Rhineland, annexed Austria, then the Sudetenland and finally swallowed the rump Czech state. Only you’re trying to make this argument and the date is September 3, 1939, and France and the Commonwealth have already declared war on Germany over Poland.