What are your thoughts on the current border crisis in Poland?

In My Humble Opinion
41

The EU has agonised about creating some kind of military but there are a lot of problems with that. The EU is primarily concerned with trade agreements and economic matters. Many countries are also members of NATO for security and, of course, the US is the most powerful member. How would a European army be compatible with NATO?

The Polish border crisis is happening at the same time as Russia has moved 100,000 troops towards the Ukrainian border. Russia sees Ukraine as the threat because they have recently acquired missile systems from NATO countries to deter further annexation by Russia.

Putin is banking on the fact that the political mood in the US seems to be weakening its commitment to international alliances. Xi in China is similarly pressing its case on Taiwan.

The balance of power between Europe and Russia and the balance between China and Japan/Taiwan/South Korea is guaranteed by the US, a Pax Americana.

If that breaks up and the US withdraws and become isolationist, then the world will become a very unstable place as rivals seek to fill the vacuum. Will Japan and Germany be obliged to re-arm in the face of threats from an expansionist China and Russia? That will certainly be the worry if Russia annexes Ukraine and China invades Taiwan.

42

Not really. Russia and China are certainly trying to expand their power and influence relative to the USA and Europe, but that’s just great power politics. I don’t think there’s any reason to suspect that their short-term goals are actually to wipe the US and Germany off the map as independent countries and slaughter their inhabitants in order to replace them with immigrants from their own countries. (China might well have something like that in mind for Taiwan, but not for the major world powers)

The current situation is certainly dangerously unstable and could potentially lead to a disastrous war between major powers. But, unlike in the 1930s, I don’t think any of the major powers have short-term ambitions which could never possibly be achieved without such a war.

43

Depends on how they did it. By my thought was simply that the individual European nations would simply build up their own militaries. After all, most don’t spend the kind of money they need to or should for their own defense…certainly not for their individual defense, but not even really for the collective defense. They rely, almost exclusively in some cases, on the US to bail them out. Germany recently wasn’t even able to adequately join in joint military exercises because their readiness has fallen so far. They rely on the US too much…and so do many other members of the alliance. That, IMHO, is a bad thing…not just for them but for everyone.

Well…overall, I agree. My main point of caution is that I don’t have a clue as to the US’s willingness to step up. It’s really about political will, and the previous administration did a lot too, IMHO, undercut our alliances and put into question our willingness to do what needs to be done. The current administration, too, seems to be taking a much more conciliatory tone wrt China and even Russia, and I don’t know how much political will exists in the administration to push things. When Biden said the US would protect Taiwan, but then walked that back, almost certainly at the behest of the administration and state department, that was a bad sign. And recently it seems to be they have taken a much more conciliatory tone wrt China, especially in the talks yesterday between Xi and Biden.

I agree. In fact, I think the hooks for this are already forming at least wrt Japan. The US will leave a huge hole in the current power structure of the world if we decide to turn fully inward…and I think that might already be happening. Certainly, Trump was doing this in his time, and he had quite a lot of support, seemingly.

44

But that’s not what was going on pre-WWII. Neither Japan nor Germany were looking to fight the other great powers. Japan was looking to do the same thing China is doing now - be the hegemonic power in the Asian theater, and control strategic assets around them to secure their energy and raw materials. Germany wanted to reunite its former empire, much like Putin wants to reunite the Soviet Union.

It was the miscalculations, category errors and the inexorable logic of war that caused these regional wars to merge into global war.

45

The caveat there, IMHO at least, is Japan was looking to fight the other great powers if we are talking about the European colonial powers in the region. They weren’t looking, initially, to fight the US until the oil embargo, then they were pretty focused on that goal.

Germany certainly didn’t want to fight GB and didn’t even really want to fight France, but I think they always had their eye on an eventual fight with Russia as an end goal.

Still, I think the overall point you are making is correct, nitpicks aside…it was miscalculations of the other side and their reaction that caused things to spiral out of control. And I think we are dangerously on the brink of that happening again in the case of both China and Russia…and, to an extent the US and Western Europe as well. I think in a lot of cases both sides are talking past each other and aren’t hearing what the other side is saying.

46

Definitely Japan would need to re-arm.

Germany might be able to rely on the rest of Europe.

I don’t think China is done invading Tibet and/or conducting ethnic cleansing on the Uighurs, they don’t really need Taiwan at this point for those sorts of expansion purposes.

Germany is a special case (as is Japan) as post-WWII no one wanted them to re-arm. The US actually entered into an agreement to be Japan’s defensive shield, it wasn’t a decision made by the Japanese. Not sure of the details in Germany’s case, and WWII might be far enough in the rear view mirror that the rest of Europe would now be comfortable with them re-arming.

The rest of 'em - yeah, they certainly should be considering what they might do if the US dropped out of NATO, for whatever reason. Or just becoming more of an equal partner to the US in general.

There has always been a segment of the US population that wants to be isolationist and have nothing to do with the rest of the world. The question is whether or not they’ll get real power to put their will into effect in the near future.

47

Of course Hitler was planning to start a world war from before he came to power. He knew his plans were too grandiose to be achieved in any other way. This has been amply demonstrated by records of many speeches delivered to his generals from 1933 on. Neither Hitler nor any of his advisors or generals were at all surprised that their invasion of Poland touched off a general European war. Indeed, they had been planning for the war to start he previous year and were surprised that the West let them get away with grabbing Czechoslovakia.

What on earth do you mean that Germany “wanted to reunite its former empire”? By invading Poland? That and a few small border regions were the only European territory Germany lost in WWI. And it’s demonstrably incorrect, because his very first aggressive moves were against Austria and German-speaking parts of Czechoslovakia, neither of which had ever been part of Germany.

48

Depends on how you are defining ‘Germany’. If you mean since Germany coalesced into the modern nation-state, then that’s true enough…but that’s not what Hitler thought of as greater Germany. Think more about the territory of the Holy Roman Empire, or even the territory of the Germanic tribes during the pre-Roman through the post-Roman period for an idea of what he THOUGHT was ‘German’ territory.

Of course, you could rightfully point out that he was wrong about all of this, and living in a fantasy world, and that would be true enough (as are most of their various theories about Arian Race BS), but that doesn’t detract from what he thought was right…and, pretty obviously, he was able to back that up with military force, at least for a while.

I think Eastern Europe and certainly Russia were always on the table for German expansion and war wrt Hitler et al. But I think Sam is sort of correct that, at least initially, Germany wasn’t really wanting a major power conflict (except with Russia, if you consider them a major power…which I do). It was the miscalculation based on earlier actions by the western European powers that caused Hitler et al to go for one country or expansion too many, and it was miscalculation that caused the Japanese to attack the US…and Germany to declare war on the US afterward. And I think it’s a good point that we seem to be tottering on the brink of similar miscalculations.

49

Hilter’s first moves were accepted by the west explicitly because they told themselves that he was just reconstituting the land they lost after WWI. For example, Austria and the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. Pan-Germanism sought to reunite all German-speaking people. Hitler took the non-response of the west as license to continue, until he went too far by invading Poland.

50

Yes, he fooled them with the “pan-German” line for a while, and he no doubt would have been happy to keep fooling them for as long as they were willing to be fooled, but your statement implies that he wouldn’t have invaded Poland if he’d known for sure that it would have led to war, and that is contradicted by ample historical evidence.

52

There are Russian speaking communities in each of the Baltic states that have constitutional issues with their governments. I seem to remember one of Putin’s gambits is to stir up controversy over the fate of war monuments celebrating the heroism if the Red Army in those countries leading to protests by this oppressed minority. There have also been incidents on Estonia’s border with Russia, which is in the Russian speaking part of Estonia.

Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia are small states with very serious concerns about Russia. Anyone conversant with the sad history of those states in the last century will understand how nervous they are. Russia is feared. They were anxious to join NATO and the EU as soon as they could after the collapse of the USSR.

One of the reasons the European Union came into being was to bind European states together by trade to develop a European economy. It has been a great success in that respect. It is good for small states. However it is underpinned by the size and strength of the German economy.

If it were to create some kind of European army, it would require a big input from Germany. That would set off a lot of nervous twitches all over Europe. There would also be a huge push back from within Germany itself.

Putin relies on a perception that NATO and the EU are expansionist and existential threats to Russia. He is anxious to keep Belarusia and parts of Ukraine under Russian control rather than allow them to drift towards the West.

The Polish border refugee crisis creates a problem for the EU. The annexation of Crimea and the threat to other parts of Ukraine is a problem for NATO.

However……Russia is invested in the global economy, as much as any other large state. It’s economy is dominated by Oil and Gas. There is no way it wants the revenue associated with those pipelines to stop. Putin priority is to get that Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline to Germany working.

Now all of this is known to diplomats in Europe. The US diplomats….maybe the Trump years have undermined the diplomatic service. But the generals in NATO certainly know about troop build ups on the Russian border and these are Putins response to arms deal between Ukraine and NATO countries for missile defence systems.

A lot of these challenges are coming from the perception that the US is withdrawing from its leading position in the global balance of power. I guess this had arisen from exasperation with the costly interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Biden needs to be quite clear where the US stands regarding the global balance of power and strengthen trade links and alliances. Europe could also make an effort to invest more in its NATO insurance policy. The South China Sea Question needs a counter move and some solidarity from the countries affected. There is a lot US diplomacy could do.