I can’t really speak for most of W. Europe, but I don’t know where people are getting this idea about the US. The foreign policy establishment in the US takes NATO very seriously, and that extends to both major political parties. Unless there is some radical change in the political establishment here, the US is going to respond to a direct invasion of a NATO member.
But then again, I can’t really see Putin attacking a NATO member. He’s not crazy.
30-years-behind-current-stuff equipment staffed by an undertrained Third World army is in no way proof of the ineffectiveness of the Russian army.
Why wouldn’t Putin try to destroy NATO?
Because he saw what happened to the bad guys in Octopussy.
Agreed. There is no way the US would sit back and allow NATO to crumble.
Crazy? Maybe, maybe not. Megalomaniac? Hell yes.
It’s not true of W Europe either. Most of the political establishment here started their careers as the carrot of EU expansion caused the former Warsaw pact members to choose political liberalization and European membership over nationalism and strongman gov’ts. That’s still seen as the major European success story of the last twenty years, and there’s zero chance the people involved would turn their backs on it while Putin tried to rebuild the Warsaw pact.
A Russian invasion of a NATO country would lead to a shooting war, there’s a zero percent chance US and European leaders would choose otherwise.
I think you are basing your reasoning on a few mistaken assumptions.
First, there is absolutly no equivalency between the Crimea -or Ukraine- and a NATO member. Ukraine is a European country that the west would quite like to see as a western, prosperous democracy. But it is not an alliance member. NATO is a defensive alliance designed to protect member states. NATO isn’t really in the business of going to war over non-members.
Also, the west isn’t really going to start a war over something they’d quite like.
An attack on a NATO member, however, would be an entirely different issue. If NATO doesn’t go to war over that, NATO is over. And NATO countries would rather have a war now, all together, than a war later one on one.
So Ukraine =/= a NATO member. Marching into Ukraine =/= marching into a NATO state. Big, big, big difference.
Second, Russia isn’t really powerful in terms of their conventional military. Not compared to NATO, just the US, or just the EU. Russias military budget over the last decade hasn’t been much bigger than the UKs, or Frances. Russia has a big army and a lot of handmedown equipment from the Soviet Union, which has gone through decades of being poorly maintained.
Yes, Russia is big and powerful compared to Hungary, or Slovakia or the Ukraine. But the EU has more than three times the population, and Russia basically has a military budget slightly larger than Britains, and an economy only slightly larger than Italys. And then you have the US…Which is heavily dependent on the EU as a customer.
So Russia =/= the Soviet Union in power.
Third, the US is quite fond of its credibility as a treaty partner, and the other NATO countries would much rather all pile up on Russia together, than fight it separatly down the line.
Finally, don’t confuse a high threshold for going to war with a lack of resolve about it. Europes history involves a lot of wars between equals, which tends to be very different from the “war as a spectator sport” the US is used to. So Europeans have a much higher threshold about war, but go to it with the understanding that it involves stuff like 9/11 happening daily.
US treaty commitments. How did that help the Ukraine? How is NATO going to stop a Russian attack on the Balts and Poland with forces in place? Zero non local ground troops. A dozen or so fighters. No much by the way of heavy armour in theatre. The old REFORGER stocks are long gone.
Moreover the terrain is flat with no real obstacles until the Polish German border.
I repeat, NATO is going to at best offer token resistance and retreat to more defensible lines.
Because real life wars aren’t like Risk. If you’re Russia, you can’t just capture small states one by one to increase your power. Russia needs rich people to buy their products, and most rich people live in or around NATO states. I doubt the territory gained from taking Baltic states would compare in value to the economic damage Western countries could do if they dared.
Um, the US doesnt** have **a treaty comitment to militarily help the Ukraine. It does have a treaty comitment to regard any action against a NATO member as an attack on the United States. Thats a pretty big difference.
This is what I meant by saying that an attack on the Ukraine is nothing like an attack on a NATO member.
When Russia attacks the Balts or Poland, they are at war with all NATO countries. Thats how NATO is set up. That means they got a frontline running from Turkey to the Arctic. You seem to think Putin gets to sit down and say “This is where the fighting happens”. Hell, Norway can sink ships in the Baltic with missiles.
(Also, I don’t think you realize how fast fighters can leapfrog from airport to airport. Russia lost planes against Georgia. They don’t stand much of a chance in an air war.)
If Putin wanted NATO gone, he has done precisely the opposite of what he should. NATOs suddely relevant and imporant after decades of reduced budgets. Its not going away for a generation or two at least now.
May I just ask, what the hell are you talking about? You know that Ukraine is not a NATO member, and the Baltics and Poland are, right?
And as far as positioning of troops, I would bet you anything that the ability of Russia to move a large invasion force to Poland’s border is worse than NATO’s ability to deploy a tripwire force to Poland.
He’s probably referring to the agreement to “respect the territorial integrity of the Ukraine” that the US and Russia signed. It’s clearly not a promise of protection. The Russians clearly violated that agreement but the U.S. didn’t renege by not going to war over it.
I’m sure he is talking about the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, and he mistakenly thinks the US made some sort of military commitment to Ukraine in that agreement. We didn’t.
Exactly. The agreement we had with Ukraine was that we wouldn’t invade Ukraine. We made no promises to defend them if somebody else invaded.
The NATO agreement is different. It explicitly says that every member will defend any other member if it’s attacked. Its only limitation is geographical; it’s only invoked by attacks in Europe, North America, and Turkey. That’s why NATO didn’t declare war on Argentina in 1982.
Also, the Falkland Islands conflict was a stupid combination of saber-rattling and utter failure of diplomacy which primarily served to highlight the deficiencies in the composition and defensive capability of the British Royal Navy.
Stranger
Trained by Russian advisers.
Key point.
If that doesn’t work for you, then let’s revisit the humiliating defeat that the Chechens inflicted upon the Russian military in the 1990s. A rebel army, with no air force, defeated the Russian superpower and forced a retreat. While Russia did make a comeback several years later, even then they had to level the major urban areas and commit numerous human rights atrocities to finally eek out a victory.
Russia’s military is simply no match for NATO. If Putin wants to try his luck, then it’s likely that Russian military installations from the Arctic to the Crimea would be ablaze from airstrikes. And that’s if the US doesn’t decide to flank Russia and put pressure on Siberia to draw off forces from any Western Front. Or drive up from the Gulf.
No…Putin doesn’t want a fight with NATO as short of a nuclear exchange, Russia would always be the loser.
But Putin doesn’t need to fight with NATO. He just needs to push the boundaries of the [del]Soviet Union[/del]Commonwealth of Independent States out to the NATO borders and establish a Moscow-controlled [del]Council for Mutual Economic Assistance[/del]Eurasian Economic Community in order to sustain military buildup of the Russian armed forces, thereby making Russia a genuine superpower.
It is important to understand that the conventional reading of the Cold War as a barely contained ideological conflict between two expansionary states is almost entirely wrong. Post-WWII, Stalin and his successors were primarily interested in creating a buffer zone and essentially annexing a bunch of “client states” which would economically sustain the badly ailing Soviet economy. The Soviets didn’t want and couldn’t afford more war; what they wanted was exactly what they got; a standoff in which the Western forces could not materially influence or encroach upon without risking another costly land war or (later) a nuclear exchange. Truth be told, the Soviet Union never had the kind of logistics and resources on hand at any given time to sustain a push into Western Europe, and it was difficult enough for them to hold national like Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. The The CPSU and its organs (the General Secretary, Secretariat, Politburo/Presidium, the Central Control Commission, and Pravda) ran the Soviet government like a puppet master and the ostensible government authorities, when they were not coincident with CPSU high officials, were just figureheads with little control or influence.
Putin is at a disadvantage compared to post-WWII Stalin in that he can’t pit the other Allied forces against one another politically while “protecting” the nations that would later become the Warsaw Pact, nor does he have any reasonable expectation of annexing the most economically valuable states of the former Warsaw Pact (Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Germany). But on the other hand, the US is at a disadvantage by not having a large established military or economic presence in Europe, having alienated many of the NATO partner states over the disastrous war in Iraq, and having the intelligence apparatus which was once built up specifically to track and oppose Soviet Communism retested to fight terrorism (however ineffectually) and Chinese economic growth; little of the resources or capability it would need to turn its operations back to a Russian focus en masse.
Grabbing control of the Ukraine, Moldova, and perhaps the beleaguered Baltic states would return Russia to superpower status and provide a healthy buffer zone as well as economic “markets” to fleece at will. They don’t need to return to Warsaw Pact borders, and don’t want a direct engagement with NATO. Nor does NATO want to provoke a potential strategic conflict with the newly aggressive Russia. The situation is back to the future, sans DeLorean or theme song by Huey Lewis and the News.
Stranger
I think you overestimate the Russian economy seriously.
GDP of Italy: 2,1 trillion. GDP of Russia : 2,1 trillion. And Russia is badly dependent on Europe as a customer to be able to hang in there with Italy.
Russia has no chance of financing a military buildup to become a superpower in conventional forces. If Europe decides to start reving up military spending, Russia has no chance of keeping up with Germany. Or the UK. Russia could, on a good day and with a cooperative Europe buying their products, keep up with Italy: France if we spot Russia a 25 % GDP growth. France and Italy together? More than twice Russias weight.
And if Europe doesn’t decide to spend any more money, just coordinate forces and spending? Russia is hugely outmatched
And what do they actually gain from pushing their borders up to the NATO members? Belorussia, Moldova, Trandnestria and the Ukraine. Thats not exactly going to make their economy any stronger.
But it would certainly see NATO strengthened and military spending in the member countries rocket up.
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While I agree grabbing Ukraine could help out Russia (what exactly is useful from grabbing Moldova?) it’s kind of unbelievable that would return them to superpower status. I also find it unlikely that they would go for the whole of Ukraine. That pipeline is far to vulnerable to sabotage and you can bet the U.S. would dump money on any group who was willing to fuck with it (fascist or not and “fuck the EU”).
I also agree with Grim Render’s objections. The Russian economy is one note and not very large. Taking over a couple of basket case economies is not going to remotely help them in the near term.
I think that’s why the President made assurances to NATO members that Article 5 still stands. If Russia tries something like that, then we have to go with option 1.
If Putin pulls out, it shows that he’s not crazy. If he decides he wants to go to war, that means he is crazy and that his ambitions would likely not stop at the point where we consider our interests directly threatened.
Not defending the Baltics is just not an option. Once the old Warsaw Pact nations realize we aren’t going to protect them, they have no reason to be in NATO and no reason not to cut their own deals with Russia. War is a terrible thing, but the United States will not besmirch our national honor by condemning hundreds of millions to a return to slavery in violation of our treaty obligations just to buy a few more years of peace before an inevitable showdown.
So we say we’ll fight, and if Putin chooses to die on that hill, then he dies on that hill and hopefully it can be ended without Europe going up in flames.
You SERIOUSLY expect Obama to do that? I don’t.
For you. I think Obama administration will easily go for that option. You know, “the nation is tired of war” and “let’s find the diplomatic solution” kind of thing. Oh I am sure there will be stern speeches and a “red line” or two. But no one will take it seriously.