dtucker300 Loc: Vista, CA

What has the Ukraine War done to/for NATO?

Thursday, May 18, 2023 2 min read
By: Josef Joffe
Research Team: Military History in Contemporary Conflict Working Group

This author’s confidence in the Alliance was low when Putin pounced a year ago. As it turned out, NATO has not been in better shape for a couple of decades. Just remember Messrs. Macron and Trump. One called the Alliance “brain-dead,” the other “obsolete.” Trump, like Obama, pulled U.S. troops from Europe.
War does strange things to alliances. On the one hand, members hesitate to commit when the going gets tough. Or they reach out the other side, as the French president and the German chancellor initially did by being on the phone with Putin every other day after the invasion. On the other hand, the Samuel Johnson dictum kicks in: “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

So, it did, and the Alliance is booming. There was indeed a Zeitenwende, the “sea-change” proclaimed by Olaf Scholz after decades of making nice to Moscow. Why?

The weightiest factor is America’s return to leadership under Joe Biden, ending the creeping neglect of Europe under Obama and Trump. If the U.S. doesn’t commit, no other member will. Only the U.S. can herd cats. So, it took the United States to beef up forces in Europe and step up as the biggest armorer of Ukraine. Only when he promised Abrams tanks to Kyiv did Scholz follow with Leopards. It takes a nuclear-armed superpower to corral allies by insuring them against Russian retaliation. Safety makes for valor.

The second factor is Ukraine itself and its miraculous victories that exposed Russia’s miserable performance. States don’t want to back losers, nor face deadly risks posed by a seemingly invincible foe. They would rather hold back to keep the war away from their own lands.

Had Russia taken Kyiv by blitzkrieg, the Europeans—probably the U.S. as well—would have swallowed the loss. They had done so after Russia had grabbed Crimea and southeastern Ukraine. The West tacitly ratified Russia’s conquests, which must have enticed Putin to go for more, as he did on February 24, 2022. That his army was turned back so quickly encouraged the West to line up behind Ukraine, unleashing an unending stream of arms and funds.

The third factor brings us back to the greatest concern of them all: peace and war, order and balance. Putin’s lunge raised the specter of Russian hegemony over Europe. At a minimum, he wants a certified sphere of influence, at a maximum to restore the old Soviet empire. In other words, a 77-year-old peace was suddenly tottering, and hence, the stakes are far bigger than Ukraine. A telltale sign are Sweden and Finland, age-old neutrals who suddenly applied for NATO membership. The closer to Russia nations are—Poland, the Baltics, the Scandinavians—the more eager they are to huddle under the NATO (and American) umbrella.

Hence, the rejuvenation of NATO. Hence the “sea-change” in Germany, whose Ostpolitik was dedicated to the rule: Don’t rile the Russian Bear. Now it is panzers for Kyiv, no more Nord Stream 2, and an extra hundred billion euros for defense. Alas, these will not soon t***slate into hands-on rearmament, given the country’s drawn-down production facilities.

Which goes for the rest, as well. The Ukraine War has revealed the true price of three decades of disarmament. The Alliance has shrunk not only its munition stockpiles, but also its manufacturing lines. High-intensity and protracted warfare seemed a thing of the past, but in Ukraine it is back. The war will not end soon, but whichever way it goes, it holds a lesson for the West: Invest in readiness. Prepare, train, and pile up plenty of gear and ordnance.

dtucker300 Loc: Vista, CA

Ukraine And NATO: The Hour Of The Little Guys (And Tough Gals)
Thursday, May 18, 2023 2 min read

Research Team: Military History in Contemporary Conflict Working Group

By: Ralph Peters
As Vladimir Putin’s wanton slaughter in Ukraine continues, each day validates anew the worth of NATO, weakens its detractors, and aligns European Union and NATO policy goals ever more closely. Putin expected to divide Europe and wrongfoot the United States. Instead, he achieved the opposite—even convincing Sweden and Finland that they need to formally join the Atlantic alliance.
Yet, there is much else to the galvanization of an alliance and continent long mocked as moribund by politicos in search of an issue. One of the keys to strengthening NATO after February 2022 has been a moral rebalancing between member states, the revelation of military neglect and weakness in, above all, Germany, but also the forthright, courageous, and vital contributions of the “little guys,” the smaller, often poorer NATO members generally regarded by strategists (of the sort who predicted that Kyiv would fall to the Russians in a few days) as minor players—to the extent they were players at all.

Although the United States and Britain led, it was often the smallest states who made a vital supplementary difference, early on. The Baltic states, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, and others moved promptly to give what material aid they could to Ukraine. Not least, Poland, the defender of Western civilization against barbarism for a millennium, became the de facto early leader of NATO’s response to Russian aggression: Although Poland is an increasingly robust military power and lynchpin European state, the traditional great powers within NATO regarded it as eternally consigned to a second tier. But when the bombs began to fall and millions of refugees began to flee, it was Poland that acted with alacrity, strength, and utility.

With Germany—paralyzed by the collapse of its beloved Ostpolitik fantasy—and France annoyed that Putin had spoiled the imagined coziness between Paris and Moscow, the eastern and central Europeans (except Hungary), their warnings about Russian ambitions vindicated, stepped into the political and economic, if not yet literal, line of fire. In the future, NATO’s smaller members will play a bigger role in decision-making, to the benefit of all. They have earned chairs closer to the head of the negotiating table.

Another noteworthy development is that, while President Biden has done a remarkable job of leading NATO and global supporters of Ukraine forward step by step, accurately judging which weapons and actions could be provided at a given time without rupturing alliances formal and informal, on the other side of the Atlantic, the fiercest defenders of Ukraine and freedom have been women. To note but a few:

Germany’s foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, a product of the Green Party that long sympathized more with Russia than with NATO, took a tough stand against Putin and Germany’s willful blindness vis-à-vis Moscow’s strategic machinations even before Putin’s second invasion of Ukraine. As a new and bewildered chancellor, Olaf Schultz, dithered, Frau Ministerin Baerbock became the face of Germany’s return to reality.

Within the EU framework, Ursula von der Leyen—another clearsighted German woman and the president of the European Commission—immediately took and maintained the moral high ground, condemning Putin with purpose and precision. Yet another member of the EU’s leadership triumvirate, Maltese European Parliament president Roberta Metsola ignored Putin’s implicit threats to her country and its economy, visiting Kyiv and making it clear that, this time, the conscience of Europe would not be for sale.

Perhaps the most-reassuring (and most frustrating for Putin) belle dame sans merci has been Italian prime minister Georgia Meloni, who has emerged as an uncompromising Atlanticist and defender of Ukraine. The leader of a right-wing party derided by the Euro-intelligentsia for its (long since retired) F*****t roots, Signora Meloni has long been underestimated and misunderstood—a subject of misogyny masquerading as analysis—while those paying serious attention would have noted that she possessed vision, clarity, and above all, integrity.

Putin had invested heavily in Italian politics, making illicit contributions to both the far right and the far left. Months into the Second Ukraine War, then-prime minister Mario D**ghi, a firm Atlanticist, saw his government pulled down by the withdrawal of support from right and left—apparently, Putin had called in the chips, expecting D**ghi to be replaced by someone in his debt and biddable. Instead, he got Meloni, who, in less politically correct times, a Hollywood B-movie script writer would have described as “one tough broad.”

Even though her coalition partners were either known or alleged to have taken Russian funding, Meloni never had done so. Slapping her corrupt and clumsy coalition partners (the has-been Silvio Berlusconi and the never-to-be Matteo Salvini) into line, Meloni not only maintained D**ghi’s hard line on Ukraine but made it harder still.

And one might fairly note that, if Meloni’s party, the Brothers of Italy, did have long-ago roots in the soil of F*****m, our own Democratic Party was, more recently, the party of Jim Crow, while, until an even more recent hour, our Republican Party stood for loyalty to the Constitution and rational policy-making. Political parties, here and abroad, are not immutable.

So…Putin, to his immeasurable frustration, has unified NATO and reinvigorated its purpose. His ill-starred campaign of butchery, rape, and ruin has robbed his own country of a better future, and, to be gleefully blunt, he is getting his ass kicked by European women.

It may be gallows humor, but the laugh’s on Putin.