NATO RIP - Ukraine, Europe etc.

Ukraine is probably going to RIP NATO into bits

And to be blunt, good riddance to it. NATO has outlasted its original purpose, the defeat of the Soviet Union, by some 35 years now. Russia is, of course, still a threat. But it’s a local threat not a global one.

President Trump told the Europeans back in 2017ish that they needed to get serious about paying for their own defense. He told them that repeatedly until 2020. They, for the most part, ignored him.

Ukraine was invaded three years ago. If Trump’s warnings could be safely ignored because OrangeManBad had been defeated and replaced by the dynamic Biden team of national security top men, then the invasion of Ukraine should have been a wake up call to get serious about spending money on defense.

Eastern Europe, on the whole, did so. Even initially non-NATO countries like Finland and Sweden. The UK and France did a bit but not much. Italy (Italy!) under Meloni started looking vaguely serious. The Germans and all their neighbors that were not formerly communist did not. Neither did the Iberian peninsular and likewise Ireland - which is happy to freeload off the Sasenachs. At this point the biggest threat to potential invaders of Ireland are the IRA’s buried armalites, the actual armed forces of the Irish Republic are only slightly above those of such military superpowers as Monaco, Liechtenstein and the Vatican City.

The armed forces of Germany are slightly better, but not meaningfully. Neither are those of Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium and so on. The British and the French actually have military forces that can shoot things but compared to the forces they had 35 years ago they really don’t have much. There is, for example, no way the UK could mount a Falklands mission today. Fortunately Argentina probably doesn’t have either the desire or the capability to invade, but if it did the UK probably could not get the Falklands back again. The French are probably doing slightly better, but they are demonstrably not doing enough to remain dominant in Africa as they used to be.

And now Trump, his VP and his SecDef have pretty bluntly told Europe that the defense of Ukraine and themselves is up to Europe. Worse for Europe, and particularly the current European leaders, Trump thinks that Putin has a legitimate right to meddle in neighboring countries and that Putin’s claims that Ukraine doesn’t really exist as a nation are reasonable. Hence the current negotiations where the Trump team is directly talking to Russia and ignoring both Ukraine and the European establishment.

[ Update: from a Discord server discussion someone made the following comment:

If they [Russia] kept to the boundaries they have, they wouldn't have to be so concerned about defensible ones. If you're concerned about someone coming through your neighbors to get to you, make sure your neighbors have no reason to let anyone through.

This seems to sum up the problem. The fact that Russia has repeatedly violated the post Soviet Union boundaries - in the case of Ukraine abrogating its signature on the Budapest agreement where Ukraine gave up its nukes - means its neighbors have precisely zero trust in Russia’s word ]

I am highly skeptical that any Trump Russia agreement will last - rather like the Hamas ceasefire that seems to failing because Hamas won’t keep its side of the deal, I strongly expect Russia to fail to abide by whatever terms the Trump team has them agree to. But in the meantime Europe and Ukraine need to react on the assumption that Trump is more interested in stopping thousands of Russians and Ukrainians (and North Koreans etc.) dying every week than he is about Ukrainian territorial integrity or the validity of territorial claims by both sides. He also, and this is key, does not want to see Russia collapse into instability or worse and it’s pretty obvious that an ignominious retreat from Ukraine will lead to, at the very least, internal Russian unrest.

America Is Not The Free World’s (Sugar) Daddy

The key takeaway for foreign affairs regarding Trump 2.0 is that the US is done with altruistic support of “democracy” and the like. In very large part this seems to be because the institutions the US set up to counter Soviet soft power became extraordinarily corrupt in their pivots to supporting democracy over countering communism. Trump 1.0 could see that there were problems but that administration still cherished a misplaced faith in the general goodness of bureaucrats and NGOs.

Those days are over now. The DC swamp turns out to have been prioritizing its interests over those of the rest of the citizens of the US and that has included the way it assisted foreign governments.

JD Vance’s speech in Munich was very, very clear. Europe as a whole has allowed itself to assume that the US will always come to its rescue and intentionally allowed its own capabilities to atrophy. The US under Trump is flat out uninterested in maintaining this kind of unhealthy relationship, which is quite different to the US/Europe relationship in the cold war and even, for the most part up to the mid 2000s. In those days, while it was true the European nations wanted US support for the long term, they had entirely capable military forces (perhaps excluding countries like Belgium) that knew how to fight and had significant stocks of working equipment from aircraft carriers to rifles that their forces could use. Since then the Europeans have endlessly delayed spending on new kit and cut military sizes to the extent that many countries are now, as I said near the top, effectively disarmed with no capability to defend themselves against a serious attacker let alone project force abroad.

The Ukraine situation is illustrative of this. Despite three years of fighting, most European countries have barely increased their spending on defense and have tended to supply Ukraine from their stocks of mothballed equipment rather than buying them new top of the range stuff.

It is not of course just in the military sphere that the US is disengaging. USAID, the state department and so on have been funding all kinds of projects overseas that are fundamentally at odds with the MAGA philosophy and indeed with parts of the US constitution - in particular the first amendment. Combine that with the immense corruption that seems to have accompanied the disbursement of such aid and the way that some of it seems to have come back to fund entities that campaign inside the USA against Trump & co. this should not be a surprise. However it seems likely to expose just how many lefty/globalist journalists, activists, opposition movements and the like were in fact dependent on American largess and how the lack of such largess will stop dead all kinds of protests about “democracy”, the “environment” and “human rights” that do not seem to be truly favoring the US or its actual interests. Those interests are of course often in direct conflict with the interests of the DC area swamp critters who seem to have often assumed that their interests were the interests of the US as a whole.

How Trump Sees Russia and Ukraine

I don’t say it is exact but Trump and his advisors - including Vance and Musk - see Russia as having been maligned by the Deep State Globalist Cabal roughly as described in this substack

Trump Is Only Western Statesman Who Wants Peace

In particular they see Ukraine’s current regime as being basic proxies for the globalists, something that Zelensky’s campaigning for Biden last year did not help. It is notable that a number of Trump’s enemies, who led calls for his impeachments and so on - e.g. Vindman, Nuland and co. - have been vehemently pro-Ukraine and that, to a significantly lesser degree, so was the Biden regime as a whole.

I am increasingly of the belief that the Bidenites deliberately provided Ukraine with enough weapons to survive but not enough with enough freedom of use to sensibly attack. I’m not alone in this view. From the substack above:

I remember perfectly reading the news of how NATO proposed Ukrainian membership at that time, and it struck me as a deliberate provocation of Putin. Moreover, when he stated that he was indeed provoked, and would not tolerate Ukrainian membership, he signaled to the West how precisely he could be baited into invading Ukraine.

I have long suspected that the Machiavellians in Washington wanted Putin to invade to indulge their fantasy of turning Ukraine into an Afghan-style quagmire for Russia. Hilary Clinton even said as much.

On the radically pro-Ukraine side, people like Phillips P O’Brien have said almost the same things

In defending themselves far more effectively than expected, the Ukrainians showed a capacity to deal Russian President Vladimir Putin a major military defeat, but again and again, Biden and his experts have constrained Ukraine’s ability to fight until it was too late. Just recently, only after his party lost the presidential election, Biden finally gave Ukraine the tightly limited ability to use American weapons on military targets in a small part of Russia. The president’s decision comes after 33 months of war, during which Russia has launched long-range attacks anywhere in Ukraine it wanted, in many cases using Iranian-made weaponry.

Biden has promised the Ukrainians that he will stand by them “for as long as it takes”—but he has nevertheless made sure that the war has gone on much longer than it had to.

[…]

However bold the president’s promises to stand by the Ukrainians, though, his administration seemed cowed by Russian threats that Putin would use nuclear weapons if the U.S. assisted Kyiv too much. Moreover, an ingrained fixation on seeking stability in Russia seemed to make the White House nervous about doing anything that would threaten Putin’s rule too much or yield chaos in Russia. In a Foreign Affairs essay last fall, Sullivan boasted multiple times that the Biden administration was helping Ukraine defend itself. The problem is that defensive tactics alone will never be sufficient to allow Ukrainians to defeat an invasion by a much larger power.

Even so, Biden and his aides pursued a Goldilocks strategy, hoping to help Ukraine fight without provoking Putin too much. They provided very limited types of military equipment to Ukraine and even then made sure to restrict what Ukraine could do with it. At first, the Biden administration seemed terrified to give Ukraine anything that could hit more than 30 miles or so from the front lines—so the U.S. supplied only short-range weaponry. It certainly didn’t want Ukraine to be able to target Russian military assets in Crimea, which is internationally recognized as part of Ukraine and has been illegally occupied by Russia since 2014.

The most generous interpretation of the Bidenites actions is that they thought Russia would decide to unilaterally withdraw rather than continue a WW1 style frontal assault. If they thought that, they were idiots who paid no attention to the Russian front in WW2 or for that matter Chechnya. It’s true that Gorbachev did withdraw from Afghanistan but that was after a decade and Gorbachev is the only Russian ruler ever to voluntarily withdraw from territory it previously occupied.

By contrast, Trump is really serious about ending the war. He and his team say this quite openly and based on what we’ve seen in other places, they are not the two-faced sorts of politician who say one thing privately and another publicly.

“The president won the election. He won it convincingly. And he’s made clear that American policy is to stop the killing and bring the war to a close,” Vance said. “Now, I talked to the President this morning, actually, and he has an incredible amount of sympathy and admiration for the people of Ukraine. He wants the killing to stop because he doesn’t want innocent Ukrainians to keep losing their lives. So I think he very much thinks about this from the perspective, not just, of course, of his obligations to the United States, but also he just. He wants the brutality and the killing to stop.”

Vance went on, stressing the point: “He has said the goal of administration policy is to end the conflict. So now, you know that has to happen. Right. Zelensky has to take that seriously. Our European allies have to take that seriously. That is the goal of administration policy. You’re not going to move the President away from that goal. You’re not going to change his mind, certainly not by attacking him publicly in the media.”

Many people see this as the US changing sides and perhaps it is.

Weekend Update#120: The US Changes Sides?

I think it is rather more that Trump is trying to be a realist and work on what is actually possible rather than hopes and dreams. Having said that, I do not think that a durable peace without Russia conceding most of the land seized since 2022 if not back to 2014 is going to be possible. Moreover I completely agree with this substack who says that direct Russia-US negotiations cutting out Ukraine are destined for failure

President Trump's Fantastic Peace Deal For The Ukraine-Russia War ...

NATO is not the answer

The fact that the Western European powers in NATO have not got serious about defense after all this time shows that NATO is, for most people, just the US with someone else pretending to be in charge. That is not sustainable. Blogger Laughing Wolf (read the whole thing and the follow up) makes the case clearly in similar words (but more detail) to what I said above that NATO as a whole is effectively dead. The US under Trump is done with supporting a bunch of deadbeats and anyway the threat of a Soviet communist takeover of Europe and then the world is no more.

Part of the Trump plan appears to be for Europe to supply troops to monitor a buffer zone in Ukraine. This idea, if it is serious, is not in fact possible as the Torygraph points out:

[A] European security guarantee with teeth seems impossible: former Nato secretary-general Anders Fogh Rasmussen, has estimated the number of troops required to police the ceasefire line would be “between 50,000 and 100,000 troops”. Former head of the British army, Lord Dannatt, has put the requirement at the upper end of that estimate, with Britain required to provide a significant number. “I mean,” he told the BBC, “if we were to deploy 10,000 troops, each rotation for six months, that would effectively tie up 30,000 or 40,000 troops and we just haven’t got that number available. So there are some big issues here that today’s politicians won’t really have considered.”

The last time British troops were deployed in Europe to prevent Russian troops sweeping westwards came in the post-war British Army of the Rhine (BAOR). At their height numbers deployed reached 80,000 – but that was in the 1950s when there were more than 350,000 regular British soldiers and almost half a million in total.

MoD figures show that there are just 74,000 regular soldiers.

However, despite that, I take the Russian threat to European stability seriously and a solution needs to be found. Right now a ceasefire may stop the bleeding, but it is not going to resolve the underlying issues.

Putin has said repeatedly that he wants countries that were part of the Soviet Union, if not part of the Warsaw Pact to be a Russian zone of influence. That seems to include Georgia, Ukraine and the Baltic states for sure and probably also includes Moldova, Romania, Hungary and Poland. As Igor Shushko and others have also pointed out, repeatedly, Putin is very far from alone in this. Even opposition heroes like Navalny have made clear that they want to see Russia restored to being a great power and that part of being a great power is control of territory that Russia lost after the collapse of the Soviet Union. With that understood, a ceasefire of any sort is merely going to be used by Russia to rearm and prepare for the next war, while at the same time seeking ways to destabilize Ukraine and other neighboring states. Although I agree with JD Vance about the ridiculousness of Europeans proudly nullifying Romanian elections due to a few hundred thousand Euros of Russian influence, there is no doubt that Russia does seek to destabilize countries in this way and that needs to be countered and treated as an act of war.

A dispassionate analysis of the above means that for Eastern Europe to be stable and able to have self determination they need to deter Russian aggression until it becomes clear that Russia no longer seeks to control them. That will probably be never. As a result, these countries need to band together in some kind of alliance to protect against Russian aggression and, based on Russian behavior and stated intentions, that alliance will need to plan how to soundly defeat Russia in a war and potentially cause the country to collapse into pieces.

source

I personally think that the Eastern Europeans need to think very hard now about how to achieve something like the above partition very very quickly. The two keys are removing Russia from the Black Sea¹ and the Baltic as much as possible. Some of this is simply readjusting borders to those prior to 1945 - Kaliningrad and Karelia particularly - others are more involved but necessary.

Trump & co are correct that Russia feels threatened by its Western neighbors and wants security by having control over them. However as should be clear the same applies in reverse. Its Western neighbors are threatened by Russian aggression in turn and need to find new borders to Russia that remove that threat. It is not just Ukraine and control of the Black Sea. The other flash point is the Baltic where, as various people have noted, Russia’s acts in deliberately cutting cables would be seen as acts of war in past eras. Russia’s ports in the St Petersburg region are a continuing threat to Baltic nations. At the very least those nations need to plan for a blockade.

While the map above (which I believe originates in Russian paranoia) is probably excessive, that doesn’t mean it should not be used as a basis for planning. Ideally Poland and/or Lithuania occupies Kaliningrad while Finland and/or Estonia occupy the Baltic coast of Russia - including St Petersburg and its military bases, oil refineries and so on. Ukraine takes most of the border oblasts and Ukraine and Georgia between them take the Black Sea coast removing Russia from all its non arctic European ports.

How much of this is possible I’m not sure. But I think it is a valid goal for Eastern Europe as it will stabilize the situation for them and force the rump of Russia to fight on formerly Russian soil to regain access if it can. The good bit is that this will destabilize Russia and make it almost certainly unable to fight at all. Probably the result is that West Taiwan will swoop in and seize Siberia as a whole and probably de facto rule the rest of the country. I hope that Japan will be willing to commit some resources to rescuing Vladivostok and Sakhalin from the West Taiwanese and, if they do, hopefully that will be more successful than the last time, but all of that is just a sideshow for Eastern Europe.

Turning Russia into a satrapy of China will be a massive geopolitical change. It’s going to give the US planners kittens (and many other countries too), but removing Russia’s west from Moscow’s control will absolutely cause that to happen and will completely stabilize Europe because it will put the focus of Russians onto resisting China. If it causes Trump and his team extra conniptions then I imagine Ukrainians and their allies will see that as a bonus. The question is, how plausible is it?

Russia is not a serious threat, now

The good news Russia is not, currently, a serious military threat. It is so bogged down in Ukraine that the only thing stopping Poland and the Baltic nations from invading it is that some of its nuclear weapons may work.

The Ukraine war has swallowed almost all of its Soviet-era reserves of munitions and weaponry as well as most of its manpower. Between the young men who have been killed in Ukraine and the others who have fled the country to avoid conscription Russia has a serious lack of available fighters. It seems unlikely that North Korea or other nations will come to its rescue by providing manpower either. There’s convincing evidence that the Norks who went to Kursk were slaughtered. Exactly how many and what proportion of the total is unclear but it seems certain that it was in the thousands out of a total of some 11,000 so at least 10% and possibly as high as 50%. None of Russia’s putative allies have thousands of surplus young men that they can afford to have killed like this, not even West Taiwan, and the morale impact of thousands of deaths for no gain whatsoever is going to be catastrophic for the survivors and the rest of the army they come from.

It isn’t just tanks and artillery (and logistical support units) that Russia has lost. It has lost so much air defense that Ukraine has been able to hit oil refineries, pumping stations and storage areas repeatedly. Many of these places are hundreds of miles from Ukraine. Analysis of satellite images show that air defenses in Kaliningrad and around St Petersburg among other places have been moved. Some, perhaps, are concealed but almost certainly most of them have been moved to the vicinity of Ukraine and many of them have been destroyed.

Additionally, as Xeeters (and bluskyers) have noted, Russia’s civilian infrastructure - rail transport, factories, farms - is in serious trouble. Even if sanctions are lifted, Russia is going to take a long time to recover because it lacks the people to fix things and the money to buy the stuff to fix them with.

So, if I were the Eastern Europe Alliance I’d grudgingly let Trump get his ceasefire and I’d arm myself with all the drones and other kit that I could afford. Which would be mostly every single drone and drone dispensable munition possible along with anti drone machine shotguns and the like as well as all the drone jammers and other things that Ukraine has developed. Then in a couple of years I’d find a suitable Russian provocation - almost certainly this will be easy - and then attack from all directions simultaneously. Trump will probably be upset so I’d better have planned for that, but he’s mostly a realist and if presented with 90% of a fait accompli he’ll probably allow the thing to finish. After all in a couple of years West Taiwan will be trying to invade Taiwan and that will be occupying is attention.

1. back in the 1800s Russia committed a genocide to get the Sochi Novyrossisk part of that and then another in the 1930s in Ukraine to retain control of the Ukrainian part