This tweet made me shake my head in disbelief:
NATO is arguably the most successful peacekeeping alliance in all of world history. Because NATO as a whole has far more military power than the rest of the world combined, any country would be crazy to invade a NATO member. It has kept its members safe for more than 70 years.
Some people suggest that NATO has nothing to do with this success, that post-WWII era aggressors have no interest in attacking European countries. But that’s clearly false, as we’ve seen Serbia attack Bosnia and Russia attack Ukraine (both non-members). Last time I looked, they were just as “European” as Latvia or Estonia. I wish NATO were even bigger.
But if Ukraine were admitted to NATO right now then we’d have two options, both highly undesirable:
1. Go to war with Russia.
2. Acquiesce to Russian troops occupying part of a NATO member.
In the latter case, NATO would lose its reputation of never allowing a member to be invaded. Without credibility, the alliance would be much less effective. Doubt would be created as to whether the US would defend Estonia from a Russian attack. And uncertainty is one of the leading causes of war. Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait precisely because it was unclear if the US would defend Kuwait. Hussein guessed wrong, but US ambiguity turned out to be very costly to everyone involved.
I find it maddening when the press discusses US policy on Taiwan. The policy is described as “strategic ambiguity”, the idea that we keep China guessing as to how we would respond. That’s a recipe for WWIII. I have no idea what policy the US should have in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, but one thing I know for sure is that whatever that policy is, it should be made crystal clear to the Chinese. (Obviously I don’t mean specific tactics; rather whether we are willing to use our military to defend Taiwan.)
The most likely cause of a nuclear war between the US and Russia is an accidental missile launch. But the second most likely cause is a small proxy war spinning out of control because one side miscalculated what the other would do.
PS. In the past we could take some consolation from the fact that the US president is not mentally unstable. I have no confidence in that claim regarding future presidents. American voters no longer insist on “gravitas”.
PPS. The military spending levels of NATO countries is a phony issue. It doesn’t matter at all whether a NATO member spends slightly above or below 2% of GDP. NATO already spends several times as much as required to defend itself.
READER COMMENTS
Frank
Oct 18 2021 at 2:33pm
Whatever happened to the concept of the buffer state?
Mark Z
Oct 18 2021 at 3:29pm
‘Bluffing’ is a thing, and everyone else knows it’s a thing, so saying unambiguously that the US is willing to go to war with China to protect Taiwan won’t disambiguate the matter. China may believe the US is lying. US presidents have drawn ‘red lines’ that were then summarily crossed with impunity by other countries. Verbal or official commitments don’t necessarily mean much.
NATO has also generally admitted countries that are unlikely to be invaded in the first place. There are other obvious reasons why Russia invaded the Ukraine but not one of the Baltic states, like the Ukraine having much larger Russian (and pro-Russia) enclaves and access to the Black Sea. NATO membership isn’t the only factor there. I don’t think NATO has no effect, but also not so sure that, say, Finland is really much more likely to be invaded with impunity than Norway simply for not being a member of NATO.
Matthias
Oct 19 2021 at 7:53am
Yes, bluffing or being suspected to bluff is a problem.
That’s one of the reasons why during the cold war, there were American soldiers stationed in West Germany and the rest of capitalist Europe:
Those soldiers wouldn’t have kept Soviet tanks from rolling all over West Germany. The soldiers job was not so much to defend, but to make sure the Soviets would have to spill American blood in any invasion.
That’s how the Americans used their own (prospective) public opinion to precommit to defending Europe.
To make the same precommitment to Taiwan would need troops stationed there. Not such that’s going to happen.
The closest that’s feasible is to put an aircraft carrier nearby and in harm’s way.
Michael Sandifer
Oct 18 2021 at 8:56pm
We shouldn’t acquiesce to the Russians occupying Ukraine. We should be working to push them out. Then, bring Ukraine into NATO. We should also be working to destabilize Putin’s regime in Russia. We should force him into negotiating out of fear. That said, it should be done quietly, behind the scenes, and with proxies, initially. There’s no reason to create unncessary political resistance to US objectives.
Russia violated the treaty signed under which Ukraine gave up nuclear weapons. I would even put tactical nukes in Ukraine, if need be, and would even consider strategic nuclear weapons there. That’s if “subtler” efforts fail.
We shouldn’t fear Russia. We should make it very clear that they should fear us. If Russia responds by helping countries like Iran get nukes, then let’s nuclearize Saudia Arabia. As I see the evidence, nuclear weapons have reduced great power warfare. MAD may stabilize the middle east.
I think the NATO expansion shortly after the cold war ended may have been a mistake. I think we were rubbing the Russian’s noses in defeat, and we were even doing so rhetorically. But, that mistake was made, and we have Putin to deal with. We have to be tough with him, because he’s a gangster and wannabe Czar and strength and the possibility of annihilation is all he understands.
Matthias
Oct 19 2021 at 7:54am
Who is ‘we’?
Brian Donohue
Oct 19 2021 at 8:22am
Russia is willing to pay a much higher price for Ukraine than we are. You have learned nothing from the foreign policy debacles of the 21st century.
https://www.mearsheimer.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Why-the-Ukraine-Crisis-Is.pdf
Michael Sandifer
Oct 20 2021 at 5:23am
Brian Donohue,
My comments aren’t about what the US or Russia is willing to do, but over what they may be able to do. What Russia is willing or able to do are two very different things. If the US is willing to assert itself sufficiently, Russia cannot materially resist in a way that’s advantageous. That is simply a fact.
Unfortunately, there’s no reason to believe the US has the clarity of purpose or resolve to do much of what I’m suggesting.
Your ad hominem would be immaterial, even if it weren’t misapplied.
Mark Z
Oct 21 2021 at 4:56pm
What Russia is willing to do is likely more important than what it’s able to do. Even if the US would win a conventional war against Russia on its home turf (which is debatable, since we just lost a war against the greatly inferior Afghanistan), is it really worth killing millions of people – mostly innocent probably – to push Russia out of Crimea and Donetsk – regions which, mind you, are predominately Russian and whose inhabitants may prefer being part of Russia to being part of Ukraine?
Mark Bahner
Oct 19 2021 at 9:22pm
Who would that action be protecting?
Michael Sandifer
Oct 20 2021 at 5:28am
Mark Bahner,
MAD in the middle east could help limit the extent to which Itan and Saudi Arabia, for example, engage in conventional warfare, possibly making petroleum supplies more secure and possibly also stabilizing the region politically. MAD seems to help keep populaces and politicians sober.
Mark Bahner
Oct 20 2021 at 12:41pm
It could. But if either side uses even one bomb, don’t you agree that it’s likely that over 100,000 people would die? After all, Saudi Arabia is a country of large cities…with Riyadh at over 4 million, Jeddah at nearly 3 million, and Mecca and Medina at more than 1 million. And Iran is the similar…the population of Tehran alone is more than 7 million(!).
What are the odds that in conventional warfare between the two that more than 100,000 people would die? It seems to me that the odds of that are miniscule.
So “MAD” exchanges *potentially* a smaller risk of conventional warfare with what seems to me to be a virtual certainty of monumental destruction of human lives if even one bomb is detonated.
Does my analysis seem incorrect to you?
And what about the possibility, if Iran and Saudi Arabia have nuclear weapons, of them both using their weapons against what the perceive at the time as a common enemy? Such as Israel, perhaps?
And finally, how can it be assured that either government–and perhaps the Saudi government in particular–can even keep the bombs out of the hands of non-state extremists? Consider that 15 of the 19 9/11 terrorists were Saudi citizens, that a large number of members of ISIS are Saudi citizens, and that Saudi Arabia itself has been the target of terrorist attacks:
https://time.com/4739488/isis-iraq-syria-tunisia-saudi-arabia-russia/
It seems to me like there’s at least a small possibility that a nuclear weapon originally in the control of the Saudi Arabian government could be obtained and detonated by non-state actors, and perhaps even detonated within Saudi Arabia.
It seems to me like the total possibility for human life lost–consisting of the chance that a one or more nuclear bombs would be detonated times the number of lives that would be lost per detonation–is far greater for a Saudi Arabia with nuclear weapons than Saudi Arabia with conventional weapons. Again, does that seem to you like an incorrect analysis?
Michael Sandifer
Oct 19 2021 at 5:57am
Of course, I may have made the idea of stationing nuclear weapons in Ukraine seem simple. It wouldn’t be. It would require doing likewise in other eastern European countries bordering Russia, requiring their permission, and we’d need the rest of Europe to go along, at a time when countries like Germany want more Russian petroleum.
And, of course, tactical nukes are controversial in host countries, since they threaten to turn those countries into nuclear battlefields. Nonetheless, Kissinger used to tell China that US tactical nukes in western Europe during the Cold War rendered Soviet numerical advantages at stretches along the NATO front irrelevant.
It would not be a small feat, diplomatically, to station nuclear weapons in Eastern Europe, and doing so would be largely symbolic, but if less extreme measures failed, the mere attempt to do so would send a strong signal about the US commitment to eastern European security and how we view Putin’s regime. Russia is in no shape for a vastly escalated arms race.
We should also have not have tolerated Russian troops in the middle east and should endeavor to push them out and keep them out of there, except foe their long-held naval base in Syria. When once went to defcon 3 to keep the Soviets out of the middle east at the end of the Yom Kippur War.
Lizard Man
Oct 19 2021 at 10:42am
“In the past we could take some consolation from the fact that the US president is not mentally unstable. I have no confidence in that claim regarding future presidents.”
The Biden administration flirting with the idea of pursuing NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia has me seriously doubting that Biden is up to the task of being president, when previously I thought all of conservative talk about “sleepy Joe” or dementia as bs.
Justin
Oct 20 2021 at 12:11pm
–“I have no idea what policy the US should have in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, but one thing I know for sure is that whatever that policy is, it should be made crystal clear to the Chinese.”–
I agree. The US should be neutral in any conflict between China and Taiwan.
The problem seems to be that the US wants Taiwan to remain independent but also wants the option to avoid getting directly involved in any conflict. Saying that out loud increases the risk that China takes the military option. Staying out of any China/Taiwan conflict makes sense. The US isn’t the dominant power in East Asia and would likely get its clock cleaned in a conventional war with China, not to mention US dependence on China for its supply chain. In addition, making a firm commitment to defend Taiwan and then reneging on it in the event of Chinese attack would damage US credibility.
Presumably, the hope is that US vagueness is enough to make the Chinese think twice, preserving the status quo. While China is more powerful locally than the US, the US military can still cause a lot of damage and destruction before the outcome is settled.
Taiwan’s only reasonable hope for ongoing independence is to follow North Korea’s path and get a few dozen nukes.
Justin
Oct 20 2021 at 12:11pm
Sorry, meant to respond to the general post.
Jon
Oct 20 2021 at 1:06am
Yes, the US maintains some ambiguity about who rules Taiwan. But the Taiwan relations act of 1979 contains this language which establishes the a bright-line against settling the ambiguity by military means:
“consider any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means, including by boycotts or embargoes, a threat to the peace and security of the Western Pacific area and of grave concern to the United States”.
Michael Sandifer
Oct 20 2021 at 5:39am
Implicit in my remarks is that I think having MAD more in the forefront of the minds of politicians and the general populations in the US, Europe, Russia, and China, could be good for keeping politics on the rails. Obviously, new nuclear arms races come with the increased risks of some nuclear war scenarios, which shouldn’t be taken lightly, but for the next generation or so, the gains in terms of political sobriety might outweigh such risks.
Justin
Oct 20 2021 at 11:41am
–“PS. In the past we could take some consolation from the fact that the US president is not mentally unstable. I have no confidence in that claim regarding future presidents. American voters no longer insist on “gravitas”.”–
In the past, people could take some consolation from not having the same access to information as people do today. Think of Kennedy vs. Clinton, with regards to marital fidelity. The early 1960s were a more traditional time than the late 1990s, but there also wasn’t a 24 hour cable news cycle yet.
Many Democrats believe that Trump is one of the most racist and uncouth men to have ever held the office of President, but some of the stuff LBJ said (especially on the topic of race) might have made Trump blush.
With regards to matters of state, it seems Nixon ordered a nuclear strike on North Korea while drunk, and we lucked out because cooler heads ignored the order and waited for him to sober up.
https://www.businessinsider.com/drunk-richard-nixon-nuke-north-korea-2017-1?IR=T&utm_source=reddit.com
https://www.theguardian.com/weekend/story/0,3605,362958,00.html
Scott Sumner
Oct 20 2021 at 3:27pm
I’m not sure how your comment relates to what I said. Issues like “racism” are very different from emotional maturity.
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