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nicklloydnow · 21 days

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“Mr Macron identifies a triple shock of interconnected threats which create a particularly dangerous moment in the continent’s history. The first is geopolitical: Europe’s struggle to stand up to Vladimir Putin’s Russia, even as America’s future commitment to Europe has gone wobbly. Having once worried out loud about not “humiliating” Moscow, Mr Macron has turned into one of Europe’s most outspoken hawks. Listing the record of Russian belligerence, from its threat to use nuclear weapons to its relentless use of hybrid warfare and disinformation, regional troublemaking, and aggression in space and at sea, the president has no doubt about what is at stake. “If Russia wins in Ukraine there will be no security in Europe,” he says. “Who can pretend that Russia will stop there?” What security would there be, he asks, for neighbouring countries: Moldova, Romania, Poland, Lithuania and others?

(…)

Mr Macron also stands by his refusal to rule out putting boots on the ground in Ukraine. His comments prompted disbelief and anger in Germany, and a blistering riposte from Olaf Scholz, the chancellor. Yet the French president argues that, faced with an expansionist Russia, Europe’s ability to deter further aggression rests on not defining red lines. He calls this “the basic condition” of its security and credibility. These were not empty words, he insists. “If the Russians were to break through the front lines, if there were a Ukrainian request, which is not the case today,” he says, “we would legitimately have to ask ourselves this question.” France, he notes, sent its troops to help African countries in the Sahel when their leaders asked.

(…)

In his telling, America simply will not always have Europe’s back. The continent has no choice: “We have to get ready to protect ourselves.” He wants to make a start at a summit in July at Britain’s Blenheim Palace. This gathering of the European Political Community, a Macron brainchild, brings together eu and non-eu members. The president wants attendees to identify the security risks facing Europe, the military capabilities it needs, and how to make more kit on European soil. Mr Macron will put on the table a full discussion of how France’s nuclear deterrent (which, unlike Britain’s, is wholly home-built and not “assigned” to nato) could contribute further to European security. He wants to finalise this discussion “in the coming months”. Mr Macron also wants to reinforce bilateral defence co-operation with the hosts, post-Brexit Britain, building on the Lancaster House treaties.

(…)

The second risk to Europe comes from the twin economic shock of accelerating technology and China. Mr Macron, a former investment banker, worries that Europe is about to fall behind in crucial high-tech sectors, from clean tech to quantum computing, if it does not grasp the scale and urgency of what needs to be done now. Part of his solution would involve a large injection of public money, in good old dirigiste fashion. Part of it would also be about deregulation, to encourage risk and disruptive innovation.

(…)

Underpinning this analysis is the observation that nobody else plays by the rules any more. The old order has been broken. Nothing has yet replaced it. America, in Mr Macron’s account, thought it would discipline Chinese behaviour with international trade rules. Instead America has ended up massively subsidising its own industry, just like the Chinese. Europe, he insists, is not being protectionist but realist when it seeks to do the same. Moreover, if Europeans are to build the industrial scale needed to stay competitive, he warns, they have to accept that specialisation cannot mean a “fair” share of subsidies for all countries or industries.

The final threat to Europe is democratic: a resurgent nationalism, turbo-charged by disinformation and echo-chamber news. The best way to understand the risk today, Mr Macron suggests, is to re-read Marc Bloch, a French historian executed by the Gestapo. In “Strange Defeat”, Bloch argued that the elites facilitated the fall of France to the Nazis in 1940 through short-sightedness and complacency. “What kills me, in France as in Europe, is the spirit of defeat,” declares the president. “The spirit of defeat means two things: you get used to it and you stop fighting.” This is the danger: elites are starting to assume that opinion polls make an outcome inevitable, and then to resign themselves to it. “Politics isn’t about reading polls,” he says; “it’s a fight, it’s about ideas, it’s about convictions.”

“Russia said on Monday that it would hold military exercises with troops based near Ukraine to practice for the possible use of battlefield nuclear weapons, a provocative warning aimed at discouraging the West from deepening its support for Ukraine.

These weapons, often referred to as “tactical,” are designed for battlefield use and have smaller warheads than the “strategic” nuclear weapons meant to target cities. Russia’s Defense Ministry said that President Vladimir V. Putin had ordered an exercise for missile, aviation and naval personnel to “increase the readiness of nonstrategic nuclear forces to carry out combat missions.”

The announcement of the exercise was Russia’s most explicit warning in its more than two-year invasion of Ukraine that it could use tactical nuclear weapons there. The Kremlin said it came in response to comments by two European leaders that raised the prospect of more direct Western intervention in the war.

(…)

Western officials have long worried that Russia could deploy tactical nuclear weapons, especially if it faced serious setbacks on the battlefield. But Mr. Putin denied as recently as March that he had ever considered it, even as he regularly reminds the world of Russia’s vast nuclear arsenal as a way of keeping in check the West’s military support for Ukraine.

On Monday, however, Russian officials claimed that warnings about the possibility of more direct Western involvement in the war had changed the situation. The Defense Ministry said the exercise would be held “to unconditionally ensure the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the Russian state in response to provocative statements and threats of individual Western officials against the Russian Federation.”

Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, said the Western “threats” in question included a recent interview with President Emmanuel Macron of France published by The Economist, in which the French leader repeated his refusal to rule out sending ground troops to Ukraine.

Mr. Peskov also alluded to a comment made last week by David Cameron, Britain’s top diplomat, in which he said that Ukraine was free to use British weapons to strike inside Russia — a departure from Western governments’ typical policy of discouraging such strikes in order to avoid being drawn deeper into the war.

“This is a completely new round of escalation of tensions — it is unprecedented,” Mr. Peskov told reporters on Monday. “And, of course, it requires special attention and special measures.””

“The United States has made a number of strategic miscalculations since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, but the single greatest may be the message that the Biden administration just sent about nuclear weapons. The U.S. showed that it would protect a nuclear-armed friend, Israel, from an as-yet-nonnuclear enemy (Iran); at the same time, Washington has refused to consider using its forces to defend a nonnuclear friend (Ukraine) against a nuclear-armed Russia.

Other governments will deduce that states with nuclear weapons can barbarically attack America’s friends and bully U.S. leaders into abandoning them. The British government has underscored that sentiment by basically admitting that, precisely because of fears of escalation with Russia, Ukraine won’t get the same help that Israel did. Even if the U.S. and its allies were more coy about their calculations, their conduct will encourage a wave of nuclear proliferation in the coming years.

(…)

Instead, the Biden administration is allowing Russia to use the threat of nuclear weapons as cover for its effort to conquer a sovereign neighbor by force. Ukraine is not just any nonnuclear state; it is a state that gave up its nuclear weapons because the U.S. and Russia firmly promised in 1994 to respect its territorial integrity.

In their passivity, the U.S. and its allies are acquiescing in the destruction of the post–World War II nuclear order—which in many ways was a great success. Since the Second World War, the two major nuclear powers never used their nuclear weapons to win wars—even when, as with the U.S. in Vietnam or the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, they were losing in conventional warfare. And although a small number of other states, including China, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea, have built nuclear arsenals, many more governments with the capacity to develop nuclear weapons have so far declined to do so.

The global order is becoming less stable in other ways. The Biden administration’s weak response to Russia is bad enough; a second Trump administration could follow a still more destructive policy of telling even close, longtime allies that they can’t count on American support. When Donald Trump said publicly earlier this year that he would encourage Russians to do “whatever the hell they want” with European NATO member states that don’t spend enough on defense, he was signaling to leaders in Europe and around the world that the North Atlantic Alliance is in jeopardy.

Other countries will take note—and begin to arm themselves for a more dangerous world. South Korea, for one, is quietly discussing the prospect of developing nuclear weapons. It’s also talking about constructing a new generation of nuclear-powered submarines, even though it has an agreement with the U.S. not to do so. Many governments will make similar calculations.

We have reached a dangerous moment. In its desperate attempts to de-escalate tensions with Russia, the Biden administration is reinforcing the message around the world that nuclear weapons provide security and freedom of action. When countries are presented with a clear choice between being shielded from attack and being left to their fate, no one should be surprised at which option they’ll take.”

“Free nations prefer peace to war, but that preference is complicated by the continued existence of nations led by criminals, ideologues and irredentists. In a fallen world, war eventually comes, wanted or not.

And it’s coming. Iran and its proxies, having started one war in Israel, don’t appear reluctant to consider another with the U.S. A Russian victory in Ukraine, even a partial one, would make eventual confrontation with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization almost inevitable. China menaces Taiwan. And the possibility that Kim Jong Un isn’t plotting an attack on South Korea—or on the U.S.—is a bet only a fool would take.

(…)

Last month I visited Mr. Helprin’s home here, some 10 miles north of Charlottesville. On the wall of his vast and spacious library I spy a framed August 1941 photograph of Winston Churchill on the deck of the H.M.S. Prince of Wales, the ship on which the prime minister met FDR to enlist the U.S. in the struggle against fascism. I came to Earlysville—I say this at the risk of melodrama—to ask Mr. Helprin the sort of question that Churchill had contemplated in the years before that photograph was taken: Are we ready to fight?

The answer today is plainly no. But neither were the British in 1935. What does America need to do to get ready?

(…)

As we sit down, Mr. Helprin doesn’t wait for me to ask a question. “It might not be a gracious thing to do, but let me begin with an ‘I told you so,’ ” he says. Briefly he catalogues several unheeded warnings he has published over the decades. One of those appeared in these pages under the headline “What to Do About Terrorism, Really,” on May 10, 1995.

The essay urged the Clinton administration to remember, the recent Oklahoma City bombing notwithstanding, that terrorism has always come mainly from abroad and would surely remain that way. Mr. Helprin envisaged a cataclysm brought about by “a few former Soviet tactical warheads in a business jet piloted by a young mullah with a grudge against Sears Roebuck.” He was slightly off—the cataclysm, when it came six years later, involved four passenger jets rather than a private plane and warheads, and the target was New York and Washington, not Chicago. But he saw something others didn’t.

Any discussion of U.S. leadership abroad has to start, as ours does, with America’s humiliating 2021 retreat from Afghanistan, a colossal exhibition of weakness and confusion and almost certainly a catalyst of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Hamas’s attack on Israel.

Our faltering in Europe and the Middle East is the reason, Mr. Helprin says, we need to adopt a “bastion strategy.” Meaning what? “No, we’re not going to give up on a forward defense in Europe and Asia. But as an emergency measure, as a reserve, in case the forward defenses fail—and they are under tremendous pressure now both because of our isolationism and our disintegration and the world situation externally—if those should fail, we have a bastion.”

The bastion is the Western Hemisphere. “Of course I’m talking about the Monroe Doctrine. Essentially, Russia, China and other nations may not interfere in this half of the globe, but we may interfere in theirs.”

Yet Russia, China and Iran are making enormous inroads in South America, “and we can’t allow them to do that. If South America goes, we’re done for. People think we’re protected by the oceans, and we are to an extent. But even so, in the [American] Revolution, when the tiny wooden ships would take a month to cross the Atlantic, it was a closely run thing. The British were still able to transport huge armies and supplies to the United States with that kind of transport.”

Another strategic priority is the protection of Europe. “A lot of people think we should concentrate more heavily on China because China is more powerful than Russia and more of a developing threat. That’s true,” he says. “China is the bigger, more immediate threat. But Europe is more valuable.”

I think I agree, but I have to ask why Europe is more valuable. “Our economic relationships to the European nations, which are the greatest other than those with Canada and Mexico. Not just trade, but the interplay of science and culture. We are, in so many ways, joined to Europe as we are to nowhere else. Also physically, in terms of a position in Earth’s geography: If the North Atlantic is controlled by hostile powers, if it falls under Russian dominance, then we’re pretty much”—again—“done for.”

(…)

Perhaps the core of the problem is American policymakers’ fear of risk and attendant accountability. If a U.S. administration tried to mount the sort of defense posture Mr. Helprin counsels, something might go wrong, someone would have to pay a political price, and no one at the moment seems inclined to pay any sort of price for anything. As soon as I use the phrase “fear of risk” he points out that “in 1940 Churchill sent all the tanks in Britain to North Africa to fight the Germans. That denuded Britain of tanks, and at the time it was still possible that Sea Lion”—Hitler’s plan to invade the U.K.—“could have happened. The British would have had no tanks to use in defense. It was a risk. Churchill took it. War is about risk.”

Our technological superiority, Mr. Helprin thinks, has fooled us into believing that war is about neat, danger-free solutions. “We have been acclimated to situations in which we control everything,” he says. “We completely control the air. We completely control logistics. We have bases to which we can retreat, and on those bases we have McDonald’s.” Mr. Helprin stops himself: “This isn’t to say that individual units and soldiers haven’t fought like hell and suffered. But in terms of the larger picture of war, we haven’t fought for survival in a long time.”

(…)

But back to the 2020s. Why is the number of men willing to fight and die for the United States decreasing? Mr. Helprin mentions an education system that trains young people to distrust their country and a military bureaucracy enthralled by woke ideology.

So what can we do about that in the short term? Without pausing Mr. Helprin says: “We can depoliticize the military completely.”

That won’t be easy, I say. “It might not be so hard,” he replies. “You don’t have to do anything. You just have to stop doing stupid things. The military is a million education programs meant to indoctrinate and train. Exclude, from all that indoctrination and training, anything having to do with ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ ”—he signals quotation marks—“anything having to do with racism, anything about how bad America is, the ‘gender’ crap, all that. Just stop doing it.”

He has a point. An executive order from the commander in chief would likely accomplish for the U.S. military what Gov. Ron DeSantis did by signing legislation banning DEI in Florida public universities. If the military were to scrap every last shred of DEI training tomorrow, nobody but activist busybodies would regret it, and the benefits would reverberate for a decade.

What about the long term? Very little about today’s cultural landscape suggests that America’s political class and citizenry understand the threats or are prepared to counter them with force. What’s going to get us ready? “A strong leader on a white horse isn’t going to do it,” Mr. Helprin says. “The only way that can happen, I think, unfortunately, is distress and defeat. A depression, a big loss in a war, invasion, Gotterdammerung.””

#macron #emmanuel macron #france #ukraine #russia #putin #nuclear #war #mark helprin #world war 3 #world war iii #wwiii #ww3 #europe #south america #monroe doctrine #Phillips Payson O’Brien

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