NATO has lost the capacity and the will to defend its member states, even in the face of blatant Russian aggression. Its so much easier to blame Israel for genocide.
I.
The strength of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, founded after WW II to stop an aggressor from ever again threatening the democracies of Europe, is based on one basic concept: an attack on one member is an attack on all. If one member country is attacked, the others come to its military defense. That, in a nutshell, is NATO.
And that, alas, is dead. Not buried, not yet. The funeral rites have yet to take place, but the death has occurred. No member state of NATO is going to go to war stop Russia from whomever it next desires to conquer; or is going to undertake a deterrent level of military preparedness to show Russia the price it would pay for expansionism. Make no mistake, Russia reads the tea leaves, and it reads them exceedingly well.
The fact that Ukraine, which Russia is in the process of invading and taking over right now, is not a NATO member is a mere technicality. NATO’s capacity to defend itself and will to do so are gone. If the next Russian object of takeover is a NATO state — and many of them have the same Russian-speaking minorities as Ukraine that provide Putin with the pretext to invade — NATO members will not come to its defense. NATO has already have invited naked Russian aggression by unquivocal signs of weakness.
First and foremost among these signs is that fact that almost all NATO states have cut their defense spending to levels so low that each is looking to the other to be the member to bear the burden for the whole. But, aside from the US, there is no other such member. The entire British army, the Wall Street Journal informs us, fields exactly 156 tanks. Most other member states have far fewer. This is not a credible deterrent. That this is what passes for the capacity for the collective self-defense of an entire continent is laughable.
Second of all, NATO has lost its sense of danger, even as Putin has made his intentions perfectly clear. He had his eyes on Crimea. No one thought Russia would actually take Crimea. It did. Now Putin has its eyes on Ukraine. Two weeks ago, no one in Europe thought he would act on his nationalist desires.We hate to think what Ukraine will look like two weeks from now. A once proud and confident NATO has rolled over, regarding Russia’s further appetite for territory as inevitable and unstoppable by any means, be they deterrence, diplomacy or war.
Putin rejects the idea that the downfall of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a good thing. He wants the Russian empire back. Who does he have for his chief opponents? Two naifs of the highest order. Our last president, George W. Bush, was asked after he first met Vladimir Putin whether he trusted him. Bush said yes, he did, because “he looked into his eyes and saw his soul.” Seven years later, Russia, nominally not under Putin but in fact under his thumb, invaded the former socialist republic of Georgia. Our current president, Barack Obama, said he would and could reverse the deterioration of US-Russian relations with a “reset.” Matters of war and peace and high statecraft became a computer game.
Bottom line, we don’t believe the US will come to the defense of any other NATO state in any way. The US has trouble working up the will to bomb ISIS fighters in Syria who don’t even have any air power. The US has trouble even working up the will to fully support another country that actually has the will to do the dirty work, namely Israel, when it bombs the “Islamic State in Gaza,” Hamas. The US, we don’t believe, will go to war a third time to save Europe. That message, as well as the ridiculously low levels of defense spending among the other NATO states, tells Russia: Proceed.
Sanctions may hurt Russia. They won’t stop Putin. Rational assessment of one’s economic self-interest has never been a top priority of dictators. That’s what the famous “end of history” has deteriorated into: a dictatorship in Russia. The Nazis caught the West flat-flooted, unprepared for war. Had they been prepared, there may well not have been a war. The truly sad aspect of the present lack of NATO’s military preparedness is that it should not, and likely would not, take a war to stop Russia. It would take a NATO that spends more than 2% of its gross domestic product on military preparedness, that takes threats seriously, that is ready to act on them — that acts and talks like a deterrent. We found a way to defeat the USSR via deterrence.
NATO, however, has sent the exact opposite message: We can do nothing. NATO is dead.
II.
NATO’s consignment of its central purpose — mutual self-defense — to the realms of history and theory accounts for much of the obsession with Israel among many NATO members. Outside Russia — outside the immediate sphere of their danger zone — many NATO members observe two forces: an Israel that defends itself, and a radical Islam that breaks new records for barbarism each week. One word, in precisely opposite senses, unites these two phenomena: genocide. Israel fights against those who would impose genocide on it; while radical Islam aspires to the genocide of those who disagree with it. And NATO mixes them up.
NATO, lacking the will to self-defense, thereby lacks the capacity to perceive when others engage in self-defense against, for example, Hamas. Many NATO members see Israel as engaging in genocide as these members stand mute or impotent before those who actually aspire to genocide: the practitioners of radical Islam. Israel fights back against rockets fired on its civilians — and Israel is accused by various members of NATO of genocide. Hamas kills its citizens in the public square quite literally, without benefit of trial, and Hamas is accused of understandably responding to harsh conditions of occupation.
NATO’s stunted capacity to see real danger is of a piece: Russia, supposedly, won’t dare invade; and Hamas, understandably, isn’t responsible for its own actions. In its capacity to perceive reality, as well as in its capacity to act on it, whether via war or deterrence, NATO is dead.
Copyright © 2014 by the Intermountain Jewish News
