Well, while I'm on a roll, a few more points. Putin’s Anschluss in Ukraine shattered Europe’s Westphalian order. Moscow has openly threatened the West with a nuclear first strike. The risk of a wider European war, and a It could easily happen through miscalculation—
or indeed, through deliberate calculation. The Kremlin’s military doctrine entertains the idea of using nuclear weapons to “de-escalate” a European war, or in other words, force us immediately to surrender. This is not some wild conspiracy theory:
Any American with access to the Internet and Google Translate can confirm it independently without once leaving his couch. Yet the President of the United States has declared NATO—never before more relevant—obsolete; he has pointedly and repeatedly refused to endorse Article V;
He is picking public, humiliating fights with our NATO Allies; and he's heading into the upcoming summit like this: nymag.com/daily/intellig…
I fear too many Americans fail to understand why precisely this was such a catastrophic error. They think of this as "a normal negotiating technique." But it is not They are preferring to forget that in the nuclear era, our security rests upon the ghastly logic of MAD ....
MUTUAL, ASSURED, DESTRUCTION: a doctrine that relies upon our ability to convince our adversaries that we have the will to destroy the world. There is no other doctrine upon which our security might rest; a nuclear war remains unwinnable; ballistic missile interception unproven.
The purpose of deterrence is to ensure we do not go to war. The enemies of the United States would, undeterred, revise the world’s borders by force. These enemies are not a paranoid fantasy, but a fact.
The two pillars of deterrence are capability and will—the first a matter of having a military strong enough to inflict incalculable damage on an aggressor, the second, a visible willingness to use it.
The failure of deterrence means conquest or war, and war in the nuclear era means the end—to everything. For deterrence to be credible, it must be clear and unconditional. The president’s words have cost us this clarity and credibility, severely undermining our deterrence.
What's worse, Candidate Trump made his intention to undermine our deterrence explicit, but Americans voted for him nonetheless. Our allies and adversaries in Europe have thus widely, and correctly, concluded that the American people are no longer committed to Europe’s defense.
This is equivalent in effect to destroying the other pillar of deterrence: capability. We might as well have sunk our own blue water fleet.
We did not win the Cold War. We merely earned an interregnum, much like the period between the First and Second World Wars. The Soviet Union collapsed, but Russia’s security state survived, institutionally intact.
Modern Russia—a revanchist and autocratic mafia state—is pursuing the same geopolitical ends as the Soviet Union, but it is free at last of communism’s ideological constraints. It is more reckless and dangerous to the West than the Soviet Union was.
This threat is only dimly understood by much of the American public. It is actively denied by a fantasist wing that imagines us “teaming up” with Russia to “knock the hell” out of ISIS, or "swapping" Crimea for Syria.
The American military is the only thing of its scale that has ever been built with the intention that it never be used. It does not exist because Americans want to go to war. It exists because Americans—sane ones, anyway—want to live in peace.
It confounds me, then, that Trump’s destruction of our deterrent elicited cheers from Americans. They are the ones who pay trillions in taxes for a military strong enough to deter an adversary, one absent the signal of will is just a dangerous and ludicrously expensive bauble.
Trump took a match to their tax dollars and set them alight. But of course, it is not just their fortune he has carelessly (or deliberately) torched. It is their lives, and their children’s lives, that he has put at risk. None of this seems to have dawned on us.
A large number of Americans are sincerely thrilled: They believe Trump stuck it good and hard to our freeloading allies, and put them in their place.
They are insane
There has always been a historic rivalry between Europe and the US. It is, fundamentally, a rivalry that reflects what Freud called the narcissism of small differences. American and European cultures and societies are essentially dialects of the same language.
Indeed, we literally dp speak dialects of the same language. There is nothing like a natural alliance, similitude of culture, or shared values between the United States and Saudi Arabia, or the United States and China.
But as Freud also pointed out, the narcissism of small differences is profoundly dangerous. It gives rise to the most vehement species of aggression. It is easily exploited. It is being exploited.
Americans are now drowned in propaganda the aim of which is to make them forget that Europe is their twin—the other half of the Western coin. Rivalries among Europeans, in turn, are being exploited to the same end, and to stir up long-forgotten rancour within Europe itself.
If the pattern of the 1930s repeats itself—and it is repeating itself—we will soon discover what generations before us have discovered. To signal our unwillingness to defend ourselves and our allies is an invitation to aggression.
Our “interests in Europe,” as they are called by policymakers with a taste for the bureaucratic cliché, are not an abstraction—as we will sooner or later be reminded. If provoked sufficiently, we *will* use our military--
--which will then become an engine of death, rather than the guarantor of our peace. The open question is what kind of provocation it will take and how much of the West we’ll first sacrifice.
That we have made this an open question has had predictable consequences. Angela Merkel, a woman not given to overstatement, has publicly acknowledged that America and Britain are no longer reliable allies. Germany now openly debates its need for an independent nuclear deterrent.
Recently the publisher of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote that the time had come to contemplate “the altogether unthinkable for a German brain, the question of a nuclear deterrence capability, which could make up for doubts about American guarantees.”
This debate is taking place among responsible German politicians and press organs, not lunatics. It has—unthinkably—become a responsible question: Germany’s politicians have an obligation to their citizens to ask it: The US has abjured responsibility for their citizens’ security.
“How wonderful!” I've heard Americans saying. “At last we’ll be relieved of this burden!" No. It is not wonderful. The Continent is already bristling with weapons and surrounded by hostile, unstable, or disintegrating states.
Not all of the states concerned are nuclear powers, but all have amassed extraordinary conventional firepower. Europe is surrounded by chemical and biological weapons, as well as a novel array of cyber weapons – some of which have already been used, to devastating effect.
How can anyone think it "wonderful" to consider what might happen if we ceased credibly to guarantee Europe’s borders and territorial integrity?
If Germany acquires the Bomb (and it is beyond belief that we could even be talking about this), the NPT is dead. Countries that now grudgingly accept Germany’s economic domination of the Continent will revert to their traditional, fearful posture and seek to contain it.
A regional, multipolar nuclear arms race will ensue. Poland could soon follow, as might all the countries in eastern and central Europe now vulnerable to Putin’s nuclear blackmail. Once the NPT is destroyed, every country with the ability will race to nuke up.
Japan will have the Bomb. So will South Korea. So will Brazil. What country that could would not? Nuking up is a logical, cost-effective solution for a wealthy, technologically-advanced country with a small (or demographically-declining) population and a rapacious neighbor.
Since the first atomic explosion, this has been the world our statesmen most feared. Game-theoreticians laboring in the basement of the Pentagon have run this scenario again and again; they have stamped report after report with the same conclusion: GOD FORBID.
At precisely 5:29 am, July 16, 1945—when a ball of fire rose in gold, violet, grey, and blue over the Jornada del Muerto desert, melting the sand into light green radioactive glass and illuminating every peak and crevasse of the nearby mountain range with a searing white light—
--our statesmen began a frantic, desperate effort to forestall the emergence of precisely the world we are now willingly whistling into being. And the world we know might well come to an end two days from now, at the NATO summit in Brussels--
