Internal problems are also on the rise in Washington, D.C., and in Brussels, and are probably the main reason why the footing is slipping away in handling the external threat.
Europe’s NATO member countries have been delinquent for years in defense spending.
Voices are heard louder questioning why America should defend Europe when Europe is entirely self-absorbed in the good life. In the shadow of a resurgent Russia this question is becoming more poignant.
In the United States, questions about foreign alliances will become more frequently asked with the increasing political activism of presidential hopefuls for 2016 elections.
Some of them will be carried to absurdity, beyond the usual harping from libertarian conservative spokesmen against spending for foreign aid (which is less than one percent of US budget) and at spending for the IRS (Internal Revenue Service — federal tax collecting agency).
The trend in the U.S. against military involvement in Europe is cited in a Financial Times article by Robert D. Kaplan: “Barack Obama’s alleged lack of resolve in dealing with Vladimir Putin may say less about U.S. president’s own foreign policy than about a gradual shift in US opinion” (‘America is growing impatient with Europe’s appeasement,’ April 8).
Sorry. Explaining Obama’s current policy toward Europe and Putin by a “shift in US opinion” does not fly.
Aside from the perennial confusion as to who represents “public opinion,” it has been very clear for some time that U.S. foreign policy now is in the hands of a very small White House circle (not to say clique), which is at odds with the Congressional majority and contrary to a long list of prominent American civilian and military personalities, specifically concerning Obama’s refusal to send weapons for Ukraine.
s there a difference between “Europe’s appeasement” and Obama’s “alleged lack of resolve”?
In the same Financial Times article we have: “The last of America’s second world war veterans will soon be dead. The European oriented elites that have influenced foreign and domestic policy in Washington are gradually being replaced by bright young men and women — many of them offspring of immigrants from Asia and Latin America — who bring with them different family histories and emotional priorities. This coincides with the security challenges and opportunities that America encounters outside Europe, particularly in Asia, where American allies are willing to maintain robust, deployable militaries.”
This sounds like a reference to an Asia on some other planet. American allies in Asia willing to maintain robust, deployable militaries?
That’s not what transpired in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the United States wasted trillions of dollars. Involvement in major land wars in Asia always had disastrous consequences for the United States.US national interest in recent memory has been tied to Mideast oil, even though by far less of that oil went to the US than to Europe.
Why then is Europe less active than the US in that area after WWII ? Like it or not, it is because the US had replaced European empires world-wide. Recall how in 1956 Britain and France attempted to seize the Suez Canal from Egypt’s control, but US President Dwight Eisenhower dramatically put a stop to it. It also sounded as a message that the US will take care of Mideast oil concerns for its European allies.
At that time the U.S. and NATO had already assumed responsibility for the defense of Europe against the Soviet empire.
There is no way Europe could do it on its own. American “Europe-oriented elites” had the brains to understand that Europe is more important for the US than Mideast oil.
If Russia gained control over continental Western Europe, the US would have a hard time sustaining itself as a major power, or have the ability to maintain defensive ties with Britain, in the absence of an “eastern front” effect (which was a major drag on German resources in World War II). The eastern front is now Ukraine, and it exists in a very different context, apparently not yet grasped by some think tanks.
Former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Wesley Clerk was quoted from his speech before the Atlantic Council on March 30, in Brian Bonner’s op-ed April 3 (“Wesley Clerk: I’m a believer in Ukraine…”), about Russia’s mindset: “If it’s not theirs, they want it. If it’s ours, it’s hurting them.”
The turmoil we now see in Iraq, Syria and Yemen is part of a never-ending disorder in the Mideast, unless clamped by autocratic rulers like Saddam Hussein was in Iraq, Bashar al-Assad in Syria, King Abdullah ben al- Suod in Saudi Arabia, army general Abdel el-Sisi in Egypt, and whoever wins in Yemen.
To write that America has challenges and opportunities in Asia when “bright young men and women” of Asian descent “with different emotional priorities” come in Washington is plain nonsense.
Actually, immigration policies favorable to demographic change which President Obama is trying to impose by executive order in defiance of Congress are widely opposed and are challenged in courts on Constitutional grounds.
It also turns out that restrictive immigration laws existing before 1965 were not as silly as disparaged by idealistic and mostly naive activists of that time. As for Europe’s appeasement, Europe could use a lesson or two how to appreciate its “four freedoms” — gained with American help through the hardships like the post-World War II Berlin airlift and then with the Marshall Plan and American rearmament, as well as the nuclear deterrent against Soviet aggression. Unfortunately, Europe’s own sensitivity to what is right is recently falling short. “When Vladimir Putin’s Russia undermined the strategic state of Ukraine, they stood and watched,” writes Robert Kaplan in the same Financial Times article.
Still, this does not absolve Obama from his part in downgrading the essence of American-European alliance and failing to notice Ukraine as an anchor of Europe’s security. His classification of Russia’s war on Ukraine as something that can be made to vanish by talking would be boring if it were not so utterly disingenuous.
Ironically, it is Ukraine that is “willing to maintain robust, dependable military,” and yet it is barred by Obama from getting weapons from America. What a contrast to pouring the armaments and finances down the drain in Asia.
