by Matthew Andersson via AmericanThinker.com,
Critics may be misreading the recent NATO summit.
It looks to them as if the U.S. is unilaterally siding with Europe against Russia.
President
Trump is smarter: he knows who has the winning hand, and his direct
communications with his peers, Xi and Putin, are not always public.
President
Trump's earliest critical instincts toward the EU and NATO still hold.
While the U.S. is currently extending them some diplomatic courtesy and
limited support, Europe is ultimately surrounded on all sides by powers
that make it irrelevant in global influence terms. Europe has put
itself into this predicament, due to its own domestic economic decline
from bad policy choices. It is using war as a way to revive its
fortunes. Its odds are long.
The EU is surrounded
economically by the U.S. to the west; by Russia and China to the east,
by a vast Arctic territory to the north that it cannot control, and by
India and a rising Middle East power, Israel, to the south. Europe has
no strategic maneuvering room. It has limited prospects to reemerge as a
serious power, and NATO is long past relevancy, and solvency.
Since his first term, President Trump has been right about Russia, and NATO.
Being
“right” means understanding Russia’s long-term economic and trade
importance, and appreciating its military prowess. Along with China and
the U.S., it makes up the superpower triad. Being right also means he
understands that the days are numbered for the EU and NATO, and that the world has changed without them.
After the Anchorage meeting with
President Trump, President Putin invited his counterpart to Moscow:
Trump's guarded reply was a reminder that productive relations may be
welcome by both leaders, but each is also operating in and surrounded by
a complex defense and foreign affairs tradition that doesn’t trust the
other side. Some have called this the “crucible of belief,” and past experience is hard to overcome. Change will happen slowly.
Europe
is part of that shared Eurasian landmass, and its security, but
“Europe” is not a unified, single country. Even within its own limited
Western sphere, it has been a region constantly engaged in rivalry and
war. There was a period after Napoleon — roughly a hundred years —
where relative peace was enjoyed. But the 20th century has been just
the opposite: a nearly unbroken chain of war — regional, revolutionary,
world, and cold — and now, a new 21st century war is increasingly seen
as inevitable.
There are many political, social, and institutional explanations, but economic decline is at the heart of why the EU is determined to provoke Russia (and why it is pleading before the U.S.).
If
Germany, France and the U.K. were strongly led, however, with robust
domestic industrial growth, controlled borders via immigration, and with
less external energy dependence, if not facing domestic energy
bankruptcy, such a conflict would not be necessary, or given any serious
consideration.
In recent history, one only has to review Angela
Merkel’s disastrous “green energy” policy, deindustrialization, open
borders, and the idling of German nuclear power, as a strong
explanation. She fell completely for naive progressive ideology which
asserts that oil no longer matters.
But for President Trump, the U.S. was going down the same path.
France
and the U.K. are just as bad in their string of weak leaders,
uncontrolled borders, domestic violence from cultures foreign to their
own, and deindustrialization and outsourcing. It is little wonder that
Europe’s “leaders” are now economically trapped, and are turning to war
as a desperate form of economic recovery.
NATO’s putative
head, Mark Rutte, was recently in the White House, pitching for war and
U.S. financial backing, with slides and charts that looked more like a
failed business recovery plan. The old saying “be careful what you ask
for” may be relevant, as NATO is functioning as a proxy for Western
Europe, and looking to the U.S. as its pre-bankruptcy
sponsor. President Trump has seen this before.
There are
obviously many other interests and players driving this strategy, but
German-French-British decline may be the largest factor. Scandinavia
is somewhat immune, especially Norway with its natural resources and
capital, but it is susceptible to European political and policy
contamination.
Economic historian Walt Rostow, a White House
national security advisor to U.S. presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and
Johnson, provided a powerful economic model that goes a long way to
partly explain why Eurasia, and Europe, have always been unstable and in
conflict. His “The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist
Manifesto,” maps how countries grow in relative stages of maturity.
But it also predicts how
countries will turn to war when those stages are challenged,
interrupted, or allowed through poor leadership, or state interference,
to stagnate or backslide. Europe has slid backwards from an
advanced industrial and colonial power, to an effective open border
welfare state, led by a weak political class with no plans, ideas,
commitment, or national loyalties.
Russia’s Kremlin has recently announced that
its Special Military Operation in Ukraine has been converted to formal
war. While predicting its development is problematic, Russia's power
advantage is so overwhelming that NATO can only been seen as engaging in
effective suicide. Given Europe’s cultural tendency to existentialist
gloom, perhaps it is understandable.
When war finally stops, as it must, it usually results in new borders, relationships, alliances, and deals being formed. NATO and Europe seem to be counting on the chaos of war as a path out of their own weakness.
The
U.S. may lend some technical military support to them as a simple
matter of arms sales, but this may be their own self-inflicted, poisoned
chalice.
And in the end, the U.S., Russia, and China will simply resume their global dominance and power alliance.
The EU will likely collapse or shrink; NATO will finally be
decommissioned, and the old Atlantic Alliance will bypass Europe and
align economically with Eurasia’s east and south — because that is where the power is.
That is what the stages of growth predict.
The
EU is also going to be further eclipsed commercially and militarily and
by a rising Israel-dominated Middle East, because they know what they
want, they have a plan, and they know how to fight. European
bureaucrats like Rutte, Macron, Merz, and von der Leyen do not, and face an interesting fate when they finally realize that this battle is likely their last political stand.
The citizens of Europe may be relieved.
