By Adam Garfinkle
Saturday, March
01, 2025
As I absorbed the collected enormities disgorged by the
second Trump administration on the topics of Ukraine and NATO over the last few
weeks—first in Brussels, then in Munich, then in Washington, then in Riyadh,
and finally in the Oval Office—I was reminded of the following exchange from
Lewis Carroll’s 1871 novel Through the Looking-Glass:
“There’s no use trying,” Alice
said to the White Queen: “One can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much
practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for
half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible
things before breakfast.”
Reality can sometimes seem even stranger than fiction,
and the second Trump administration has done what many people supposed to be
six impossible things within the first month of its tenure. The upshot is that
we are now living in a post-NATO world where black is white, up is down,
friends are foes (and vice versa), and once-unthinkable impossibilities have
become our new reality.
Six Impossibilities
The first impossibility accomplished by the new
administration saw Donald J. Trump and J.D. Vance win the only two elected
offices of the US executive branch with a campaign of wild lies about the
November 2020 election and what happened at the Capitol on 6 January 2021.
After the inauguration, they turned those lies into loyalty tests required of
nominees to plum jobs in the administration, including on the National Security
Council staff and the Policy Planning staff at the State Department.
Second, on his first day in office, the president used
his pardon power to release a loyal and violence-prone cohort of 1,600
insurrectionists.
Third, the White House won Senate confirmation of
manifestly unsuitable nominees to head executive-branch departments and
agencies, many of whom are openly hostile to the stolidly apolitical missions
of their own offices.
Fourth, the administration fomented a constitutional
crisis by illegally impounding funds authorised by Congress, illegally firing
senior civil-service employees without due notice or cause, and empowering a
legally non-existent office—the DOGE—to carry out the most massive
personal-information hack of the US government in history. The White House
seeks a confrontation with the Supreme Court over this because it
believes—perhaps correctly, perhaps not—that the 1 July 2024 SCOTUS decision on
presidential immunity will cause Chief Justice John Roberts to back down. And
if he does, the core checks-and-balances mechanism of US democracy—the
separation of powers—will shatter. And if that happens, the US
government will become a de facto autocracy.
Fifth, the administration fomented that crisis by using
the DOGE to destroy the regulatory capacities of the federal government,
purporting that its activities were devoted to greater government efficiency.
The real purpose of this project is the creation of a corporate oligarchy within
and protected by a weaponised para-government itself.
And sixth, the administration has effectively liquidated
the central US alliance of the postwar era, the North Atlantic Treaty
Organisation (NATO), and then joined with Russia to enable the consolidation of
a West-facing sphere of influence. That sphere of influence may expand or it
may not; if it expands, it may expand slowly and modestly, or rapidly and
immodestly. The Trump administration does not care either way. In return, the
administration wants rights to invest in Russian energy industries and to partner
in the colonisation of Ukraine. Presumably, given the stunted syntax of this
logic, it also hopes to reach an understanding with Vladimir Putin that Russia
will henceforth respect an expanded US sphere of influence.
Two strategic benefits seem to be expected to emerge from
cutting that deal. First, it is supposed to assuage Russian fears of American
enmity and disincentivise further aggression by Moscow against the West.
Second, Russian cooperation with China is expected to diminish. Are these
realistic expectations? The idea that the Russian regime will forgo easy
pickings because its last bout of aggression was obviously just defensive in
nature is, well, unpersuasive. Even less persuasive is the idea that Russia
will moderate its relations with China because America offers the Russians more
than the Chinese and insists that Putin choose between them.
Russia may well opt for a respite once Ukraine is
Belarusised, but if it does, it will be a consequence of exhaustion and
inherent weakness. Putin may moderate relations with China because he fears
China getting the upper hand, and he may finally understand the utility of the
West in balancing an Eastern threat—an obvious thought that seems to have
escaped him these past years. But Putin will not do either of these
things because the Trump administration has exercised any leverage over him,
since it plainly has not.
Cravenly conceding the pot before the hand has played out
is neither shrewd nor subtle. Effective deterrence requires strength not
unforced displays of weakness. If this is Trump’s idea of peace through
strength, it is hard to imagine what peace through weakness would look like. I
am reminded of Robert S. Vansittart’s tart observation: “In diplomacy you can
‘solve’ anything by giving way.”
The Meaning of the Sixth Impossible Thing
The first five of these impossible things complement and
pave the way for the sixth—the demolition of NATO. As anyone who has worked
high enough in government knows, the foreign policy of a great power is always
at least partly an extension of its domestic politics and a projection of its
wider political culture. So, then, what of the particular projection we
witnessed these past weeks?
NATO still exists on paper, but operationally, it has
been killed in a four-act drama followed by a macabre after-party (ongoing).
There will be those who insist that NATO’s Article V guarantee is still alive
and well, and that Ukraine is an exception because NATO real-estate is not at
risk. Should the Russians attack a NATO member-state, they claim, Article V
will rise and shine. This argument is backwards.
How can a US Article V guarantee remain credible in the
event of some theoretical future contingency when it has been disavowed in the
context of an extant shooting war, more or less contained outside the
alliance’s borders? The very essence of extended deterrence—which is what
Article V is supposed to ensure—is that the alliance leader will credibly
backstop risks in ways that reduce those risks. If it won’t do that when risks
are modest, it is hardly likely to do it when the risks are much greater. Yes,
on 12 February, US Defence Secretary Hegseth reaffirmed the “US commitment to
NATO,” which presumably implied a commitment to Article V. But the US president
then attached a condition; namely, that European members of NATO each fork out
five percent of GDP to pull their weight. The implicit threat being that those
who fail to do so will forfeit the guarantee of US protection.
This is absurd. The United States currently spends just
2.9 percent of its GDP on defence, and looks to be planning reductions, not
increases, in that percentage. So Trump knows that his five percent demand will
not be met, thereby providing him with a pretext to offload US responsibility
for European security altogether, which is what he wants to do anyway. During
his first term, Trump made no secret of his wish to destroy NATO, or at least
to pull the United States out of the alliance. He was only prevented from doing
so by the presence of wiser Republicans like H.R. McMaster, James Mattis, John
Bolton, John Kelley, and a few others.
In any event, there is no fooling Friedrich Merz on this
point. One of the first things Merz said after Germany’s 23 February election
made him Bundeskanzler-apparent was that Europe must make itself
independent of the United States, which Europeans increasingly see as not
merely uninterested in continuing alliance relations but as a potential threat.
He and they are correct, and any lingering doubts about the full-frontal nature
of the US foreign-policy upheaval were dispelled by the UN General Assembly
episode of 24 February. In a draft resolution on Ukraine, the US adopted the
Russian position on the war, thereby putting America at odds with nearly every
democracy on the planet.
The Play and the Afterparty
In the light of which, let’s review the aforementioned
four-act performance with the benefit of a few weeks’ hindsight.
In Act I, Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth told the
Ukraine Defence Contact Group in Brussels on 12 February that European members
of NATO must lead from the front, that the United States would neither put
troops on the ground nor apply an Article V guarantee with respect to anything
the allies might do to help Ukraine. He added that NATO membership for Ukraine
was off the table, and that Ukraine’s goal of reclaiming all its sovereign
territory is unrealistic and is not supported by the US government. In return
for these pre-emptive concessions to Russia, the United States asked for—and
therefore received—nothing in return.
Why did the Trump administration do this? Hegseth
explained that the national priority must be securing America’s own borders and
deterring “communist China,” which he called “a peer competitor ... with the
capability and intent to threaten our homeland and core national
interests in the Indo-Pacific.” In short, European security is Europe’s
obligation and problem, and the US government will not pledge its support
should the continent’s deterrence or actual security be threatened. Hegseth’s
subsequent reaffirmation of the US commitment to NATO meant nothing. For those
not wilfully blind to the obvious, NATO without US security guarantees is not
NATO at all. For the time being, at least, the alliance has been reduced to a
coffee klatch able to bring little more than a butter knife to a gunfight.
In Act II, Vice President Vance appeared at the Munich
Security Conference on 14 February, where he briefly repeated Secretary
Hegseth’s points about security. But he spent most of his time at the dais
channelling the spirit of fascist theorist Carl Schmitt. His audience might
have wondered why they were listening to a sermon on democratic probity from a
man who has sworn he would have done—and will do in future if necessary—what
Vice President Mike Pence refused to do on 6 January 2021; namely, defy the law
to void the results of a free and fair American election.
In Act III, no words were spoken in public, but they did
not need to be. Hegseth and Vance brought a young demagogue and conspiracy
crank named Jack Posobiec with them to Europe, presumably so that the assembled
Europeans would not misunderstand Vance’s excessively tactful speech. During
his appearance on a panel at last year’s Conservative Political Action
Conference, Posobiec
announced: “Welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it
completely. We didn’t get all the way there on January 6, but we will endeavor
to get rid of it.” Vance, meanwhile, pointedly refused to meet with the German
chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and met instead with Alice Weidel, the head of the
aggressively pro-Russian Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD). This was not an
oversight or a coincidence.
In Act IV, President Trump initiated a call with Vladimir
Putin, and presumed to negotiate the fate of Ukraine without that embattled
country’s approval or participation, and without the foreknowledge or
participation of America’s NATO allies. Hegseth did not mention this call when
he spoke and Vance made no reference to it either, which suggests they believed
it was no one’s business but that of the United States alone. The blindsiding
of the NATO allies delivered an unmistakable message: We don’t care about you,
we don’t like you, and we enjoy it when you whine. The exclusion of Ukraine
delivered an equally clear message: Your sovereignty is about to disappear and
we would be happy to hear you whine about that too.
The same day, a package from Washington landed on the
desk of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, in which President Trump
demanded US$500 billion in what amounted to reparations from Ukraine, and
first-right shares to Ukrainian minerals, oil and gas, port fees, and much
else. Trump told US news sources that if Zelensky were unwise enough to reject
this deal, his country would be delivered to Russia on a plate. This is just
extortion, mafioso-style, with an extra dash of loan-sharking: a deal you cannot
refuse without imperilling your own life and the lives of everyone you care
about.
That document was prepared by private lawyers in New
York, not by anyone in the US government in Washington. President Zelensky
accurately pronounced it a colonial document. Trump then accused Ukraine (not
Russia) of starting the war, described Zelensky (not Putin) as a dictator, and
declared that Russians (not Ukrainians) are the conflict’s true victims.
Ordinary observers gasped while the MAGA herd brayed its approval.
As to the afterparty, Trump’s erratic behaviour toward
Zelensky has resembled that of a frenzied Adderall addict. Days after Trump
called Zelensky a dictator, Trump appeared to withdraw the remark during a
press conference with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Then, when Zelensky
headed to Washington to sign a vastly watered-down version of the extortion
demand he was originally given, he was yelled at by the US president and his
deputy during a bizarre photo call in the Oval Office—ostensibly for failing to
be sufficiently deferential to his hosts.
The new United States government only has use for servile
partners willing to accept a strictly transactional relationship. In the MAGA
political economy, things like cultural affinity, moral authority, and
political values are now worthless. Even Niall Ferguson, who has leaned hard
into MAGA in recent months, has taken
exception to the spiteful humiliation of Ukraine. In
response, Vice President Vance accused
him of peddling “moralistic garbage.”
Like Putin, the Trump administration sees the world
through a 19th-century lens. The US-wrought postwar order, it believes, has
become harmful to US interests. It assumes and hopes that great powers will now
pursue deal-making and advantage over the heads—and often at the expense—of
smaller and weaker states. It knows but doesn’t care that this will almost
certainly produce a proliferation of rapid WMD acquisition. In short, Trump and
his crew have made Kissingerian realism—pilloried by the preening foreign-policy
moralists of that day—look like a Cub Scout project.
Further Implications of the Sixth Impossible Thing
Is that all? Well, no. Some details need a light dusting.
What, for instance, will happen to the Five Eyes, and to intelligence-sharing
beyond the Anglosphere? That’s a dead letter. With Tulsi Gabbard now waved into
DNI by a compliant Senate, no foreign intelligence service will share anything
sensitive with the United States. This is common knowledge already.
What is not common knowledge—but ought to be—is that
America’s European allies regularly provide the US with intelligence as
valuable as anything the US provides to them. The US is very good at helping
warfighters, so allies in a fight get more from America than America gets back
on balance. But in everyday collections and analysis efforts, America benefits
at least as much from intel reciprocation as its allies do. The Norwegians, for
example, are in a sweet position to monitor the movement of Russian submarines
at Murmansk. Radars in Iceland are excellent intelligence collectors.
Fibre-optic cables that run through NATO-Europe eastward are critical to
certain kinds of signal-intelligence collection. And all of this is now at risk
because America’s allies are understandably worried that Tulsi Gabbard will
send a digest of the best stuff straight to Moscow. This is one reason, rarely
noted so far, why the Russians are so chipper these days.
What will now become of the fairly extensive US basing
infrastructure in NATO countries? Most likely it will diminish and disappear
over the next four years—from both ends. The Europeans will not wish to make
offset payments to the United States for bases that are no longer linked to
credible promises of US protection. Secretary Hegseth, meanwhile, has memoed
the heads of all US combat arms services to inform them that they should expect
eight percent cuts in their annual budgets for the next four years.
Most US bases and personnel in Europe are not there for
Europe’s sake. Beyond their symbolic and tripwire functions, they furnish
convenient and relatively inexpensive power-projection capabilities for the
Near East and South Asia. But the administration does not seem to want to
project its power into those places or even retain the capacity to do so.
Wherever George McGovern’s spirit now abides, it must be dancing a jig: His
“America, Come Home” plea from 1972 is finally being heeded.
Insofar as Israel is concerned—and a good number of Trump
supporters claim to be fond of Israel despite a thick undertow of antisemitism
in the MAGA periphery—the administration doesn’t seem to have made the
connection between US naval facilities in the Mediterranean and Israeli
security. When the guided-missile nuclear submarine USS Georgia—with its
154 Tomahawk Land-Attack Missiles with ranges of 1,600 kilometres, suitable for
destroying every Iranian oil terminal structure on Kharg Island—showed up in
the Eastern Med some months back to deter the Iranians, it worked. But if the
administration closes Rota in Spain and other bases in Europe, the USS
Georgia will not be able to show up quickly and stay put for long.
Trump likes to talk tough. But he doesn’t seem to
understand that foreign competitors and potential adversaries don’t care about
talk, they care about capabilities. “Speak softly and carry a big stick”
is excellent advice but most of the time Trump does precisely the opposite.
More’s the pity for everyone.
It is important to keep two truths in mind when assessing
the significance of recent developments. First, NATO was never just a military
alliance. It has always been, at least for its core members, a
collective-security arrangement—albeit a lopsided one—with integrated military,
economic, diplomatic, and normative dimensions. Donald Trump, zero-sum thinker
that he is, has never understood this. Which is why he imagines that funding
for NATO is just a kind of protection racket, just another part of his larger
delusion that the US government ought to be a profit-making corporation of
which he is CEO. He has never understood that allowing some European
free-riding did not negate the net value of NATO to the United States.
Second, the extension of a US security umbrella to Europe
was never an act of charity. It was the result of a studied conclusion that US
national-security interests were best served by preventing European wars that
dragged in the United States. NATO was not just about deterring the Soviet
Union. It was as much about replacing historical European enmities with new
habits of trust and cooperation. By guiding and supporting the creation of the
European Union, postwar US policy has accomplished its goal with remarkable
success.
That is why those who believe the Europeans are
hopelessly squabbling tribes are living in an obsolete reality. Such people
like to point out that, from the collapse of the Western Roman Empire until the
advent of NATO, at least two—and usually more—centres of power in Europe were
eternally at each other’s throats. That much is true. But thanks to US power
and perseverance, and the pressure of circumstances, intra-European hostility
has finally been laid to rest.
Today, no vestigial European rivalry that does not
involve Russia (besides, perhaps, eternal Greco-Turkish enmity) is remotely
likely to lead to a shooting war. The historically small Hungary of today,
nationalist and autocratic though it is, might some day attack Slovakia to
absorb the majority-ethnic Hungarian city of Bratislava (formerly Pressburg).
But this is far-fetched so long as the European Union continues to exist. This
historical novelty—no enmity great enough to cause a war within Europe and the
shared threat of Russia—counsels measured optimism about Europe’s future
security capacities.
Some years ago, I
contended that the Zeitenwende—a European
turning point—was real. I still believe that, and a hitherto glacial process
may now accelerate, not least thanks to the results of the 23 February German
election. Some defence functions will develop faster than others, and the
process will be both affected by and have effects on each country’s domestic
politics in ways that are hard to predict.
Of particular significance is that Germany’s postwar
liberal-democratic ethos has been inseparable from post-bellicist and pacific
security thinking. If Germany must now develop an extensive military industry
and possibly even nuclear weapons, what will its postwar compact look like a
generation hence?As things stand, Europe needs real leadership above all, and
domestic politics in both Germany and France have been dicey in recent months.
But the new CDU-SPD coalition under the leadership of Friedrich Merz is more
likely to hasten a turning point than any other possible combination.
The Germans need to offload the Schuldenbremse—the
obligation to balance annual budgets, first established in 2009 under Angela
Merkel. This policy has depressed investment in infrastructure, contributed to
the recessionary trends of the past two years, and helped to bring down the
Scholz government. The Germans need to understand that higher spending on
defence can stimulate their economy, especially the value-added parts the
Germans excel at. The sooner it starts, the less time will need to pass for the
benign economic and security effects to be felt. At which point, Germany can
play its part as a leader in a new European concert.
If the United States really does want to urge and assist
the construction of a unitary European security power, it isn’t especially
productive to hurl the toddler into the lake yelling, “Swim, you idiot!” Will
Europe have the time it needs to find its feet under currently re-wrought
circumstances? The answer depends on cases and circumstances and these are
complex.
The Sixth Impossible Thing and Russia’s Near Abroad
The US government has been providing useful satellite
intel to the Ukrainians via the Starlink and other systems that Europeans
cannot presently match. But Europe could match these systems in five years or
perhaps as few as two. On the ground, the US has also been providing items the
Europeans could not. Nevertheless, Europe has been providing about sixty
percent of the Ukrainian order of battle to America’s forty percent. Europe
could make up half of that forty percent—so, another twenty percent—in six months
to two years.
What about getting Europe’s defence-industrial base
integrated enough to produce the major platforms that America has provided? That
is harder and will take much longer: most industry estimates fall between eight
and ten years. But Swedish accession to NATO may help more than many realise,
for the Swedes have managed to produce remarkable scientific-technical and
engineering feats with a fairly small population. And if AI enables NATO
members to skip a technological generation, the time curve could flatten down
to between four and eight years. No one really knows, although that’s clearly
much too long to matter in the current war.
All that changes if one looks at a hypothetical
post-Ukraine-Belarusisation period, the dangers of which may be fairly modest
in narrow military terms given Russia’s manifest military weaknesses, but also
extremely politically sensitive. If I were Putin, what might I be thinking of
doing next? Well, Russia could attack Latvia, kinetically and otherwise,
especially if US tripwire troops are soon withdrawn, as rumours suggest they
will be. Why Latvia? Because 35 percent of the population speaks Russian at home
(compared to 27 percent in Estonia and five percent in Lithuania), and that’s
high enough to tempt Putin’s urge to unite Russia into the “civilisation-state”
he likes to talk about.
But invading Latvia would mean war with NATO (or what’s
left of it). And if that’s the case, why go small beer? Putin is now 72 and
looking at the clock, so he could reason that a new war should be over a
strategically more worthy stake. What might that stake be? Connecting Russia’s
land borders, perhaps, by pushing through the Suwalki corridor to link up
Kaliningrad?
Kaliningrad is currently a vulnerability for Russia. It
could be blockaded and choked by NATO-Europe as a pressure point. So it would
be appealing, from a Russian military point of view, to eliminate that
vulnerability. The map shows that Russian power would erupt out of Belarus,
which is entirely under Putin’s control, and soak up either Lithuanian
territory to the north or Polish territory to the south—or some of both. Either
way, Lithuania’s land access to the rest of NATO to its south would be severed.
That would be a big deal, obviously for Lithuania and Poland, but also for
Latvia and Estonia to the north—and so therefore to all of NATO-Europe to one
degree or another.
So, the farsighted military question to ask is: If the
Russians burst toward Suwalki how does NATO-Europe—without the United States
and without a US Article V backstop—repel and defeat them? Can they do
so?
The answer is yes, probably, depending on when it
happens. The longer Putin waits, the more likely and able the Europeans will be
to resist and defeat his aggression. But it could get scary; the Russian
military might, for example, detonate a tactical nuke high over the Baltic Sea,
killing no one but terrifying people throughout Europe. Still, in a
Suwalki-corridor scenario, the difference between what the United States has
provided to Ukraine and what the Europeans have provided becomes less relevant.
Near real-time satellite imagery would be nice to have in a contingency like
that, but given the relatively small size of the battle area, air recon and
other modalities could substitute well enough for most purposes, assuming
European forces can muster the command, control, communications, and
intelligence capabilities to enable them to fight together effectively.
On the larger point at issue, there is nothing wrong with
wanting to improve relations with Russia, for doing so is in the US grand
strategic interest in limiting the sway of Chinese power—even as misdescribed
by Secretary Hegseth. But to do so in a way that rewards Russian aggression
against a fledgling democratic polity is neither necessary nor in our interest,
unless we disavow the value of democracy altogether, which is exactly what many
MAGA entrepreneurs and supporters seem to want to do. Some of them really do
sound a lot like Carl Schmitt, trying to substitute a mobocracy for a liberal
democracy—but instead of doing it in just one country they seem to want
to do it in several. This is the Trump version of internationalism.
Specific circumstances matter. Yalta was a tragic but
necessary case of spheres-of-influence diplomacy under the circumstances, since
the Red Army already occupied eastern and central Europe. We need not repeat
that now; there is no Russian army in those territories and the West is much
stronger than the Russians as a result of the unity vouchsafed by postwar US
policy. A principle-based security strategy has yielded highly practical
benefits. As a result, the West—were it to remain in alliance—has options other
than a balance-of-power, spheres-of-influence approach to strategy.
In this regard, it is worth remembering that, after the
1939 Soviet aggression against the Baltic States and their absorption into the
USSR, the United States never recognised those annexations. Instead, it sat on
a block of ice for more than 52 years as a matter of principle. It took the
same position with respect to Crimea in 2014. This history needs pointing out,
lest some think that rewarding aggression is standard US protocol in the face
of a fait accompli emanating from Moscow. It never has been... at least,
not until last week. Just as “Swim, you idiot!” is no way to encourage
Europeans to put more skin in their own defence, rewarding naked aggression—and
looking past all manner of other war crimes, as well—is no way to set up the
kind of balance-of-power equilibrium with Russia that the Trump administration
claims to want.
Unfortunately, the administration simply does not care
about consequences of any shape in Europe, so they have rushed to forfeit a
strong position in alliance with Europe for a weaker one without it. And it has
done so for what are now revealed to be ideological reasons, or
proto-ideological impulses based on motion-driven tics as opposed to actual
thoughts. The emotional tics are dark and brutalist, like the kind of
unfocussed angst that drives small boys to kill insects with magnifying
glasses. The administration has confused complements and opposites. It is a
zero-sum approach—besotted, angry, and replete with nihilistic effusions of
self-harm projected outward as cruelty.
None of what we have seen in recent days is about
strategy or even money. The same destructive shock-nihilism now prevalent in
American domestic politics has extruded into the administration’s foreign and
national-security policies. It is deep and it is dangerous. Indeed, it reeks of
Lord of the Flies.
