By George Will
Saturday, September 06, 2014
Speaking on August 29 — at a fundraiser, of course —
Barack Obama applied to a platitude the varnish of smartphone sociology,
producing this intellectual sunburst: “The truth of the matter is, is that the
world has always been messy. In part, we’re just noticing now because of social
media and our capacity to see in intimate detail the hardships that people are
going through.” So, if 14th-century Europeans had had Facebook and Twitter,
they would have noticed how really disagreeable the Hundred Years’ War was.
Obama did have a piece of a point: Graphic journalism,
now augmented by billions of people with cameras in their pockets, can give an
inflammatory immediacy to events. His intention was to dispel the impression
that the world has become not just unusually “messy” but especially dangerous.
Unfortunately, this impression derives not from social-media static but from
stark facts, including this one:
A nation with nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles is
dismembering another nation. And the nuclear power is governed by an
unconstrained despot fueled by a dangerous brew of disappointment, resentment,
and contempt.
Writing for the Federalist website, Professor Tom Nichols
of the Naval War College describes Vladimir Putin as neither a realist nor a
nationalist but rather someone saturated with Soviet nostalgia. In 1975,
Nichols writes, the world seemed to be going the Soviet Union’s way.
Extraordinary U.S. exertions in Vietnam had ended in defeat, a president had
resigned, and the economy was sagging into stagflation. “By contrast,” Nichols
says, “the Soviets were at the top of
their game,” with a modernized military and a new generation of missiles: “The
correlation of forces, the great wheel of History itself, was finally turning
in their favor,” and because History’s ratchet clicks only in a progressive
direction, “it would never turn back.”
In 1975, Putin, 23, joined “the most elite Soviet
institution,” the KGB, which would guarantee “he would be somebody in the brave
new Soviet future.” But in the 1980s, “he watched the Soviet descent to
oblivion begin, accelerate, and then end in a humiliating wreck.” Ronald
Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and a Polish pope ignited a Western resurgence —
military, economic, and moral. By 1990, Putin was 38 and aggrieved. Today,
“Putin’s speeches and public utterances,” Nichols notes, “tend to show more
nostalgia for his Soviet youth than his Russian adulthood.” Remember “the
explosion of bad taste and Soviet kitsch” in the 2014 Sochi Olympics.
A participant in NATO’s 1949 founding famously said that
the alliance’s purpose was to protect Europe by keeping “the Russians out, the
Americans in, and the Germans down.” When the Cold War, which prompted NATO’s
creation, ended, the alliance began to gingerly undertake what it calls
“out-of-area operations,” as in Afghanistan. Now, however, it is back to its
original business of keeping Russian forces out of NATO members, which now
include Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, the last two being contiguous to
Russia.
If NATO’s meeting in Wales was, as one European defense
intellectual said, a “credibility summit,” it was at most a semi-success. The
decision to augment by around 4,000 an existing rapid-response force of around
13,000 is a far cry from Poland’s request that 10,000 NATO troops be stationed
with heavy weapons in that country. Watching NATO flinch from this, Putin might
reasonably conclude that NATO is ambivalent about Article 5 (an attack on any
member will be considered an attack on all) and therefore wants its means of
responding to remain some distance from where events might require a response.
Although ambiguity has its uses, a British diplomat of
the early 20th century, Lord Curzon, reportedly advised that it is generally
wise to know your own mind and make sure your adversary knows it, too. Putin
might read NATO’s mind in what Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times calls “the
learned helplessness” of American allies who “have come to rely excessively on
the U.S. to guarantee their security.”
Time was, Rachman writes, America accounted for roughly
half of NATO’s military spending; now it accounts for about 75 percent. Only
four of NATO’s 28 members (America, Britain, Estonia, and penurious Greece)
fulfill their obligation to spend at least 2 percent of GDP on defense, and
Britain may soon fall below that threshold as its army shrinks to about 80,000,
its smallest size since after Waterloo (1815). As Putin casts a cold eye on his
enemies, he might reasonably infer from their atrophied military muscles that
they have palsied wills.
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