By Colin Dueck
Wednesday, February 07, 2018
Where is the Trump administration headed in its policies
toward Russia and Europe? Several markers have been laid down in recent months.
First, the president delivered a forceful defense of the
Western idea in Warsaw last summer, while affirming America’s commitment to
NATO under Article 5. Liberals informed us that a verbal defense of Western
civilization is now socially unacceptable, but most conservatives liked it.
Second, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson delivered a
welcome address on strengthening Western alliances, at the Wilson Center in
November, followed by repeat visits to Europe.
Third, the administration began staffing up with some
capable Europe experts as political appointees. The former head of the Center
for European Policy Analysis, Wess Mitchell, arrived as assistant secretary of
state for European and Eurasian Affairs in October. Mitchell co-authored a
recent book, The Unquiet Frontier — a
favorite of H. R. McMaster’s — arguing that American alliances around the
perimeters of Russia, China, and Iran should be bolstered. Mitchell’s
co-author, Jakub Grygiel, manages European matters at the State Department’s
Office of Policy Planning, with planning director Brian Hook.
The administration’s Europe policy, as it has emerged,
appears to have several key components:
• A reaffirmation of NATO as the heart of the West’s
defense
• Asking European allies to shoulder more of the burden
for their own military protection
• Working with smaller Central European NATO allies,
rather than against them
• Maintaining and expanding a U.S. strategic presence in
Poland and the Baltics
• Encouraging alternative energy supplies to European
allies, in order to wean them off excessive dependence on Russian natural gas
• To that end, opposition toward the Nord Stream 2
pipeline project connecting Russia and Germany
• Negotiations over Ukraine to enforce the 2014 Minsk
agreement
• Boosting military aid to Ukraine, through the sale of
U.S. weapons, allowing its government to better fight off Russian-backed
separatists
• Taking the position that EU relations with member
European states is a matter for those states to resolve, without American
interference
• Increased U.S. military spending, in part to make more
credible America’s strategic position overseas, not least with regard to Russia
• Urging European allies to reconsider and help
renegotiate the deeply flawed 2015 Iran nuclear deal
• An unapologetic defense of the idea of the West as a
civilizational legacy worth defending
The Trump administration’s position, in practice, is not
against the European Union as such. Rather, the position is simply that free
member states can decide through their own democratic processes how to relate
to the EU — or whether they want to be members at all — and that this is no
business of U.S. policy. Liberals on both sides of the Atlantic currently worry
that even democratic expressions of national self-determination portend a
resurgence of 1930s-style fascism. Yet the British, just to take one leading
case, are not known for their fascist authoritarianism. British voters decided
to exit the EU. They have every right to do so, without being lectured on the
matter one way or another by U.S. presidents.
From time to time, standing by American values does
require speaking out on human-rights issues, even in relation to U.S. allies.
This is certainly the case with regard to Poland’s proposed law criminalizing
specific ways of discussing the Holocaust. The U.S. State Department has spoken
out against this strange proposed law, as well it should.
At other times in the past, a human-rights agenda has
been pressed or misinterpreted to the point that it damages broader U.S.
interests. During the presidency of Barack Obama, the U.S. State Department
took an increasingly assertive position promoting liberal policy preferences,
such as same-sex marriage, as American foreign-policy priorities worldwide,
even in Central Europe. The public position of multiple Obama officials was
simply that there was no tradeoff between emphasizing these social issues and
working with allies in culturally conservative countries like Poland on other
matters of interest such as counterterrorism. As even a number of thoughtful
Democratic-party foreign-policy experts admit privately, however, this public
position was unserious, since the practical tradeoffs were very real.
What about the specter of neo-fascism? On the European
continent, the small minority of Hitler-lovers are a little more numerous than
in the U.S., represented by some extremely creepy groups such as Golden Dawn of
Greece, along with numerous radical Islamists. Most populist parties of
political relevance in Europe, however, are neither fascist nor neo-fascist.
Poland’s Law and Justice party, for example, as well as Hungary’s Fidesz, are
culturally conservative, Euro-skeptical, and populist, working within a
democratic framework of multiparty competition. They look to remain within
NATO, and indeed within the EU, but resent what they view as excess meddling
from Brussels. Having seen their countries liberated from Soviet Communism
within the last 30 years, they’re in no mood to cede their national sovereignty
to either Russia or the EU. As even the watchdog organization Freedom House
concedes, Hungary and Poland are free countries.
Hungary’s Viktor Orban, in particular — the EU’s longtime
provocateur — maintains businesslike relations with Russia, in part because
Budapest remains dependent on Moscow for natural gas. Most Hungarians support
NATO, neither like nor fear Russia, and view their own country as Western while
simultaneously a bridge to the East. Which, geographically, it is. Orban’s
“illiberal democracy” speech a few years ago troubled many of Hungary’s allies,
and understandably so. It is still not entirely clear what he meant by it. One
possibility is a functional democracy that is neither post-Christian nor
post-national.
A well-informed understanding of a democratically
expressed conservative nationalism would grasp that there are multiple examples
of it in European history having nothing to do with fascism. Charles De Gaulle,
for example, was in many ways a fiercely conservative nationalist, committed to
the sovereignty, greatness, and independence of his native France.
Diplomatically he was an Euro-skeptic and liked to keep his options open, with
Moscow as well as other powers. He introduced dramatic constitutional changes
to form the Fifth Republic, and his personal style was regularly described as
autocratic. For U.S. officials, he could be immensely frustrating. But at the
end of the day, as more-astute Americans came to understand, De Gaulle was rock
solid, and a democrat deeply rooted within the best traditions of the Western
world. When the time came to combat actual fascists, he fought them with everything
he had, and never stopped fighting.
If what we are seeing in parts of Western and Central
Europe today is a Gaullist trend, then this may be badly misunderstood or even
feared by orthodox liberal elite opinion, but it wouldn’t necessarily be the
worst thing in the world. At a minimum, outside analysts need to develop the
conceptual tools to grasp what’s happening, without going straight for the lazy
fascist analogies.
What about U.S. policy toward Moscow? In practice, the
current administration has been more hardline against Russian assertions on the
ground than was Obama. However, the tone has been less stern than many would
like on human rights. As George Kennan argued years ago, experience suggests
that the best way to handle Russia is to create facts on the ground — and then
let Moscow draw its own conclusions. The Russians won’t like it, but they’ll
get the message. U.S. relations with Moscow really were dangerously tense by
late 2016. Obama’s special combination of ethical scolding and half-hearted
threats of force was almost custom-made to drive Russians up the wall without
necessarily deterring them in all cases. Still, there’s a right way to
negotiate with the Russians, and a wrong way. Push back, impose costs, and
create counter-pressure. Don’t focus primarily on scolding them. The Russian
people really are a great nation, deserving of respect. But that respect will
neither be given, nor earned, by any undue concessions to the Putin regime.
Obama already tried that. It didn’t work. When Putin’s anxieties bump up
against the democratic self-determination of Russia’s neighbors — including
Ukraine — then for the United States, democracy can and should take precedence.
Putin denies having tried to meddle in the last U.S.
presidential election. In all probability, he’s lying. It is absolutely
insufferable that any foreign autocrat, including Putin, would dare attempt to
interfere in this country’s democratic processes. But Putin may have got more
than he bargained for. His attempted machinations have triggered a political
reaction in this country, however discombobulated and excessive at times, that
makes it practically impossible for Trump to reach out to Moscow
diplomatically, even on those occasions when it might make sense. As so often
before in other cases, Putin’s aggressive tactical coups produce strategic
backfires that hurt and isolate Russia.
American conservatives need to recognize the seriousness
of attempted Russian cyberattacks on the United States. In fact, many
conservatives do. But liberals must recognize a few stubborn facts as well.
There is simply no hard evidence that Russia succeeded in altering a single
U.S. vote in the 2016 presidential election, through either electronic hacking
or political persuasion online. If Vladimir Putin convinced 50,000
Pennsylvanians to vote for Trump instead of Clinton, then please introduce them
to the rest of us. People voted for their own reasons. When Democrats claim
that the 2016 result is or might be illegitimate — as Clinton herself did, amazingly,
last November — this actually serves Putin’s broader purposes. It badly
undermines popular faith in the result of a valid, democratic U.S. election and
sets Americans against one another with even greater intensity. In the January
2017 assessment of the U.S. intelligence community, that’s a good part of what
Putin wants.
There’s also one other thing that serves Putin’s
purposes, and that’s when voices on the left in Europe and America routinely
describe their conservative democratic opponents as fascist or fascistic. It’s
actually a very Putin-esque move, guaranteed to whip up outrage and blind
reasonable discussion. Progressives might want to knock that off. There are
indeed powerful and genuinely authoritarian challenges in the world today,
requiring a vigilant response. But they come from Russia, China, North Korea,
Iran, radical Islamists, and jihadist terrorists such as ISIS and al-Qaeda. The
United States for its part remains a rambunctiously free republic, in case you
hadn’t noticed, and the world’s most powerful democracy.
If congressional Democrats are as serious as they say
they are about countering Russian aggressions, including those against Europe,
then there are some practical measures they can support, and conservative
Republicans should support them too. They can support proposed increases in
national defense spending, including U.S. nuclear modernization, to strengthen
the strategic credibility of America’s position in Europe. They can support
continuing increased U.S. natural-gas production through hydraulic fracking and
other means, allowing for a boost in U.S. gas exports across the Atlantic to
help wean NATO allies off Russian natural gas. They can join in opposing
Germany’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline project, for the very same reason. They can
support strengthened U.S. cyber-defenses, including American-election
infrastructure security. They can support working with rather than against key
NATO allies such as Poland and Hungary, precisely in order to counter Russian
influence in that part of the world.
And if congressional liberal Democrats cannot support the
above practical national-security measures to counter Russian influence in the
West but only discuss the issue at endless fever pitch when it aligns with
advantages to their party, then we may well begin to wonder whether all the
current agitation was really about Russia in the first place.
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