The Real World Awaiting Trump

Gauzy Hopefuls: Two-thirds of the new Trifecta

THIS IS A MOMENT IN HISTORY when most American news media are (perhaps understandably) looking inward, domestically more than internationally.

It’s inescapable that we’re in the middle of major national realignments. Just seven days ago the US Congress reconvened with both chambers now under Republican control … and in eleven days’ time a Republican, albeit a wildly transfigured, highly personalized form of Republican, will accede to the Presidency, thus bringing about the first single-party trifecta in Washington since – oh, since the last time Donald Trump became President.

He will be presiding through a time when events beyond our shores will be of even greater significance than what happens to this country under his watch. And I’m not talking about the ludicrous notions he put out during this week’s typically rambling press conference about accruing additional US territory, even perhaps by force (Greenland? Panama? Canada?) as if he were some imperious potentate from a previous century. No, I’m talking about real events, already in motion, to which Trump has hitherto been indifferent or even a force for (what else?) negative interference.

It’s worth saying bluntly what American media coverage is currently under-reporting. A security crisis is overtaking Europe. It’s cause is obvious –– the aggressiveness of Russia under Vladimir Putin. But too little attention is being paid to the danger, certainly by media for whom it appears a distant threat.

The danger applies even more widely than to the badly pummeled nation of Ukraine, invaded full-scale by Putin three years ago next month, and previously attacked in part – especially the Crimea region – nine years before that. Russia can be said to be on the march, and this is not a journalistic exaggeration.  

Indeed, the military leaders whose purpose is to keep Russia in check define the problem in decidedly down-to-earth, emphatic terms.  NATO, the alliance originally designed to yoke together both democratic sides of the Atlantic is also under new leadership. Mark Rutte (right) was appointed NATO Secretary-General just three months ago. He’s a former Prime Minister of Holland – and he employed a Dutchman’s familiar bluntness when he said just before the New Year: “Russia’s economy is on a war footing . . . Danger is moving towards us at full speed.”

In a sense, there’s danger already in the midst of NATO. Russia is actively engaged in what security analysts call a form of hybrid warfare with Europe — which has involved sporadic,  but multiplying acts of espionage and sabotage. An American general in Europe, though officially not part of NATO’s command, expressed it colloquially at a recent strategic conference: the Russians he said: “are currently snooping around Europe and causing mischief in all of our backyards.”

This was the commanding general of  US Army, Europe and Africa, Darryl Williams, who at the time was about to retire. He said he couldn’t go into much operational detail, but described the Russian agents he was highlighting as “nontraditional.” And his audience had little doubt he meant, among other attacks, the planting of incendiary devices, disguised as machinery imported from Lithuania, and planted in airline cargo hubs at Leipzig, Germany and Birmingham, England.  These devices led Nato’s intelligence officers to theorize Russia could be aiming to target aircraft cargo-holds on transatlantic flights.

It was a disturbing conference. Wiliams was joined by Jack Watling, a ground warfare expert with the Royal United Services Institute in London, who said “We are seeing sabotage right across Europe.” Experts like him see such actions as Russian retaliation for Western support given to Ukraine.

General Cavoli: Russia Not Stopping with Ukraine

Mark Rutte’s in-uniform equivalent in NATO, the four-star general Christopher Cavoli (left), Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, rang this unspecific but resounding alarm bell: “Russia shows no sign of stopping. Russia does not intend to stop with Ukraine.”

Since Rutte is the alliance’s political head, it fell to him to urge NATO governments onto a rapid course of increased defense production and (to quote him exactly) “a shift to a wartime mindset.” He also added a reproach and a time-specific warning. “We are not ready,” he said, “for what is coming our way in four to five years."

The need for European countries to urgently build up their defensive response is getting more fully recognized across the continent. (And it’s an awkward kind of irony that it was Trump’s own disdain for NATO that contributed to the upward shift of gears). But we can’t expect it to be easy, for all sorts of reasons, many of them historical. Crucial to a broad reinforcement of defenses would be the enactment by Germany, Europe’s largest economy, of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s previous promises to raise defense spending. But this enactment will have to wait until after Scholz’s snap election, called for next month – in which he hopes to beat back an internal threat from anti-immigrant, rightwing extremists. He also has to do a lot of reassuring to his European allies that a beefed-up German defense is for everyone’s protection, not just Germany’s. Among its neighbors, echoes of Hitler’s rearmament in the 1930s still create considerable uneasiness about Germany as a military power.

Later in the twentieth century, during the Cold War, when it was Russia (Soviet Russia at the time) who cranked up military pressure in Europe  — taking offensive action, for instance, in supposedly friendly nations, like Hungary and Czechoslovakia — it was the US who led the allied response. But the American reaction this time around threatens, we all know, to be very different.

Looming over it of course is President-elect Trump’s general chumminess with Vladimir Putin. More specifically, we can note that his key appointments in the incoming Administration include advisers who are explicit about their desire to redeploy American military assets away from Europe. For instance, there’s the hardly well-known Elbridge Colby (right), nominated as Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy -- a step up at the Pentagon from where he served Trump last time. He wrote for international consumption last year (in Britain’s Financial Times, in fact) that China is a much higher priority for the US than Russia. He argued – rather remarkably - that “the US must withhold forces from Europe that are needed for Asia, even in the event of Russia attacking first”. Colby describes himself as “a realist” in foreign policy.

European defense analysts worry that a US military pullback from Europe would, fairly obviously, encourage Russian aggression. Keir Giles of the Chatham House international think-tank in London states the matter flatly in his recent book, which is entitled unambiguously “Russia's War on Everybody” (below, left). He writes: “The withdrawal of America’s military backing for NATO is the surest possible way of turning the possibility of Russia attacking beyond Ukraine into a probability.”

The staggering losses that Russia has sustained in its attempt to take over Ukraine— now estimated at 700,000 troops killed and wounded — are in themselves a warning of how far Putin can be willing to go. His army, despite those losses, is now … thanks to ever more aggressive conscription … larger than it was at the beginning of the war. (And that’s not counting  the North Koreans who’ve been added to the Russian side, irrespective of how unwilling they might be as combatants.)  Russia is now set to leapfrog the United States and India in military numbers … making it the second biggest force in the world, after China.

Putting it brutally, European countries lack the manpower and equipment to engage in a war of attrition of the kind Russia has been fighting in Ukraine. The once massive numbers that Britain could field now stand at just 74,000 soldiers — the fewest since the year 1792. The German army has even less - 64,000.  NATO’s planners themselves assess the Alliance to be roughly one-third short of where it needs to be to effectively deter Russia. There are especially acute shortages in air defense, logistics, ammunition of all kinds and secure electronic communications.

Alliance member-countries are currently committed to spending two percent of their Gross Domestic Product on defense. They look likely to raise it to three percent at the next NATO summit. But that 3 per cent target is still based on the assumption that America will keep its commitment to NATO steady.

Not a wise assumption, we’d have to judge, given the tenor of Trump’s approach, which he voiced broadly this week as a demand that Europe’s two percent contribution level should be more than doubled to five percent - which happens to be much greater than his own country’s level. Plus of course the detailed plans of his acolytes for an actual pullback from Europe. Maybe the Trumpists are thinking that a risibly-named ‘diplomatic’ solution negotiated with Russia could dispel Europe’s fears.

A traditional role for the media is to hold the country’s leaders’ ‘feet to the fire’ to use a much-favored phrase in America’s newsrooms. They can all remember (readers, viewers and listeners can too) how Trump blustered his assurance that he could end the Ukraine war in a day, and even before his inauguration … so how much feet-burning can we expect now?