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United States
September 6, 2024 Planning for a post-American NATO, „Europe must prepare for a second Trump term”. By the end of January 2025, the Europe’s most important partner, the United States, could be led by former President Trump, who has said that he would encourage Russia to do “whatever the hell it wanted” to European countries that did not do what he wanted: spend more on defense. Freed from the influence of the traditional Atlanticist Republicans who staffed his cabinet in his first term, a second-term Trump would face fewer obstacles to making good on his threats. The magnitude of the change that a Trump victory could bring is far too great for Europe to sit by and hope that the former president loses at the ballot box. European governments stuck their heads in the sand. Trump has ’warned’ that he would immediately cut all U.S. aid to Kyiv and demand a quick end to the war, which would likely require Ukraine to cede a significant part of its territory to Russia. And that could just be the start. Trump has long questioned the value of NATO, so it is not inconceivable that he would strip back the U.S. commitment to defend Europe. He could enact the analyst Maitra’s widely circulated “dormant NATO” proposal, in which the U.S. military would provide logistics support as a last resort but leave all other NATO defense responsibilities to Europe, or follow in the footsteps of French President de Gaulle, who removed France from NATO’s military command (but not the alliance itself) in 1966. There is no reason Trump could not act quickly. As commander in chief, he could vow never to order U.S. troops to fight for Europe and take steps to withdraw the United States from NATO’s military command. Without the United States to provide military leadership and capability, European capitals could quickly turn against one another over Ukraine. Countries in central and eastern Europe, for instance, may double down on their commitment to the survival of a strong Ukraine, fearing that a Russian victory would give Moscow the opportunity to rebuild, rearm, and then, with the help of a compliant Belarus and Ukraine, issue new threats across the border. Many western European countries, meanwhile, might decide that, with the United States out of the picture, the best option would be to force Ukraine to make extensive concessions to Russia. A European security alliance could collapse under the weight of such incompatible outlooks. European countries and institutions must start planning now. The continent’s leaders will need to grapple with many hard questions. The most urgent among them fall into three categories: how to structure European security, who should lead the effort, and what capabilities Europe must acquire. The most straightforward and best solution would be for Europe to assume control of the North Atlantic Council, the decision-making authority within NATO, being familiar to all NATO countries in Europe and having an established secretariat. European countries could also repurpose NATO facilities, such as the NATO Defense College, that are scattered across the continent. ’The new NAC could draw upon other European institutions for support, too. The EU, for example, could help coordinate the national legislative change and bloc-wide financial planning that will be necessary to prepare European societies for a potential conflict’. ’And although the NAC would remain the primary decision-making body for NATO members’, the European Political Community, which was established after Russia’s 2022 invasion and counts several non-NATO countries among its members, would play an important role as a forum for discussing security matters that affect the region as a whole. European countries have essentially outsourced geopolitical leadership to the United States for the last 75 years or so. ’No European country has experience with that job, and there is no natural leader for the rest to converge upon’. Berlin, crippled by political indecision, has failed to display leadership so far in the war in Ukraine. Having cozied up to Russia before the 2022 invasion, and joining the United States in limiting aid to Ukraine after, Germany has lost the trust of many of the central and eastern European countries that fear ending up on a new frontline. The openly pro-Russian positions espoused by the ’far-right’ Alternative for Germany and ’far-left’ Reason and Justice parties, both of which made strong showings in last weekend’s regional elections, raise additional concerns. France could be a better option. As one of Europe’s two nuclear powers, France would necessarily play an important and immediate role in European security if the United States were to withdraw. The French have a competent military. Yet Paris, like Berlin, carries serious liabilities. In the early months of the invasion, Macron favored reaching some kind of arrangement with Russian President Putin, and today, politicians on France’s increasingly empowered ’far right’ and far left, as in Germany, seriously discuss cutting aid to Ukraine. The United Kingdom, Europe’s other nuclear power, would bring many positive attributes to the leadership role. London, as a ’consistent supporter’ of Ukraine, is aligned with Europe’s frontline countries. The United Kingdom also has long-standing defense ties with fellow members of the Joint Expeditionary Force, a military grouping of ten Baltic, Scandinavian, and other northern European nations. But after its 2016 decision to leave the EU, it is almost impossible to see EU countries agreeing to British strategic command. Europe could seize the opportunity to make a less conventional choice for its security leadership. Poland has emerged as a strong candidate. It is a large country with a growing economy, and it took defense seriously even before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Over the past few years, Warsaw has undertaken the most substantial military buildup on the continent, increasing both the fraction of its GDP spent on defense and the forces deployed to its borders with Belarus and the Russian enclave Kaliningrad, and its defense budget target of five percent of GDP for 2025 outpaces the rest of Europe. ’Already seen as a leader in central and eastern Europe’, Poland understands frontline countries’ concerns about Russia in a way that a western European government cannot. Given that Poland shares a border with Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia, its military would be critical ’in a larger war with Russia’. Warsaw, aware of this, is now expending significant resources to upgrade its army and air force. Before the war in Ukraine, a land-centric military such as Poland’s would not have been considered capable of leading European forces. But NATO’s traditional emphasis on air and sea domains was largely a function of the centrality of the United States, which relied on long-range air and sea capabilities to project power across the Atlantic. Without Washington, the picture changes. If Europe is defending itself, its land power, supported by tactical airpower, becomes its bulwark. Thus, once Poland expands its air force - it is now amassing one of Europe’s largest fleets of F-35 and F-16 fighter jets - the country will have a striking case for security leadership. 'If the need arises, a Polish officer could be selected as the first supreme allied commander for a European NATO'. This choice would make political and strategic sense to show both frontline states and Russia that Europe is serious about protecting its eastern flank. A strong signal of this kind is sorely needed; the appointed successor to Jens Stoltenberg as NATO secretary-general, Mark Rutte, most recently served as prime minister of the Netherlands, a country that has consistently failed to meet the NATO defense spending target of two percent of GDP. Elevating a Polish commander would also smooth the way for a civilian leader from western Europe, ensuring the political balance that would be crucial to European unity in the early stages of post-American security planning. Europe has outsourced many essential defense capabilities to the United States. It has neglected to develop the basic capabilities it would need if the United States were to draw down. Perhaps the most glaring among them is a system for intelligence sharing among European states. For decades, Europe has relied on the Five Eyes - the intelligence network that includes Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States - to conduct much of its intelligence work. The United States does the bulk of the data collection - high-end, space-based intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems. Washington’s retreat from Europe would thus disrupt the flow of information. European countries would have to rely on local sources for data collection and analysis. Setting up the architecture to share intelligence among European NATO members will be a challenge in the absence of U.S. leadership. Althoug reams of data, it turns out, do not always produce good intelligence or insight. Some of the best intelligence work on Russia over the past few years has in fact come from smaller countries with more specialized knowledge. The Baltic states and the Nordic states, for instance, have consistently provided useful information about Russian capabilities and intentions. Ukraine, too, has done a credible job analyzing Russian strengths and weaknesses, and ’Kyiv’s intelligence capacity has enabled operations such as a strategic air campaign against Russian oil production’. Europe’s country-by-country weapons production is also wildly inefficient. Across the ten main categories of major weapons systems - such as fighter aircraft or destroyers - the United States maintains 33 types of systems. Europe maintains 174. This has limited European militaries’ interoperability and created a logistic nightmare. Decades of peace and Europe’s concentration on boutique capabilities have also left the continent with insufficient weapons arsenals. Individual countries’ protectionist impulses to bring investments home would replicate the inefficiencies of Europe’s small-scale, national weapons production. „European countries have not moved as quickly as the United States to address their production capacity shortfalls - a problem they will need to rectify in order to plan for an end to or a drastic reduction in U.S. material support for Ukraine’. The European Political Community should negotiate a framework for joint - its own - research and development. The task has largely been farmed out to the United States. NATO’s London-based Defense Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic, which became operational last year, has begun to extract lessons from the war in Ukraine, especially regarding dual-use technologies that originate in the civilian sphere - European countries could repurpose and expand this model to fill the resulting gap. Logistically, Europe would have to confront issues around deployability. „Without U.S. capabilities, European militaries could not maintain any kind of global presence; they do not have the capacity for long-distance air deployments of fighting units on their own”. Europe will need to invest in the full breadth of tactical airpower, while it integrates the capacities of European militaries. „European NATO might have to confront life without the U.S. nuclear deterrent”, it would also need to build up a credible European nuclear deterrent, separate from the United States. In the long term, the nuclear deterrent would have to be fully Europeanized. A United States with little military presence on the continent - and with an administration that looks rather benignly at Putin - could not credibly warn Europe’s enemies that it would put its nuclear weapons in play ’in the event of an attack’. ’This is not to say Europe should reject a slimmed-down U.S. deterrent if a Trump administration were to offer’. In the short term, the job would fall to France and the United Kingdom, which both have small nuclear arsenals. The immediate challenge will be ’coordinating the deployment’ and refitting of the British and French nuclear arsenals. Furthermore, ’London and Paris must begin to expand their deterrents to the rest of the continent’. Europe’s nuclear capacity would need to be fully independent. As long as Russia maintains its vast nuclear arsenal, Europe will need to protect itself from Russian nuclear blackmail. Europe would have to manufacture a nuclear delivery system. At present, European states have the ability to produce nuclear warheads on their own. But they have outsourced the means to deliver those warheads -the United Kingdom today shares a nuclear missile fleet with the United States. (Source: foreignaffairs)
by O’Brien, Head of the School of International Relations and Professor of Strategic Studies at the University of St. Andrews; Stringer, a senior fellow at Policy Exchange, a retired RAF Air Marshal, and former Director General of the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom.
September 06, 2024 "Many of the recruits drafted under Ukraine’s new conscription law lack the motivation and military indoctrination required to actually aim their weapons and fire at Russian soldiers. “Some people don’t want to shoot. They see the enemy in the firing position in trenches but don’t open fire… That is why our men are dying,' said a frustrated battalion commander in Ukraine’s 47th Brigade. “When they don’t use the weapon, they are ineffective.' In Ukraine, an expanded military draft has failed to overcome the reality that most young Ukrainians do not want to kill and die in an endless, unwinnable war. Hardened veterans see new recruits much as Sassoon described the British conscripts he was training in November 1916 in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer: “The raw material to be trained was growing steadily worse. Most of those who came in now had joined the Army unwillingly, and there was no reason why they should find military service tolerable.” U.S. Brigadier General “Slam” Marshall, a First World War veteran and the chief combat historian of the U.S. Army in the Second World War conducted hundreds of post-combat small group sessions with U.S. troops in the Pacific and Europe, and documented his findings in his book, Men Against Fire: the Problem of Battle Command. One of Marshall’s most startling and controversial findings was that only about 15% of U.S. troops in combat actually fired their weapons at the enemy. In no case did that ever rise above 25%, even when failing to fire placed the soldiers’ own lives in greater danger. Marshall concluded that most human beings have a natural aversion to killing other human beings, often reinforced by our upbringing and religious beliefs, and that turning civilians into effective combat soldiers therefore requires training and indoctrination expressly designed to override our natural respect for fellow human life. This dichotomy between human nature and killing in war is now understood to lie at the root of much of the PTSD suffered by combat veterans. Marshall’s conclusions were incorporated into U.S. military training, with the introduction of firing range targets that looked like enemy soldiers and deliberate indoctrination to dehumanize the enemy in soldiers’ minds. When he conducted similar research in the Korean War, Marshall found that changes in infantry training based on his work in World War II had already led to higher firing ratios. That trend continued in Vietnam and more recent U.S. wars. Part of the shocking brutality of the U.S. hostile military occupation of Iraq stemmed directly from the dehumanizing indoctrination of the U.S. occupation forces, which included falsely linking Iraq to the September 11th terrorist crimes in the U.S. and labeling Iraqis who resisted the U.S. invasion and occupation of their country as “terrorists.' A Zogby poll of U.S. forces in Iraq in February 2006 found that 85% of U.S. troops believed their mission was to 'retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9/11 attacks,' and 77% believed that the primary reason for the war was to 'stop Saddam from protecting Al Qaeda in Iraq.” This was all pure fiction, cut from whole cloth by propagandists in Washington, and yet, three years into the U.S. occupation, the Pentagon was still misleading U.S. troops to falsely link Iraq with 9/11'. 'The response of the U.S. political class to the blowback from its catastrophic wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was simply to avoid large deployments of U.S. ground forces or “boots on the ground.” They instead embraced the use of devastating bombing and artillery campaigns in Afghanistan, Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria, and wars fought by proxies, with full, “ironclad” U.S. support, in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and now Ukraine and Palestine. The absence of large numbers of U.S. casualties in these wars kept them off the front pages back home and avoided the kind of political blowback generated by the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. The lack of media coverage and public debate meant that most Americans knew very little about these more recent wars, until the shocking atrocity of the genocide in Gaza finally started to crack the wall of silence and indifference. The results of these U.S. proxy wars are, predictably, no less catastrophic than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. domestic political impacts have been mitigated, but the real-world impacts in the countries and regions involved are as deadly, destructive and destabilizing as ever, undermining U.S. “soft power' and pretensions to global leadership in the eyes of much of the world. In fact, these policies have widened the yawning gulf between the worldview of ill-informed Americans who cling to the view of their country as a country at peace and a force for good in the world, and people in other countries, especially in the Global South, who are ever more outraged by the violence, chaos and poverty caused by the aggressive projection of U.S. military and economic power, whether by U.S. wars, proxy wars, bombing campaigns, coups or economic sanctions'. As Israeli and Ukrainian leaders see their political support crumbling, Netanyahu and Zelenskyy are taking increasingly desperate risks, all the while insisting that the U.S. must come to their rescue. By “leading from behind,' our leaders have surrendered the initiative to these foreign leaders, who will keep pushing the United States to make good on its promises of unconditional support, which will sooner or later include sending young American troops to kill and die alongside their own. (Source: counterpunch)
by Davies, an independent journalist, the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq, and War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, co-authored with Benjamin.
Globalization
6 Sep 2024 at 12:20 Over the past 12 months, the global average temperature was 1.64°C higher than pre-industrial levels, above the 1.5°C threshold that policymakers and scientists say threatens life on the planet. The European Union's (EU) Copernicus Climate Change Service reported that for June to August, global temperatures were 0.69 degrees Celsius above historical averages, beating the previous high set last year. The record for the world's highest average temperature was broken on a number of days over the summer. In Europe, the heat over the June to August period was 1.54°C above the 1991-2020 average, according to Copernicus. The most extreme conditions were recorded in the Mediterranean region and Eastern Europe, while the United Kingdom, Iceland, parts of Ireland, the west coast of Portugal and southern Norway were cooler than the norm. And parts of the Southern Hemisphere just had a very mild winter, with Australia experiencing the hottest August since data started in 1910 and looking forward to a warmer-than-average spring. This summer the effects of a strong El Niño weather pattern, which causes warming in the Pacific Ocean, started giving way to the La Niña phenomenon. This shift usually means less extreme heat, but it can also bring droughts in some areas and produces flooding and hurricanes elsewhere. (Source: bangkokpost)
