Pew: Just 47% of Democrats think U.S. should honor its NATO obligations to defend an ally against Russia. Me: That many?:
Actually, what I find a bit dismaying is that not even seven out of every ten Republicans believe that NATO should still mean something. Which is not to say that the venerable, Cold War-era Western alliance hasn't been searching for a purpose since the Soviet Union collapsed twenty-four years ago, and couldn't be rethought - in theory. All other things being equal, there would be at least something to be said for taking our military resources still deployed there and moving them elsewhere on the globe where they are more pressingly needed.
But things are not equal, what with Czar Vlad rebuilding the old Evil Empire and taking aim at NATO, no matter how soothing his mendatious reassurances to the contrary. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, in other words, is recovering its original purpose, whether it likes it or not, and that narrow an American majority support for it is little short of hair-raising.
Or is, until you see that majority support for NATO in its member countries only exists on this side of the Atlantic:
Look where there's outright public opposition: France (no surprise) and two former front-line NATO states, and the two one-time European Axis powers, Germany and Italy. Without which, I regret to say, the alliance cannot function, even as (symbolically) expanded as it looks on paper today. And that -20% German opposition extends to all anti-Russian options: admitting Ukraine to NATO (57% opposed), and providing the Ukrainians military aid (77% opposed).
Again, the historical parallel seems to be the late 1930s, during Hitler's Western-pacifist-driven road to war. The British and French, vowing never to fight again for any reason after the slaughter of World War I, chose not to go to war on Czechoslovakia's behalf over the Sudetenland crisis. Which bought them peace....for a year. A year after that France had been conquered and the British were being annihilated by the Blitz. Now had the Brits and French drew a line in the sand instead at Munich, would that have meant war with Nazi Germany? Maybe. But it's a certain bet that if it had, it would have been much smaller in scope, on much less favorable terms to the Germans, and on the Western democracies' initiative, not Hitler's.
It's not difficult to envision a scenario where if NATO arms the Ukrainians now and blunts Putin's geostrategic momentum, perhaps he's still deterred from moving on the Baltic States and bringing about NATO's collapse. It's effortless to actually predict that if NATO does nothing, Ukraine will either be overrun or undermined until it collapses, either way falling under Russian domination, and then it will be Lithuania's, Latvia's, and Estonia's turn. And NATO will be no more, because most of its members adamantly refuse to defend themselves, or even want the U.S. to defend them.
Like we were still capable of it.
Incidentally, here's the gallows punchline:
The Russian people want the Evil Empire back, Vladimir Putin is delivering it, and the Russians utterly adore him for it. So much so that even though they acknowledge that their economy is a disaster (73%), run by the Russian mafia, and their leader is a dictator, 70% of them approve of his economic policies, 62% say Putin is an anti-corruption crusader, and 63% call him a stalwart defender of Russian civil liberties.
And Putin's approval number on foreign policy? 88%.
Are the Russians slaves? That's the direction in which they are headed. But like the Germans in the late thirties, they're slaves on the winning side, and they accordingly love their despot as much as the Germans loved Hitler.
At the rate things are deteriorating, Czar Vlad won't even have to kick in the door of the rotten NATO structure, because for all practical intents and purposes, the Western Alliance no longer exists.
Exit question: Does anybody really want Barack Obama to apply any of his patented "leadership" to this predicament?
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