Washington Merry-Go-Round

IMMEDIATE RELEASE 1 March 2025
WASHINGTON MERRY-GO-ROUND
Today’s Events in Historical Perspective
America’s Longest-Running Column Founded 1932
The Keystone and Catastrophe
By Douglas Cohn and Eleanor Clift         
 
WASHINGTON – The following analysis is ominous, far from a worst case, and hopefully wrong.
         For most of its history Europe has been a battleground, and it remained so until April 4, 1949, the date the NATO Treaty was signed by 30 European nations plus the United States and Canada. Seventy-six years of European peace followed, an arch of peace held together by its keystone, the United States (NATO and Russia jointly intervened to stop the fighting in Yugoslavia as it broke up).
              Remove the keystone and the arch collapses, and for the current U.S. president such removal is his goal. For reasons suspect the president has aligned himself with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, a dictator who poses the greatest threat to Europe since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Commensurate with his America First policy, America’s new president has furthered the country’s enforced isolationism by commencing the pullout of U.S. troops from Europe, followed by economic isolationism as he prepares to impose high tariffs on the nations of Europe.
In the midst of this Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelinsky met with the new U.S. President and Vice President in the Oval Office for what may have been a preplanned made-for-television attempt to humiliate Zelinsky into lashing out (which he did not do), so it could be claimed he disrespected the United States, and his country was therefore unworthy of restarting the U.S. aid which had dried up in January. If so, it backfired with the EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, acknowledging the view widely held in Europe, that “the free world needs a new leader.”
Unless the president suddenly and unexpectedly reverses course, and NATO begins to unravel, Europe will be forced to go it alone.
Enter the war in Ukraine. Will it prove to be a Sarajevo moment when the 1914 assassination of Austrian Archduke Ferdinand and his wife became more excuse than spark for the launching of World War I?
The European options are stark. Europe has provided more aid to Ukraine than the U.S. has, but filling the void will be a daunting task. It will bust budgets. Some countries will balk. There will be hawks and doves. Some will want to follow the inglorious path of appeasement. Others will press for confrontation. Almost certainly, there will not be unanimity, a cornerstone requirement in the NATO Treaty.
Meanwhile, Russian forces are continuing to press forward in Ukraine, all the more so knowing where the U.S. president stands. Further, North Korea has announced its intention to send additional troops to buoy the Russian effort. And it should be remembered that North Korea is a Chinese surrogate quite possibly being funded by China.
So, the dynamic has changed with a new Russia, North Korea, and China coalition facing Ukraine, bereft of U.S. support and hoping for an awakened Europe to step up, failing in which Ukraine will fall.
Most likely, Europe will once again resume its splintered history. The idea of a European Army replacing NATO’s Army will almost certainly fail to attract all or even a majority of Europe’s nations. Eastern Europe will have the most to fear from Putin’s Russia, but its armies are small. Following the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany after German reunification in 1990, the German armed forces were limited to 370,000 personnel, a fact that makes the country vulnerable if it stands alone, and Poland’s army is slightly more than half that size. The other Eastern European armies are even smaller.
Even so, Europe’s future is tied to Ukraine’s future. If Ukraine falls and NATO dismantles, Putin’s plan to reestablish the Russian Empire will gain traction. The Baltic states of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania, all with significant Russian-speaking populations in their eastern provinces, could be taken without a fight much as Hitler walked into Czechoslovakia in 1938-39.
In short, only a unified Europe can deter Russia and its allies, and the line must be drawn in Ukraine, but the introduction of NATO-aligned troops could raise the prospect of a wider war, even a nuclear war, and the U.S., although an inactive member of NATO, would object.
Meanwhile, the idea that the battleline in Ukraine will remain near static is belied by memory of World War I’s Western Front that remained static until the German line suddenly cracked. With this in mind, it must be realized that a collapse of the Ukrainian line would mean the collapse of Ukraine, which coupled with the fissures in NATO, would place Eastern Europe at risk.
This is the conundrum. Take the risks associated with confronting Russia in Ukraine or the risks associated with the fall of Ukraine.
There are alternatives if Europe can remain united in its resolve. European forces could be stationed in major Ukrainian cities and regions far from the front, a scenario that could deter Russia’s ongoing missile campaign. and it could signal that a breakthrough of Ukrainian lines could not be exploited deep into the country.
Another option would be for European troops to occupy relatively quiet sectors of the front as peacekeepers in the hope that the Russians would not engage them. This would shorten the battlefront and free up soldiers, Ukrainian and Russian, to deploy in active areas, an outcome that would prove more beneficial to Ukraine than Russia.
The reality is that none of this is likely. At best, Europe will ramp up its war production and continue to resupply Ukraine, but it cannot immediately replace U.S. made weapons such as the Patriot and HIMARs systems, nor the Elon Musk-controlled Starlink satellite internet service funded by the U.S. government.
In the end, with the U.S. pulling its aid from Ukraine and diminishing its role in NATO, Ukraine will fall, Europe will splinter, Russia, financially supported by China, will grow stronger and more aggressive, and the United States will become weaker, wallowing in military and economic isolationism.
 
See Eleanor Clift’s book Selecting a President, and Douglas Cohn’s latest books The President’s First Year: The Only School for Presidents Is the Presidency and World War 4: Nine Scenarios (endorsed by seven flag officers).
          Twitter:  @douglas_cohn
          © 2024 U.S. News Syndicate, Inc.
          Distributed by U.S. News Syndicate, Inc.
END WASHINGTON MERRY-GO-ROUND