Hey, I promised, and a blogger always keeps his word—well, within the limits of reason, of course. And, anyway, Dan is at his terrible worst in this one—his terribleist, one might say—in an abysmal missive abysmally titled The progressive case against NATO is weird. When a pundit, particularly a scholarly one such as Dan, uses the word “weird” to refute an argument he disagrees with, you know he doesn’t have a case. He’s afraid to engage with the actual arguments with which he’s confronted, and instead retreats to what is the intellectual equivalent of feces throwing. To each his own.
To contend with Dan a little bit more directly, let’s, well, begin at the beginning. Dan is bouncing his excrementitious abuse off an excellent article, Sorry, Liberals. But You Really Shouldn’t Love NATO., by Stephen Wertheim, who is a bit absurdly titled as “direct of grand strategy” at the Quincy Institute for Responsible (as in “non-Drezneresque”) Statecraft, an outfit specifically set up to counter our confrontation-loving, intervention-happy foreign policy establishment, aka “the Blob”, which Dan so compulsively defends.
Dan half-concedes Wertheim one point in his argument against the expansion of NATO, but then takes it back, largely changing the subject as he does so:
Wertheim’s strongest argument is the disastrous fallout from NATO’s 2008 Bucharest declaration, which stated that Georgia and Ukraine “will become members of NATO” without any viable plan of action. U.S. policymakers intended it as a sop, but the Russians took it seriously. Plenty of Russian national security experts point to that declaration as the beginning of the end for Russian President Vladimir Putin and the West. It is not a coincidence that Russia invaded both countries.
Of course, the flip side of that argument is that these same Russian security experts do not reference earlier rounds of NATO expansion as triggering, well, anything. This contradicts Wertheim’s theory that the original sin was NATO expansion in the ’90s.
First of all, for NATO to declare that Georgia and Ukraine “will become members of NATO” is not a “sop”. A state visit from the first lady is a sop. A statement that “possible future associate membership at a later date will be considered in the near future” is a sop. If NATO actually intended their statement as a “sop”, then it was not a sop, it was a lie. And lies do not make good policy.
Next up is “Plenty of Russian national security experts point to that declaration as the beginning of the end for Russian President Vladimir Putin and the West.” Does the phrase “Russian national security experts” mean “Russian experts on their national security” or “experts on Russian security in the West”? It’s entirely unclear, and it makes a difference. Secondly, Dan is putting words in these shadowy figures’ mouths without giving us the slightest reason to believe that what he is saying is, you know, “true”. Furthermore, there are plenty of foreign policy “experts” who would disagree radically with Dan’s second citation from the “thought” of this ghostly crowd, to wit: “these same Russian security experts do not reference earlier rounds of NATO expansion as triggering, well, anything.”
Uh, really? How in God’s name are we supposed to verify that? Can Dan give me a list of the names of the “plenty” of Russian national security agents, along with a citation-studded summary of their views on both subjects? Of course he can’t. He’s just making this stuff up as he goes along.
There are, in fact, plenty of foreign policy experts who have been deeply critical of NATO’s actions back in the 1990s, actions that deeply antagonized Russia and ensured that future actions, including any and all “sops”, would be regarded with instant suspicion. Ted Galen Carpenter, senior fellow in defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, writing in the National Interest back in 2017, has an excellent article, How Kosovo Poisoned America's Relationship with Russia which is well worth Dan’s time, and yours as well. Carpenter describes the 1999 intervention and its subsequent fall-out as follows:
The Kosovo intervention set some terrible precedents. A supposedly defensive U.S.-led alliance attacked a country that had not attacked any NATO member, disregarded Moscow’s angry protests, and forcibly detached the province of a sovereign country, placing it under international control. That set of worrisome precedents was compounded by the actions that the United States and its allies took in early 2008. Kosovo wanted to declare its formal independence from Serbia, but it was clear that such a move would face a certain Russian (and probable Chinese) veto in the UN Security Council. Washington and an ad hoc coalition of European Union countries brazenly bypassed the council and approved Pristina’s independence declaration.
It was an extremely controversial move. Not even all EU members were on board with the policy, since some of them worried about the wider ramifications. Spain fretted about the encouragement because such a decision might give to its own secessionist movements, especially the Basques and the Catalonians. Greece and Cyprus were deeply concerned that ratifying the forcible severing of Kosovo from Serbia could legitimize Turkey’s earlier military seizure of the northern portion of Cyprus and the subsequent establishment of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus in that occupied territory.
Russia’s leaders protested vehemently and warned that the West’s unauthorized action established a dangerous, destabilizing precedent. Washington rebuffed such complaints, arguing that the Kosovo situation was unique. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs R. Nicholas Burns made that point explicitly in a February 2008 State Department briefing. Because the situation was unique, he insisted, the West’s Kosovo policy set no precedent regarding other ethnic secessionist situations. Both the illogic and the hubris of that position were breathtaking.
It's a good bet that Dan doesn’t recognize Ted as an “expert” on anything because he’s not part of the “club”, aka “the Blob”, the 18th and Mass clique of foreign policy outfits that constitute, for Dan, “the world”.2 As in all of Dan’s pro-Blob rants, I am invariably struck by the limits, rather than the capaciousness, of his philosophy. The limits, and the evasiveness. He responds to the remainder of Wertheim’s arguments as he does to all explicit attacks on the basic premises, and past sorry record, of the Blob, with snickers and sneers and deliberate misunderstandings. He won’t recognize how our constant pushing and shoving to “free” Ukraine led inevitably to the Russian invasion of Crimea and the subsequent Ukrainian civil war, which we continue to insist on subsidizing, in an effort that does “divide Europe”, though Dr. Drezner refuses to admit it, as he refuses to admit that our decades-long, purpose-free occupation of Afghanistan was an absurd and utterly unnecessary bloodbath. Dr. Drezner seems to feel no responsibility at all for this unending record of “good intentions” (good intentions/Wille zur Macht) leading over and over again to bloody disaster. Because being the Blob means never having to say you’re sorry.
Afterwords
Dan won’t even engage with the argument that NATO, being an alliance to counter the threat of the Soviet Union and the dogma of world revolution that provided its reason for being, lost its reason for being when both the USSR and the dream of “revolution” went belly up in 1989. Nor will he notice that the European Union is a far more powerful entity than Russia, by any and all measures,3 and doesn’t need our help. For if he did, that might deprive him of his reason for being.
1. Carpenter’s piece is taken from his book-long study, NATO's Empty Victory, published in “real time”, back in 2000.
2. The American Enterprise Institute, Brookings, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies are within a few blocks of the intersection of 18th and Massachusetts Ave, NW, in DC, as am I. If I missed anyone “important”, I apologize.
3. EU population, 447,710,000; Russia’s population, 146,200,00. EU GDP, $16.2 trillion; Russia’s GDP, $4.33 trillion. EU defense spending (2019), $220 billion; Russia’s defense spending (2019), $65 billion. In fact, Germany alone if far more powerful than Russia.
