Well, he is. Sort of. President Trump is recognizing that NATO has outlived its usefulness, seeing as the “Soviet Menace”, as we used to call it, disappeared, you know, almost thirty years ago, so we don’t have keep paying to defend Europe from a “threat” that doesn’t exist.
Of course, cool, calm reflection and “reason’ aren’t exactly El Trumpo’s style, which is why he’s bellowing about how the Europeans should start meeting that fabled “2% of GDP” defense budget standard that NATO supposedly sets for its members. Some wiseguys have suggested that Europe isn’t coming through with its 2% because they aren’t really afraid of Russia in the first place, which, shockingly, makes a lot of sense to me.
I can understand Europeans don’t like having a guy who looks like a Tom of Finland wannabe waving his warheads in their faces, but I also suspect that they actually don’t think that Putin is stupid enough to start a real war of aggression. Yes, Putin “took” Crimea, which had been part of Russia for longer than Texas has been part of the U.S. (by about a century), but the notion that Russia’s shrunken boundaries, set in a period of stunning economic collapse,1 should endure “forever” was a bit ridiculous, particularly when the U.S. was aggressively encouraging every former member of the old Czarist Empire to pursue anti-Russian policies. If the U.S. had, in effect, urged Ukraine to remain in Russia’s orbit, instead of eagerly urging her to “go West”, the entire Ukraine disaster could have been avoided.
Trump, to the horror of the unreconstructed neocons, is also making nice with the Russians in Syria, almost as if he’s recognizing that Russia might have a “legitimate” interest in another country, as legitimate, at least, as that of the United States itself.2
In the Far East, Trump has announced that, thanks entirely to him, of course, North Korea is no longer a nuclear threat to the U.S. Of course, as I’ve complained endlessly in the past, it never was. Well, it may be offensive if a president can reap political credit for making the sun rise, but at least it’s better than, you know, nuclear war!3
How is Donald managing this “retreat”, which, unlike Obama’s “retreat”, which was a (very) loud figment of the Republican Party’s imagination, is an actual retreat? Well, because he’s Donald Trump, that’s why, and good Republicans believe whatever tells them. Well, that’s half the magic. The other half is that Trump, while significantly reducing our commitments abroad, is significantly increasing the Pentagon’s budget! So everybody’s happy!
Afterwords
The one outlier/fly in the ointment4 is Trump’s obsession (if it is one) with Iran. Clearly, he’d like to do something “big”—his ultimate hero, after all, is George Patton—but what? There’s no one more confrontational on the planet than Tom “They call me Mr. Regime Change” Bolton, who clearly wants to push Iran into a corner the way George Bush II did with Iraq, but where this will all go is very unclear. For the most part, Bolton is following the Trump line of making nice with both Putin and Kim Jong-un, Donald’s favorite 34-year-old mass murderer, so we’ll have to just wait and see.
UPDATE
Daniel Larison suggests, all too convincingly, that we’re lucky not to be already at war with Venezuela. So I’d say the outlook is gloomy with very strong chance of rain.
- When the USSR collapsed in 1989, the country’s grain production, about 65 million tons a year had not changed since the mid-1960s, despite a large increase in population. The Soviets had been importing grain for decades, even though Czarist Russia had been a leading exporter. After the Soviet collapse, Russia is once more a leading exporter: the 2017-2018 harvest is expected to be 133 million tons. The USSR was a house of cards, entirely dependent on high oil prices. When these collapsed, the house came tumbling down. Russia today, buoyed by both (relatively) high oil prices and record grain production (and a far more sensible military establishment) is in much better financial shape than the “mighty USSR”, whose glory Putin stupidly wishes to recapture. ↩︎
- Remember Obama’s stupid “Assad must go”? Yo, Barack! How does it feel to know that Donald Trump is smarter than you are? ↩︎
- Pissed off neocons like Jennifer Rubin are vociferously pointing to reports that North Korea isn’t honoring the feel-good paragraphs that Trump and Kim Jong-un agreed to in Singapore. Will Donald feel he’s been played for a sucker? Or will his self-love cause him to deny reality, for the umpteenth time? I’m afraid that one’s a bit of a toss-up. ↩︎
- “Ointment”, eh? Wow, that takes you back, right? When was the last time you ever used “ointment”? 1959? ↩︎
