This is the general problem with NATO. Security guarantees only have worth if willing to defend. Expanding into eastern Europe was idiotic. Are Americans ready to die for Estonia, Lithuania? Did Americans ever voted for willing to die for them? I bet the average American doesn't even know where to find them on a map.
I believe article 5 only talks about supporting the other. The US could do that with financial support, weapon deliveries,... but with thousands stationed in Europe they will be in the crosshair. I still have hope for rationality from the US but the EU is lost. I've never seen such morally depraved humans in my life with zero respect for democracy and their citizens. No government ever survived making people poor. This is the hope we have, the EU collapsing before starting a nuclear war.
Even when I say I have more hope for the US if you look at politics I see both with the democrats and republicans the same kind of people as in the EU. Trump might represent the American spirit but has to go authoritarian just to push back, but like all authoritarian leaders he gets lost in nitpicking about trivial things. At some point the government becomes that mosquito around your head and people turn against you. Just focus on the things that matter.
Article 5 was invoked in Afghanistan which was because America was attacked on 9/11. Libya was a NATO operation but once again America was attacked along with UK by the Lockerbie Bomber…so so far Article 5 has worked to our benefit as our Air Force needed the practice in the late 1990s.
If Europe gets attacked first we will see if the president at the time joins Europe because it’s not a guarantee.
Agree to a large degree with your assessment (except I’m hopeful that Europe is not lost). Consider the broader military strategy and doctrine in the complexity of things. This is multi-dimensional chess, where some wars need propping up, while other needs to be rapidly extinguished. See my comments on US strategy below.
After successfully having manifactured reality, the European Commission and a large segment of European politicians, media and academia have convinced themselves that they can manifest victory.
A correct assessment of the situation by Stephen. The Europeans--it is a misnomer--speak as if they are "one voice". It could not be farther from the truth.
Having lived in Europe, no one, especially those in the south and south western parts of the EU, have any inclination to march to fight the Russians.
Even, the Poles and the Baltics, acidic as they sound, have no such illusions unless Uncle Sam steps in. We are not fools!
No one mentions that NATO's largest army apart from that of the US, is Turkey's. Does any sane person believe that the Turks would step in to fight the Russians, given their memories of WWI and how the Ottomans were destroyed in the Caucasus.
The European public must jettison these so-called leaders of the UK, Germany and France and replace them with proper ones that care more economic growth than war.
This sounds profoundly true, and it was fairly quiet since the fall of the Soviet Union. The Neocons never trusted the Russians and perhaps for good reason when you look at the broader geopolitics.
The US is 100% not going to fight a war with Russia. Such folly would immediately hand military hegemony to China as the US would be degraded, even if it survived.
As such, any guarantee would not be respected by the Americans, thereby undermining all American security guarantees, and exposing the US as a paper tiger, handing hegemony to China.
Trump is wrong about nearly everything. He is right about Russia.
Biden was pretty clear about not sending troops. I would say Biden and Trump saw eye to eye on foreign policy but Biden wouldn’t be taking out boats in the Caribbean…although Biden did successfully reduce fentanyl deaths after they exploded under Trump in 2020.
I agree that Biden was probably operating on standard US military doctrine on the Russian front, but it seems entirely true that Biden’s open border fiasco and lax border enforcement totally enabled the transfer of cartel operatives into the US and exacerbated the drug flow problem (which by many astute analysts constitutes part of the asymmetric warfare being waged against the homeland). It was President Trump who shut that down.
No, PPP and sibling programs were the venture capital for American criminal organizations and both spiked in April 2020 when illegal immigration was at record lows. Basically Trump wanted as many dollars in the economy as possible to turbocharge the recovery and oversight would have impeded the flow of free dollars.
Illegal immigration initially spiked in 2019 because that is when the construction boom started…Covid delayed it a year but 2023/24 is when the business cycle ended and illegal immigration was trending down. Unless you believe Obama was better at enforcing the border than Bush you have to credit much of the ebb and flow of illegal immigration to the overall economy and construction industry.
Respectfully, while it’s tempting to use President Trump as a punching bag for everything that feels sus, he is definitely not the one solely making and planning strategic military decisions. The strategy being executed is part of longstanding US military doctrine, no matter what President sits in the White House. That being said, the US has been fighting a cold war with Russia, even after the fall of the Soviet Union. It was just contained. The agreement was: you leave us alone, we leave you alone. The fragile balance of power was in place, until it wasn’t. Perhaps, when the war in Syria broke out, Russia depleted some resources to prop up Assad (he is resting in Moscow now), then the CIA made a move on Ukraine, and Russia’s resources became further depleted. They had to pull out of Syria, and things went in reverse. Now Iran has to send weapons to Russia to fight a low grade war, so that the Russians don’t completely deplete their big guns designed for a different kind of war. Russia exiting Syria allowed NATO member Turkey to step in to fill the power vacuum and shifted the balance of power in the Middle East in NATO’s favor. To think that that the world is not at war is a misnomer. There is always war. It’s a question of how big does it escalate.
True, but there is no reason for a nuclear power to send ground troops anywhere. A nuclear power has air and sea superiority and so with those two tools they should be able to accomplish all achievable goals. Establishing Jeffersonian Democracy in Islamic cr@pholes is not an “achievable goal”. 😉
Agreed. Sending conventional armies is probably a no-go for the current administration, and that position is politically popular at home. But most military assessments I’ve read conclude that air and sea superiority can only go so far (e.g. Houthis still firing) and critical maneuvering requires boots on the ground, especially in the middle east where guerrilla warfare tactics use civilians as human shields. The current strategy favors propping up proxy armies, using drones and emerging small scale precision arms, with private mercenary groups for training. This preserves the required level of ambiguity and layer of abstraction to sideline antiquated international law, without the political fallout. Everyone is waiting for Elon to complete the robots. That will change the landscape of warfare completely.
As long as “boots on the ground” means special operators then I agree with you. And Trump’s first military order involved SEAL Team 6 in Yemen and it was FUBAR from the jump and probably the worst military operation in American history. So “boots on the ground” doesn’t guarantee success even if the best of the best are involved.
it's taken Russia over 3 yrs to conqueror the Donbass region of Ukraine (about 20% of the entire country), but somehow you imagine them absolutely destroying the European armies. How the hell would they do that when they can't even beat the 3rd world army of Ukraine?? Be serious
excluding the fact that China is keeping Russia on a tight leash when it comes to nukes, and does not want to see a nuclear war started, if Russia tried to nuke European cities, the nuclear response would be overwhelming. There are hundreds of nuclear tipped missiles scatted across Europe and in subs sitting at the bottom of the ocean waiting for a "go" code. It would be literally the dumbest, most suicidal decision Russia would ever make.
It's in the hands of the EU and the US to start a bigger war. Nobody forces them to help Ukraine but they do it to weaken Russia. If Russia has to use nukes, they will.
So Russia starts a war with a sovereign country, violating the UN Charter, kills countless thousands of civilians, abducts children, and it's the US and EU that must restrain themselves? Seriously?
so Ukraine, a country that pre 2022 had a standing army of around 250k, with next to no modern intelligence services, and nothing but antiquated Soviet era tanks and aircraft started a war against Russia, a country with a standing army (pre 2022) of 900,000, and that vastly outnumbered Ukrainians in tanks, aircraft, and light armored vehicles.
Small, weak countries that live in the shadow of large, powerful countries through accidents of history suffer what they must.
The president/dictator Porfirio Diaz captured the relationship perfectly over a century ago when he described the relationship between the United States and Mexico. Let us update what he said for the current crisis:
'Poor Ukraine, so far from God and so close to the Russian Federation.'
You do know that ukraine was a founding member of the soviet union and therefore basically just as commie and soviet as russia?
Defending Ukraines borders is, funnily enough, also the most communist thing to do as they were drawn by Lenin himself. So in a way the west worships Lenins creation.
Given the ambiguous decision making structure in the US administration, can we really afford to put forward vague and ambiguous security guarantees (which for instance, could be totally misconstrued by a succeeding US administration) just to show solidarity with the Ukrainian cause (or to save skin by covering up years of foreign policy blunders!). Can the world afford a total catastrophe just because people made errors of judgement in the past and the battlefield situation on the Ukrainian frontline getting more adverse by the day!
Article 5 is just words on a piece of a paper. Poland, for instance, has never put much faith in it from the very beginning. For more than two decades the country has consistently sought deployment of US forces on its territories, going so far as participating in the invasion of Iraq. Boots on the ground--that's the real guarantee. Since we're definitely not doing that in regards to Ukraine, I see no problem with what's being tabled. We have to give the Ukrainians something to wash down the bitter pills after all. In all likelihood, in order to close a deal with the Russians we'd need to scale down our presence in Poland and Romania. That's going to be a pretty clear message to the Ukrainian leadership that they haven't received some sort of carte blanche.
The EU is getting close to collapse: the countries have been badly abused by MI6 via mass Muslim immigration; their energy costs are unsustainable due to green energy scams; so many immigrants on welfare that the economies cannot sustain any kind of growth, and at best are on the brink of needing life support; and the people who are indigenous to each country have been silenced and attacked. They have been silenced by many of the government's attacks on freedom of speech and they've experienced attacks by Muslims including Christmas Market attacks, rapes, knifings, and attacks on Jews attending religious services. The governments do not support the people, they support the Muslims who very soon are going to conquer each and every country in the EU unless someone sane takes over and the EU is dissolved.
The idea that the EU would demand article V protection for Ukraine is just one further step in their downfall.
I believe the leaders of European countries (Except for Viktor Orban and Robert Fico) are afraid to face their people given the serious, if not fatal, damage they have done to their countries.
Article V or WWIII will not help them face their people. Oh and by the way, the people of the UK and Europe DO NOT WANT TO FIGHT IN UKRAINE AND HAVE MADE THAT CLEAR.
Isn't it the exact opposite of what you assert? The US will never live up to an Article 5 guarantee (read the National Security Strategy), so it gives Russia a license to stir up trouble.
Respectfully, I think “giving Russia license to stir up trouble” is too narrow a view. You have to take into account the entire geopolitical chess board. There are multiple wars going on around the world, some clandestine, some highly publicized, where the balance of power depends on which strings are being pulled.
This is the general problem with NATO. Security guarantees only have worth if willing to defend. Expanding into eastern Europe was idiotic. Are Americans ready to die for Estonia, Lithuania? Did Americans ever voted for willing to die for them? I bet the average American doesn't even know where to find them on a map.
I believe article 5 only talks about supporting the other. The US could do that with financial support, weapon deliveries,... but with thousands stationed in Europe they will be in the crosshair. I still have hope for rationality from the US but the EU is lost. I've never seen such morally depraved humans in my life with zero respect for democracy and their citizens. No government ever survived making people poor. This is the hope we have, the EU collapsing before starting a nuclear war.
Even when I say I have more hope for the US if you look at politics I see both with the democrats and republicans the same kind of people as in the EU. Trump might represent the American spirit but has to go authoritarian just to push back, but like all authoritarian leaders he gets lost in nitpicking about trivial things. At some point the government becomes that mosquito around your head and people turn against you. Just focus on the things that matter.
Article 5 was invoked in Afghanistan which was because America was attacked on 9/11. Libya was a NATO operation but once again America was attacked along with UK by the Lockerbie Bomber…so so far Article 5 has worked to our benefit as our Air Force needed the practice in the late 1990s.
If Europe gets attacked first we will see if the president at the time joins Europe because it’s not a guarantee.
Bingo! And yeah, article 5 only speaks of basically supporting in whatever way you find necessary.
It’s not a blank check.
The danger is of course that a POTUS will be pressured to “be tough”, despite it not being in Americas best interest.
Agree to a large degree with your assessment (except I’m hopeful that Europe is not lost). Consider the broader military strategy and doctrine in the complexity of things. This is multi-dimensional chess, where some wars need propping up, while other needs to be rapidly extinguished. See my comments on US strategy below.
After successfully having manifactured reality, the European Commission and a large segment of European politicians, media and academia have convinced themselves that they can manifest victory.
I agree emphatically. The decisions makers badly need to understand this.
The Eurocrats are utopians, and utopians with power always drag the world to hell sooner or later.
A correct assessment of the situation by Stephen. The Europeans--it is a misnomer--speak as if they are "one voice". It could not be farther from the truth.
Having lived in Europe, no one, especially those in the south and south western parts of the EU, have any inclination to march to fight the Russians.
Even, the Poles and the Baltics, acidic as they sound, have no such illusions unless Uncle Sam steps in. We are not fools!
No one mentions that NATO's largest army apart from that of the US, is Turkey's. Does any sane person believe that the Turks would step in to fight the Russians, given their memories of WWI and how the Ottomans were destroyed in the Caucasus.
The European public must jettison these so-called leaders of the UK, Germany and France and replace them with proper ones that care more economic growth than war.
Otto von Bismarck came up with a working solution some 150 years ago:
"The secret of politics? Make a good treaty with Russia."
This sounds profoundly true, and it was fairly quiet since the fall of the Soviet Union. The Neocons never trusted the Russians and perhaps for good reason when you look at the broader geopolitics.
The US is 100% not going to fight a war with Russia. Such folly would immediately hand military hegemony to China as the US would be degraded, even if it survived.
As such, any guarantee would not be respected by the Americans, thereby undermining all American security guarantees, and exposing the US as a paper tiger, handing hegemony to China.
Trump is wrong about nearly everything. He is right about Russia.
Biden was pretty clear about not sending troops. I would say Biden and Trump saw eye to eye on foreign policy but Biden wouldn’t be taking out boats in the Caribbean…although Biden did successfully reduce fentanyl deaths after they exploded under Trump in 2020.
I agree that Biden was probably operating on standard US military doctrine on the Russian front, but it seems entirely true that Biden’s open border fiasco and lax border enforcement totally enabled the transfer of cartel operatives into the US and exacerbated the drug flow problem (which by many astute analysts constitutes part of the asymmetric warfare being waged against the homeland). It was President Trump who shut that down.
No, PPP and sibling programs were the venture capital for American criminal organizations and both spiked in April 2020 when illegal immigration was at record lows. Basically Trump wanted as many dollars in the economy as possible to turbocharge the recovery and oversight would have impeded the flow of free dollars.
Illegal immigration initially spiked in 2019 because that is when the construction boom started…Covid delayed it a year but 2023/24 is when the business cycle ended and illegal immigration was trending down. Unless you believe Obama was better at enforcing the border than Bush you have to credit much of the ebb and flow of illegal immigration to the overall economy and construction industry.
Respectfully, while it’s tempting to use President Trump as a punching bag for everything that feels sus, he is definitely not the one solely making and planning strategic military decisions. The strategy being executed is part of longstanding US military doctrine, no matter what President sits in the White House. That being said, the US has been fighting a cold war with Russia, even after the fall of the Soviet Union. It was just contained. The agreement was: you leave us alone, we leave you alone. The fragile balance of power was in place, until it wasn’t. Perhaps, when the war in Syria broke out, Russia depleted some resources to prop up Assad (he is resting in Moscow now), then the CIA made a move on Ukraine, and Russia’s resources became further depleted. They had to pull out of Syria, and things went in reverse. Now Iran has to send weapons to Russia to fight a low grade war, so that the Russians don’t completely deplete their big guns designed for a different kind of war. Russia exiting Syria allowed NATO member Turkey to step in to fill the power vacuum and shifted the balance of power in the Middle East in NATO’s favor. To think that that the world is not at war is a misnomer. There is always war. It’s a question of how big does it escalate.
True, but there is no reason for a nuclear power to send ground troops anywhere. A nuclear power has air and sea superiority and so with those two tools they should be able to accomplish all achievable goals. Establishing Jeffersonian Democracy in Islamic cr@pholes is not an “achievable goal”. 😉
Agreed. Sending conventional armies is probably a no-go for the current administration, and that position is politically popular at home. But most military assessments I’ve read conclude that air and sea superiority can only go so far (e.g. Houthis still firing) and critical maneuvering requires boots on the ground, especially in the middle east where guerrilla warfare tactics use civilians as human shields. The current strategy favors propping up proxy armies, using drones and emerging small scale precision arms, with private mercenary groups for training. This preserves the required level of ambiguity and layer of abstraction to sideline antiquated international law, without the political fallout. Everyone is waiting for Elon to complete the robots. That will change the landscape of warfare completely.
As long as “boots on the ground” means special operators then I agree with you. And Trump’s first military order involved SEAL Team 6 in Yemen and it was FUBAR from the jump and probably the worst military operation in American history. So “boots on the ground” doesn’t guarantee success even if the best of the best are involved.
Any such plan needs to be accepted by Russia before it can take effect.
Russia will never accept it. Like in : NEVER EVER EVER!!!
it's taken Russia over 3 yrs to conqueror the Donbass region of Ukraine (about 20% of the entire country), but somehow you imagine them absolutely destroying the European armies. How the hell would they do that when they can't even beat the 3rd world army of Ukraine?? Be serious
Nuclear weapons. Also the EU has nothing to give and no armies to send. It's all a hoax
excluding the fact that China is keeping Russia on a tight leash when it comes to nukes, and does not want to see a nuclear war started, if Russia tried to nuke European cities, the nuclear response would be overwhelming. There are hundreds of nuclear tipped missiles scatted across Europe and in subs sitting at the bottom of the ocean waiting for a "go" code. It would be literally the dumbest, most suicidal decision Russia would ever make.
It's in the hands of the EU and the US to start a bigger war. Nobody forces them to help Ukraine but they do it to weaken Russia. If Russia has to use nukes, they will.
So Russia starts a war with a sovereign country, violating the UN Charter, kills countless thousands of civilians, abducts children, and it's the US and EU that must restrain themselves? Seriously?
Ukraine started the war, but people like you don't care about that. It's all out there in the open. Only Western media claims Russia is at fault here.
Wrong.
so Ukraine, a country that pre 2022 had a standing army of around 250k, with next to no modern intelligence services, and nothing but antiquated Soviet era tanks and aircraft started a war against Russia, a country with a standing army (pre 2022) of 900,000, and that vastly outnumbered Ukrainians in tanks, aircraft, and light armored vehicles.
Small, weak countries that live in the shadow of large, powerful countries through accidents of history suffer what they must.
The president/dictator Porfirio Diaz captured the relationship perfectly over a century ago when he described the relationship between the United States and Mexico. Let us update what he said for the current crisis:
'Poor Ukraine, so far from God and so close to the Russian Federation.'
Probably a good idea, if Soviets like you are opposed to it.
You do know that ukraine was a founding member of the soviet union and therefore basically just as commie and soviet as russia?
Defending Ukraines borders is, funnily enough, also the most communist thing to do as they were drawn by Lenin himself. So in a way the west worships Lenins creation.
Explain what happened at Bucha to me, Russian bot. Can you be truthful?
Why don’t you explain it Mark?
Here’s a thought: Why doesn’t Putin just claim that he “achieved his goals” and withdraw from Ukraine to lick his proverbial wounds?
You know what happened, but, you are either a criminal, or, you support criminals, so, you want to be “cute.”
Makes a lot of good sense, Bryen!
Given the ambiguous decision making structure in the US administration, can we really afford to put forward vague and ambiguous security guarantees (which for instance, could be totally misconstrued by a succeeding US administration) just to show solidarity with the Ukrainian cause (or to save skin by covering up years of foreign policy blunders!). Can the world afford a total catastrophe just because people made errors of judgement in the past and the battlefield situation on the Ukrainian frontline getting more adverse by the day!
Article 5 is just words on a piece of a paper. Poland, for instance, has never put much faith in it from the very beginning. For more than two decades the country has consistently sought deployment of US forces on its territories, going so far as participating in the invasion of Iraq. Boots on the ground--that's the real guarantee. Since we're definitely not doing that in regards to Ukraine, I see no problem with what's being tabled. We have to give the Ukrainians something to wash down the bitter pills after all. In all likelihood, in order to close a deal with the Russians we'd need to scale down our presence in Poland and Romania. That's going to be a pretty clear message to the Ukrainian leadership that they haven't received some sort of carte blanche.
I could not agree more with your assessment.
The EU is getting close to collapse: the countries have been badly abused by MI6 via mass Muslim immigration; their energy costs are unsustainable due to green energy scams; so many immigrants on welfare that the economies cannot sustain any kind of growth, and at best are on the brink of needing life support; and the people who are indigenous to each country have been silenced and attacked. They have been silenced by many of the government's attacks on freedom of speech and they've experienced attacks by Muslims including Christmas Market attacks, rapes, knifings, and attacks on Jews attending religious services. The governments do not support the people, they support the Muslims who very soon are going to conquer each and every country in the EU unless someone sane takes over and the EU is dissolved.
The idea that the EU would demand article V protection for Ukraine is just one further step in their downfall.
I believe the leaders of European countries (Except for Viktor Orban and Robert Fico) are afraid to face their people given the serious, if not fatal, damage they have done to their countries.
Article V or WWIII will not help them face their people. Oh and by the way, the people of the UK and Europe DO NOT WANT TO FIGHT IN UKRAINE AND HAVE MADE THAT CLEAR.
Isn't it the exact opposite of what you assert? The US will never live up to an Article 5 guarantee (read the National Security Strategy), so it gives Russia a license to stir up trouble.
Respectfully, I think “giving Russia license to stir up trouble” is too narrow a view. You have to take into account the entire geopolitical chess board. There are multiple wars going on around the world, some clandestine, some highly publicized, where the balance of power depends on which strings are being pulled.
Half the day, Trump doesn't know what he's saying or doing, so why is anyone surprised?
The E3 are of course right to champion democracy.
But I note Starmer and Macron have 20% support in domestic polls, Merz and Zelensky 30%.
So Starmer, Macron, and Merz are not committed to a "real" democracy? They face a large, democratic majority against them in the polls.