By George F. Will
Speaking on Aug. 29 — at a
fundraiser, of course — Barack Obama applied to a platitude the varnish of
smartphone sociology, producing this intellectual sunburst: “The truth of the
matter is, is that the world has always been messy. In part, we’re just
noticing now because of social media and our capacity to see in intimate detail
the hardships that people are going through.” So, if 14th-century Europeans had
had Facebook and Twitter, they would have noticed how really disagreeable the
Hundred Years’ War was.
Obama did have a piece of a
point: Graphic journalism, now augmented by billions of people with cameras in
their pockets, can give an inflammatory immediacy to events. His intention was
to dispel the impression that the world has become not just unusually “messy”
but especially dangerous. Unfortunately, this impression derives not from
social media static but from stark facts, including this one:
A nation with nuclear weapons
and ballistic missiles is dismembering another nation. And the nuclear power is
governed by an unconstrained despot fueled by a dangerous brew of
disappointment, resentment and contempt.
Writing for the Federalist Web
site , professor Tom Nichols of the Naval War College describes Vladimir Putin
as neither a realist nor a nationalist but rather someone saturated with Soviet
nostalgia. In 1975, Nichols writes, the world seemed to be going the Soviet
Union’s way. Extraordinary U.S. exertions in Vietnam had ended in defeat, a
president had resigned and the economy was sagging into stagflation. “By
contrast,” Nichols says, “the Soviets were at the top of their game,” with a
modernized military and a new generation of missiles: “The correlation of
forces, the great wheel of History itself, was finally turning in their favor,”
and because History’s ratchet clicks only in a progressive direction, “it would
never turn back.”
In 1975, Putin, 23, joined “the
most elite Soviet institution,” the KGB, which would guarantee “he would be
somebody in the brave new Soviet future.” But in the 1980s, “he watched the
Soviet descent to oblivion begin, accelerate, and then end in a humiliating
wreck.” Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and a Polish pope ignited a Western
resurgence — military, economic and moral. By 1990, Putin was 38 and aggrieved.
Today, “Putin’s speeches and public utterances,” Nichols notes, “tend to show
more nostalgia for his Soviet youth than his Russian adulthood.” Remember “the
explosion of bad taste and Soviet kitsch” in the 2014 Sochi Olympics.
A participant in NATO’s 1949
founding famously said that the alliance’s purpose was to protect Europe by
keeping “the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down.” When the
Cold War, which prompted NATO’s creation, ended, the alliance began to gingerly
undertake what it calls “out-of-area operations,” as in Afghanistan. Now,
however, it is back to its original business of keeping Russian forces out of
NATO members, which now include Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, the last two
being contiguous to Russia.
If NATO’s meeting in Wales was,
as one European defense intellectual said, a “credibility summit,” it was at
most a semi-success. The decision to augment by around 4,000 an existing
rapid-response force of around 13,000 is a far cry from Poland’s request that
10,000 NATO troops be stationed with heavy weapons in that country. Watching
NATO flinch from this, Putin might reasonably conclude that NATO is ambivalent
about Article 5 (an attack on any member will be considered an attack on all)
and therefore wants its means of responding to remain some distance from where
events might require a response.
Although ambiguity has its
uses, a British diplomat of the early 20th century, Lord Curzon, reportedly
advised that it is generally wise to know your own mind and make sure your
adversary knows it, too. Putin might read NATO’s mind in what Gideon Rachman of
the Financial Times calls “the learned helplessness” of American allies who
“have come to rely excessively on the U.S. to guarantee their security.”
Time was, Rachman writes,
America accounted for roughly half of NATO’s military spending; now it accounts
for about 75 percent. Only four of NATO’s 28 members (America, Britain, Estonia
and penurious Greece) fulfill their obligation to spend at least 2 percent of
gross domestic product on defense, and Britain may soon fall below that
threshold as its army shrinks to about 80,000, its smallest size since after
Waterloo (1815). As Putin casts a cold eye on his enemies, he might reasonably
infer from their atrophied military muscles that they have palsied wills.
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