President Biden has been blustering about how much Russia in general and Vladimir Putin in particular will regret a Russian invasion of Ukraine (leaving aside “minor incursions”), and it would be unfair to say that no action has accompanied his bluster. Some troops have been mobilized for possible deployment to NATO’s eastern border; some weapons are on their way to Kiev; some European allies have sent military aid from their own resources; some economic sanctions are threatened. The official consensus seems to be, though, that Russia can lop off as much of Ukraine as it feels able to digest without any risk of having to bear more pain than its rulers are willing to let the Russian people suffer. Hence, the United States has been proposing compromises in the hope that Moscow will settle for a few slices less than a full loaf. Perhaps it will. Tsar Vladimir’s demands, which amount to NATO’s permanent abandonment of Eastern Europe, are so extravagant that they may be intended only as a step toward securing concessions that, while major, will look reasonable by comparison.
For America and NATO to back down before an adversary with no significant allies and whose total economic output is not much more than one-third of U.S. tax revenue would be as embarrassing as it seems inevitable. It certainly will be no feather in Joe Biden’s cap. Hence, we may anticipate that his Varangian Guard will find ways to deflect responsibility. The New York Times’s morning newsletter is among the first to fiddle with the gaslight. Its author, David Leonhardt (kind of a leftish Jim Geraghty but without the latter’s sprighliness), has identified the blameworthy party. Not surprisingly, it is Donald Trump.
The argument is convincing so long as you don’t think about it:
Donald Trump has made a habit of deriding the U.S. alliance with Western Europe. He described NATO – the American-led alliance with Europe that dates to the 1940s – as “obsolete” and said that Americans were “schmucks” for financing it. He mused about withdrawing the U.S. from NATO and often spoke more positively about Russia than about longtime American allies like Germany and France.
These comments were a radical departure from the policies of every U.S. president, Republican and Democrat, for 75 years. Still, because Trump did not make good on his biggest threats, the tangible effects were not always clear.
Now they are becoming clearer.
As Mr. Leonhardt sees it, the reason why there is no NATO unity against Russian threats of aggression is that “one crucial country is missing from that united front: Germany”.
Germany’s government, under its new chancellor, Olaf Scholz, has ruled out any arms exports to Ukraine. It is also delaying a shipment of howitzers from Estonia to Ukraine. It may have kept British planes from using German airspace when sending military supplies to Ukraine last week.
Most significantly, the Scholz government has been vague about whether a Russian invasion would lead to the shutdown of an undersea gas pipeline between Germany and Russia. The pipeline, the Nord Stream 2, will become a major source of energy for Germany and a major source of revenue for Russia once it begins operating, likely in the next year.
These developments are, we are informed, “the long-term consequences of Trump’s hostility to Europe”. “Trump’s hostility to Western Europe” supposedly “encouraged Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor at the time, to ponder a future in which the U.S. might be pulling back from NATO. In that scenario, friendly relations with Russia (and China, too) would have advantages, especially because of its importance to European energy supplies.”
So President Trump’s denigration of NATO, which, as Mr. Leonhardt says, never led to any significant action, impelled Chancellor Merkel and her successor from the opposing political party to increase Germany’s dependence on Russian natural gas supplies? Left unmentioned is Merkel’s decision to shutter Germany’s nuclear reactors, thus creating a huge shortfall of domestic energy production that her preferred “green” alternatives cannot begin to fill. Also pertinent, perhaps, is the fact that Chancellor Scholz’s Social Democratic Party has a history of Russophilia. The last SDP chancellor before Herr Scholz was Gerhard Schröder (1998-2005) who went onto the Russian payroll almost immediately after leaving office. He is now, among other posts, a director of Rosneft, the Russian state oil producer (reportedly with a salary of $350,000 a year for part-time work). He celebrated his 70th birthday in St. Petersburg at a bash hosted by Tsar Vladimir himself.
Further evidence that Germany’s unreliability as an ally can’t reasonably be traced to a snit over Donald Trump’s catcalls is the fact that, in Mr. Leonhardt’s own words, the “united front” lacks “one crucial country”, not several. Britain and even France have been supporting such efforts as the Biden Administration has made to contain Russia. Didn’t they read The Donald’s mean tweets?
Donald Trump can be blamed for many things, such as the loss of the Republican majority in the Senate and consequent empowerment of the Democratic Party’s socialist wing. His Euroskeptic rhetoric, on the other hand, annoying as it was to those of us who support a robust pro-liberty policy, was no more than wind that swayed the grasses back and forth but left them standing after it blew itself out. For the looming failure in Ukraine, Joe Biden bears full responsibility.
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