Jason Ditz / AntiWar.com & John Vandiver / Stars and Stripes – 2014-03-27 01:18:36
Obama Wants More NATO Troops in Eastern Europe
Jason Ditz / AntiWar.com
(March 26, 2014) — Officially, everyone seems to be settled on the idea that the Russian annexation of Crimea is not some redux of the WW2 blitzkrieg or of Russia reforming the entire Warsaw Pact in a weekend. Still, that doesn’t mean officials aren’t using it as an excuse for a laundry list of military policy goals.
President Obama, who made a big point of mocking Russia and downplaying the Crimea situation as a sign of Putin’s weakness, is now pushing NATO to commit to a military build-up in Eastern Europe.
Not that there’s a war coming, mind you. President Obama has ruled out attacking Crimea several times, but says a build-up would be a great way to “reassure” Poland and the Baltic states that, as NATO members, the alliance is willing to defend them from a Russian invasion that no one thinks is coming anyhow.
It also fits in neatly with Obama’s other major goal: to parlay the Russia situation into a dramatic increase in military spending across Europe, and by extension an increase in US military exports to the continent.
US Presses EU Nations to Hike
Military Spending to ‘Confront Russia’
Obama: Everybody’s Got to Chip In
Jason Ditz / AntiWar.com
(March 26, 2014) — Economic struggles and budget shortfalls have had many European member nations of NATO cutting back military spending, something US officials have been railed about for years. Russia has given them an excuse for another pushback on those cuts.
European Union nations spend an average of 1.7% of their GDPs annually on military, and in the Obama Administration’s mind, that’s not nearly enough money being thrown into the sinkhole of militarism.
“Everybody’s got to chip in,” insisted President Obama, going on to insist that “freedom isn’t free” and the loss of Crimea necessitates a much larger military buildup across Europe to “confront Russia.”
As a practical matter, NATO as a whole spent over 10 times what Russia does on its military, $990 billion versus $90 billion. The US accounts for over two-thirds of that.
The reality is that many NATO member nations, particularly those in the Mediterranean, simply can’t afford the dramatic increases President Obama wants, and have credit ratings that don’t allow them to deficit finance runaway military spending.
And while the US couches this as a “counter” to Russia, there is similarly no reason to think a 10 to 1 or 11 to 1 ratio of NATO to Russia spending isn’t sufficient for “defensive” purposes. The unspoken assumption here is that the US, by far the world’s largest exporter of weapons systems, would see considerable benefit from increased spending by nations like Spain and the Netherlands.
Obama Paints Crimea Secession as Worse than Iraq War
Jason Ditz / AntiWar.com
(March 26, 2014) — With fully one Ukrainian soldier confirmed dead and several others wounded in myriad clashes, world leaders seem agreed that the Russian annexation of Crimea is the worst thing to happen within their collective memories. Then someone, likely just to bum everyone out, brought up Iraq.
Speaking in Brussels today, President Obama went on a lengthy diatribe about how the decade-long US occupation of Iraq, which left roughly a million people dead and the entire region awash in al-Qaeda factions, was nowhere near as bad a thing as Crimea.
“America sought to work within the international system. We did not claim or annex Iraq’s territory,” Obama insisted, going on to praise Iraq as a “fully sovereign state” that “could make decisions about its own future.”
Which is to say the US forced a puppet government into power before it left, despite Prime Minister Maliki losing the last election, and put in place an election system so crooked that even the Maliki-appointed election commission resigned en masse yesterday rather than take part in April’s planned vote.
The US left Iraq, but the war did not, and even today the US is throwing military aid at the nation in ever-increasing numbers to fight off al-Qaeda, which has seized significant chunks of the country.
Obama went on to praise the “vigorous debate” which surrounded the US invasion of Iraq, which mostly centered on the Bush Administration lying about the “threat” until they invaded.
The Russian annexation of Crimea is indeed apples and oranges to the US occupation of Iraq, in that Russia acquired a small peninsula populated mostly by ethnic Russians with few casualties involved, and the US obliterated the nation of Iraq in the bloodiest war of the current century, killing enormous numbers of people and accomplishing virtually nothing before meandering off in search of new dragons to slay.
Ukraine Crisis to Test West’s
Threshold for Economic Pain
John Vandiver / Stars and Stripes
STUTTGART, Germany (March 26, 2014) — The seizure of Crimea could become the first in a series of power plays by an emboldened Vladimir Putin to redraw post-Cold War lines, unless the United States and its allies impose severe economic penalties against Russia and bolster their defenses in the east.
That’s the view of some analysts, who say Europe is unlikely to stomach the costs of necessary sanctions and military options that would deter Russia from future land grabs.
“The US has made a reasonable start here, but just how far is this going to go and do we have the appetite to inflict a higher level of pain? Damaging the Russian economy is going to hurt us as well,” said John Lough, a Russia expert at the Chatham House in London. “The Russian appetite for pain could be higher than ours.”
The US and the European Union will phase in sanctions, which include immediate suspension of talks on closer economic cooperation between Europe and Russia, and a freeze on assets and travel for a small number of Russian figures. Those measures will expand if Putin signs a treaty to annex Crimea, EU leaders said.
But expanding economic sanctions to include Russia’s vast petrochemical industry could threaten an energy-dependent Europe, which is only beginning to emerge from years of economic stagnation.
Germany, Europe’s economic powerhouse, would be especially affected because of its close business ties to Russia, which involve the auto industry and energy interests. As a result, business leaders have been lobbying against tough measures.
“Germany will be harder hit than almost all other countries” by sanctions, especially if Putin retaliates by halting gas shipments, Holger Schmieding, chief economist at Berenberg Bank in London, told Bloomberg News. “A stop of Russian energy imports throughout next winter — that would stall the European and the German economic recovery.”
In response to more extensive economic sanctions, Russia could look east to China as an alternative market, leaving Europe in the lurch.
A week after Russia’s annexation of Crimea, there is no sign that limited Western sanctions, and threats of more to come, have caused Moscow to reconsider its intervention in Ukraine. But there are signs that Putin could already be looking beyond the peninsula.
Russia has been building up forces along its eastern border with Ukraine, prompting worries that its troops could soon march across the heart of that country to seize Trans-Dniester, a breakaway enclave in neighboring Moldova that is home to a Russian-speaking population.
“There is a danger that if Russia’s leaders continue to think that Western countries are less-than-committed to supporting Ukraine, they will think they can get away with doing more,” Lough said.
Even if Russia moved to claim Trans-Dniester, a Western military intervention against any Russian offensive would be virtually inconceivable given the fact that Moldova is not a NATO member.
Still, the crisis in Ukraine has galvanized NATO in recent weeks as the alliance ratcheted up operations near Russia’s border. These include an air-policing mission in the Baltics and the deployment of surveillance aircraft along Ukraine’s western border. NATO also is examining the need to reposition forces in other parts of Eastern Europe.
Since the mid-1990s, NATO has been expanding eastward, taking in Moscow’s former Warsaw-pact allies, as well as the Baltic counties of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, which like Ukraine had been integral parts of the Soviet Union.
NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, speaking in Brussels on Friday, described Russia’s actions in Ukraine as a game-changing event and a “wake-up call” for Europe as a whole.
“Our vision of a Europe whole, free and at peace has been put into question because this is not an isolated incident,” Rasmussen said.
The redeployment of forces is an important step in trying to deter more Russian aggression and will reassure wary NATO members, such as Poland, experts say. What isn’t clear is how such NATO posturing could dissuade Russia from conducting interventions in other regions that don’t enjoy the NATO security guarantee, known as Article 5, which ensures that an attack on one member would trigger a collective response.
“Article 5 is iron-clad, but when it goes beyond that, it gets much more complicated politically. There will be differences in the alliance about how forward-leaning it wants to be,” said Ian Lesser, an expert with the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
Beyond the debate over sanctions, if the crisis in Ukraine persists, it will force a re-examination of how US military forces in Europe are positioned as well as spark a debate over nuclear and arms control strategies, Lesser said.
If economic sanctions must be the primary tool to deter Russia, experts say, NATO’s efforts to reassure alliance members in the east are also a key aspect in countering Russia.
“I think there are things NATO can and will do to deter Russia,” Lesser said. “This is opening up a whole set of conversations that go from crisis management to grand strategy. None of this will be settled anytime soon.”
NATO’s Article 5 security pact all but rules out a Russian incursion into the former Warsaw Pact members and Baltic republics. Russian military intervention in those countries would be tantamount to launching a large-scale war.
However, other non-NATO states such as Georgia, which fought a brief war with Russia in 2008, and Moldova could be viewed as fair game by Putin if he sought to reassert himself in areas that once fell under the Soviet Union.
Those ambitions could only grow if the West failed to take concrete measures such as harsh economic sanctions, analysts say. In addition, the US should bolster military aid to countries at risk of Russian intimidation, according to the global security firm STRATFOR.
“A failure to engage at this point would cause countries around Russia’s periphery, from Estonia to Azerbaijan, to conclude that with the United States withdrawn and Europe fragmented, they must reach an accommodation with Russia,” wrote George Friedman, chairman of STRATFOR, in a Tuesday analysis. “This will expand Russian power and open the door to Russian influence spreading on the European Peninsula itself.”
Attack helicopters, communications systems and anti-missile technology should be sent to countries to counter a growing Russian threat, Friedman said.
“The United States has an interest in acting early because early action is cheaper than acting in the last extremity,” he said.
Lough says that Russia’s commodity-based economy would be vulnerable to sustained economic pressure from the West, but that Europe must be willing to pay the short-term costs of such action. So far, there are few signs Europe has the appetite for such a confrontation.
“We’re still in the early stages of this crisis,” Lough said. “What’s at stake is the independence of a country (Ukraine) that is pivotal to European security. It’s a mistake to think we can ignore what the Russians are doing.”
vandiver.john@stripes.com
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