“Russia aims to weaken U.S. influence in the world and divide us from our allies and partners,” says the Trump administration’s 2017 National Security Strategy. The line, while accurate, reflects poorly on the strategy’s ostensible author, given that among other things it implicitly refers to Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election on behalf of Donald Trump. Left unwritten is that Russia’s goal of creating distance between the United States and its allies is part of what attracted it to Trump in the first place. As a candidate, Trump called nato “obsolete.” As president, he initially declined to reaffirm America’s commitment to the alliance’s mutual defense provision, before begrudgingly reversing course at the insistence of his advisers. [...]
The chances of such an outcome, however, are slim. Orbán and Kaczyński have made clear that they will ride to each other’s rescue, creating an emerging “axis of illiberalism” within Europe. The nato alliance thus faces a problematic odd couple. On one hand is a leader whose government openly seeks closer ties with the Kremlin. On the other is a Russia hawk whose government hosts one of four multinational “battlegroups” on nato’s eastern periphery, yet may be strengthening Russia’s hand in the long run by hollowing out his country’s institutions and backing his southern neighbor. [...]
Turkey’s slide into authoritarianism has coincided with a worsening diplomatic relationship with the United States. On March 13, Turkish prosecutors indicted American pastor Andrew Brunson on charges related to the failed coup, seeking life imprisonment. Brunson has been held in pre-trial detention for 18 months in what some analysts describe as a hostage-taking related to Turkish requests for the United States to extradite cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Ankara blames for the failed coup. The Brunson indictment follows the conviction in February of dual Turkish-American citizen and nasa employee Serkan Golge, who was sentenced to 7 and a half years in prison in a trial the U.S. embassy in Ankara alleged lacked credible evidence. [...]
Yet the mounting authoritarianism in Hungary, Poland, and Turkey likely poses the greatest internal threat to the nato alliance in its history. Any alliance depends on its members sharing common goals. During the Cold War, nato served to keep peace in post-WWII Europe by “keep[ing] the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down,” in the famous telling of its first secretary general. With the raison d'etre of territorial defense essentially nullified by the collapse of the Soviet Union, nato has until recently largely justified itself through so-called “out-of-area” operations in places like Bosnia and Afghanistan, and by the presumed power of the alliance to bind its members around respect for democratic values and institutions. In 2016, the leaders of nato member states went so far as to say that its “essential mission” was “to ensure that the Alliance remains an unparalleled community of freedom, peace, security, and shared values, including individual liberty, human rights, democracy, and the rule of law.”
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