|
Musing About Europe Without NATO
Tonight Trump will address Congress. There are unconfirmed rumors that he will announce a U.S. exit from NATO.
Now that would be a bummer for the Europeans.
During the last 80 years European leaders never had to think strategically about their own nations' security. The U.S. and USSR did that for them.
How would or should Europe look without NATO?
Over the last eight decades NATO and the U.S. (and until 1990 the Warsaw Pact and Russia) have largely prevented wars between European countries. The continent – where nations have been at war with each other for centuries – could easily fall back into that bad habit.
Just look up what Polish revisionists think of Germany and how that country is re-building its army …
As a German I understand that my country is, financially and size wise, the biggest dog in the European pack (ex Russia). It would be wise for it to declare absolute neutrality and to refrain, like Austria, from joining any alliance. Its army, based on a short conscription of every men, should be stationed and act only within its own borders.
That done it would be time to launch a new Concert of Europe (incl. Russia):
… a general agreement among the great powers of 19th-century Europe to maintain the European balance of power, political boundaries, and spheres of influence. Never a perfect unity and subject to disputes and jockeying for position and influence, the Concert was an extended period of relative peace and stability in Europe following the Wars of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars which had consumed the continent since the 1790s.
The last concert did not keep the continent at total peace but it prevented crises from escalating beyond narrowly defined borders. In that respect it lasted from 1820 up to the start of the first World War.
To conduct such a concert would probably require another Prince Metternich or Otto von Bismark. There is however no such person in sight. (Lavrov would be good at that job but he is Russian, too old and otherwise committed.)
The EU bureaucracy in Brussels has neither legitimacy nor competence in inner-European or international security issues.
Don't count on it when NATO is out.
What are other alternatives?
A strong, militarily independent EU with a concomitantly strong, leading-edge high-tech sector, fueled by inexpensive RF energy resources and demonstrating the mutual respect of nuclear-armed equals, would, by definition, be its own bloc within a quadripartite “multipolar world,” consisting of the US/UK, EU (neo-Concert of Europe), RF, and the Sino-Indian sphere. However, note that it is the latter sphere that would inherently be the most labile, considering the entrenched protectorates of Australia, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and, of course, Taiwan. So, really, out of all the hypothetical spheres or blocs, it seemingly makes sense for the Chinese to continue to be the most globalist, because their hypothetical respective tranche is the least clear-cut.
In comparison, a true Concert of Europe/RF condominium seems very geostrategically symmetrical indeed, notwithstanding the RF’s concerning and unbalancing population shortage. Obviously, no other country in the “New World” has ever been a threat, let alone a rival, to US hemispheric potency, and there doesn’t seem to be anything in even the long-term horizon to disturb, let alone dethrone, that dynamic. A revived Concert of Europe, inspired by a Hegelian/Kojevian vision, must also be a benevolent protector of North Africa; its borders starting from Greenland to the West, but excluding Canada, which is unsalvageable, because the old patriarch (“patria”) itself is intractable in its allegiance to its favorite, albeit quite unruly, child—the US—which “ought and must” remain the antithesis of Continental Europe.
The RF part of the condominium would serve to gently placate Turkish neo-Ottoman revanchism throughout the Caucasus, discounting those places where a Turkic majority has become entrenched or has always been an autochthonous majority. The Muslim world is sui generis, encompassing Pakistan and Indo-Malaysia; it should be courted, and the theological dimension treated with pincers, considering parts of it are already nuclear-armed. Instead of encouraging secularism in the short term, the right sort of theologues should be respectfully maintained or supported—namely, those who are rational in a comparatively empirical sense. The point, to be sure, is to avoid the proliferation of nuclear-armed anti-Israels in an evolving response to Israel. The fact that this phenomenon hasn’t yet spread beyond Pakistan is perhaps indicative of the level of corruption and hegemonic capture, vis-à-vis the US, that plagues the region.
Disarming this seemingly ever-more tightly wound ticking time bomb would, perforce, entail a not insignificant role and job for the EU-RF-Sino triad of the quadripartite rest, considering that Asia—both Near and Far, relative to the West—would remain, for the long durée, the zone of peril and sabotage by the US/UK sectors, the only ones to have effectively been spared the type of relatively recent internal mass carnage and physical destruction that was, differentially (in contrast), directly experienced en masse and in se by the Continent, Russia, and China (mutatis mutandis).
Posted by: Ludovic | Mar 4 2025 22:23 utc | 44
|
