NATO Was Inside All of Us the Whole Time
What is -- or was -- NATO?
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I keep reading that Trump is “threatening” or “destabilizing” NATO. Reports from Davos are that Trump’s dementia-infused shit-talk has brows most furrowed and feathers indubitably ruffled. I picture a man with white mutton chops wearing a sash that says “VISCOUNT OF EUROPE” being so shocked by Trump’s words that his monocle tumbles out of his eye and splashes into a flute of champagne — from what I’ve read, that seems to be the vibe. And I would be very disturbed by what’s happening if I thought that NATO was about to fall apart.
But I do not think NATO is being “threatened” or “destabilized” because…uh…gee, I don’t know how to say this…let me try to deliver the news as delicately as possible: NATO is worm food, folks. We should now think of NATO as a pile of bleached bones in the desert, or a crow carcass being devoured by maggots while a goth teenager takes black and white photos. You know how in movies, a guy gets thrown into a dungeon, and he looks next to him, and — yikes! — there’s a skeleton still manacled to the wall? NATO makes that skeleton look like the cover model for a fitness magazine.
I’m very unhappy about all of this. I think that the transatlantic alliance was incredibly beneficial to the United States, Europe, and this alleged body called “Can-o-da”. I mourned NATO when it died, which I’d date to the day Trump was re-elected. But I think the sad reality is that NATO is dead, or at a bare minimum frozen in carbonite like Han Solo.
No reasonable person could think that Trump will respect Article 5 — NATO’s mutual defense clause — if it was invoked. It’s as difficult to imagine Trump saying “I feel morally bound by our prior commitments to Estonia” as it is to imagine him saying “The poetry of Maya Angelou has long provide solace when I’ve doubted myself.” The problem with international agreements has always been that there’s no easy enforcement mechanism if some huge asshole just says “fuck it”. And Trump is a galaxies-wide asshole, and he’s saying “fuck it” — sometimes translated as “fuck you” — as loudly as he can. I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump took a day trip from Davos to ascend the Matterhorn, drop a Ricola, and yell “FUCK YOU” so loudly that it can be heard from Iceland to Istanbul.
Without Article 5, NATO is a social-club-slash-snack-bar. It can help with coordination, but we already see the limits of that: Several NATO countries have moved troops to Greenland to protect it from the United States, their nominal ally. International law only works when the parties agree to follow the rules, which makes it strange that we refer to these agreements using words like “law” and “rules” — those words imply non-optional compliance. But compliance is very much optional, as proved by the fact that Trump — having passed no statute, having not informed the other NATO members of any formal change — is just doing whatever the hell he wants.
I’ve been writing a lot about international law recently because I share goals with many of the people who take a legalistic approach to international relations. We both want peace, and we think that international affairs isn’t doomed to be an infinity-sided scrum that make the fight at the end of The Revenant look like a birthday party at Disneyland. But I think it’s important to be clear-eyed about what agreements can and can’t do. They can provide clarity, they can signal a government’s intent, and they can create a future cost for governments who might stick to the pact simply to maintain their credibility. What they can’t do is persist in the presence of a government that has radical aims and doesn’t care about credibility. And that describes the current American government: Our goals are a revenge tour based on narcissism and stupidity, and our credibility is where OJ’s was after he failed to find whoever killed his ex-wife.
The good news is that NATO could spring back to life under the next president. I don’t know who Democrats will nominate, but I know it will be someone who thinks that it’s better to ally with the richest, most advanced countries in the world than with a rickety petro-state currently being fought to a standstill by a country less than one-third its size. That’s something that all 28 post-World War II major party nominees other than Trump intuitively understood.1 Trump is virtually the only figure in American politics who thinks it’s smart to ally with the country that lost the Cold War, the Afghan War, World War I,2 the Russo-Japanese War, the Crimean War, and basically any conflict that didn’t involve a foreign army charging into the vast Russian wilderness wearing light windbreakers.
Ultimately, NATO is kind of like Santa: It exists when people believe it exists. Our current president is a non-believer. If Russia invades Estonia or Poland, there’s a chance that Russia would be countered by basically the Crimean War coalition plus Germany and minus Sardinia-Piedmont (though I would never go to sleep on Sardinia-Piedmont). But it’s fairly obvious that the United States won’t do a damn thing. Go ahead and wave the NATO charter in the face of the guy who already abrogated the Iran Deal, the Paris Accord, NAFTA, the successor to NAFTA that he negotiated, and about six dozen trade deals this week alone — it won’t change anything. There is not currently a transatlantic alliance. And if we accept that unfortunate reality, we can start looking towards a new alliance under a different president.
Including the Republican nominee immediately before Trump, who was regrettably mocked by people like me for saying that countering Russia should be a foreign policy priority.
Yes, I think it’s fair to say that Russia lost World War I. They were faring so badly that they had a revolution and dropped out, ceding an enormous amount of territory in the process. That’s certainly not winning.
Trumps speeches and social media posts the last few days have convinced me: the man has lost his mind.
Some people will say he's playing 3-D chess to distract from the eventual release of the Epstein files. I say no.
The only one with Trump derangement syndrome is Trump himself because he is deranged. He's not kidding folks.
He really believes that shit.
It's time for the straight jacket.....
Sardinia Piedmont was awesome: they were winning the Second War of Independence against Austria but they had to cede Nice (it should be Nizza, bitches) and Savoy to their “ally,” who then quit and made a separate peace deal with Austria. At least they got most of northern Italy, but Emperor Napoleon III of France does sound a bit Trumpy here.
I am a giant nerd.