The Raspberry Patch has been deliberately eclectic lately, and has taken its eclectic arc in a direction away from the policy analyses on offer back in January toward lighter fare in February—not that a substrata of seriousness has been lacking even in more recent essays. (FYI, the February 16 post stayed up for only a very short time; I quickly retrieved it to make significant improvements and for related reasons to be revealed later.) I have proceeded as though it were a virtue to go wide and light both for its own sake, and because I’ve wanted to show readers in this still-new venue the range of subjects I can write about with at least some modest degree of sophistication. Advertising, in other words….sort of.
But it would be imprudent to overdo it. Indeed, my all but ignoring the fact that we now confront a national security dilemma over the Ukraine/Russia/NATO nexus from hell even more serious than when I wrote about it here on January 9 (“Once Upon a Time There Was an Essay”), and that we are already deep into a portentous presidential election season, might give some the impression that I don’t care about any of this or that I have nothing of possible interest to say about it. That’s not the case, so I’ll start now to bend our eclectic arc back toward more serious subjects by telling a short story.
An Email Shot from the Red Dot
In mid-December a journalist working for the Chinese-language Singaporean daily Lianhe Zaobao asked if I would help her to understand what was going on politically in the United States. She was assigned to write a front-page feature about it, and intended to ask questions of several U.S. experts to help her get arms around a subject twelve time zones and a cultural galaxy or two distant from her home base.
“Why me?” I asked her. “I’m not a U.S. domestic politics expert, despite having worked briefly many years ago as a Senate aide, and despite having exerted myself more recently, to no avail, in trying to get a new third party up on its feet. U.S. domestic politics certainly does play a role, sometimes a large one, in foreign and national security policymaking, so it’s been impossible for me to ignore it even when it appears in a sideswiping role; one thus accumulates a certain amount of insight almost by accident. But it’s not what most of my accumulated oeuvre is about, and it’s never been my bread-and-butter forte.” Or words to that effect.
This tenacious journalist was buying none of it. I’d helped one of her colleagues a few months before toward happy results, and my name still carries some local recognition since, while living in Singapore from July 2019 through July 2020, I had written several articles for the Straits Times. (All the major daily papers in Singapore are owned by the same company--Singapore Press Holdings (SPH)—and the political journalists all know one another and read the English-language press.) “Besides,” she told me, “you know something other American experts usually don’t: You know us from having lived and worked among us here; you know what we think we know about the US but actually, some of the time at least, don’t.”
So, easily influenced when someone else’s logic sounds flatteringly truthful, I agreed—but only on the condition, as before, that she send me a PDF of whatever got published. She knew why I asked this even without my needing to tell her; she agreed and complied.
What did we both know that you, dear reader, might not? Just that the Chinese regime allows Lianhe Zaobao to circulate in China, enabling SPH to make money thereby. The paper’s circulation in China isn’t huge according to publicly available data, although no one can say how many people might read the same copy. But modest as sales are, China is gargantuan compared to Singapore, so every yuan helps. SPH needs the money because most of its other assets are flatlined financially, and without Lianhe Zaobao’s China revenue the whole thing—which not incidentally is a parastatal operation, like nearly everything of scale in Singapore—would be in the red. No pun really, seriously, intended.
For their part, Chinese authorities seek to leverage SPH’s need for the China market by setting quiet but clear markers for what Lianhe Zaobao should not say, and for what it should say, on sensitive topics—which include much having to do with U.S. politics and policies and nearly everything having to do with Chinese ones.[1] Knowing this, I need to make certain that my words are not twisted to say what I do not mean them to say. So I turn over the PDFs I receive to stateside friends fluent in written Chinese, they interpret for me, and if I detect hanky-panky of the Mandarin kind, I reject subsequent requests for help. So far, all the Lianhe Zaobao journalists I’ve worked with have been straight shooters, but with things getting ever tighter under Xi Jinping I continue to ask.
What follows in a bit are not the three questions put to me in mid-December and my answers from early January.….yes, I will show them to you soon (soon being, along with later, two of the most worthless words in any language). What follows instead are another set of three questions put to me much more recently by a different Lianhe Zaobao journalist and my answers to them on the Ukraine/Russia/NATO caldron.
Tragedy and Farce
The relevant near-term context here is two-fold: Trump’s outrageous statement in South Carolina on February 10 saying that Russia could do “whatever the hell it wants” with U.S. NATO allies “that don’t pay up,” a statement he defended and repeated a few days ago; and the close confluence just within the past week of the bloody Ukrainian withdrawal from Adviivka, the murder of Alexei Navalny, and the convening of the annual Munich Security Conference. Taken together, these contextual backdrops have set a scene of potentially worsening threat accompanied by the specter of an American volte face with respect to European and global security structures, all dumped into a large room filled with important people and on-the-make journalists very few of whom could not not talk about all this if their lives depended on it.
But here is the kicker: Amid the torrent of stark headlines and equally breathless media stories we’re seen this week, the weird fact is what everyone seems so worried may not even be the most worrying scenario out there. That scenario, mentioned already in passing in my aforementioned January 9 post, has barely broken the surface of the collective analysis passing these days for insight. Sorry to be blunt and even sorrier to sound less than humble, but it just is what it is.
So much for tragedy aborning. Now for some farce.
Just one case in point, before we get to the three questions and my answers, is the January 20 front page, above-the-fold left, Washington Post article by Isaac Arnsdorf, Josh Dawsey, and Michael Birnbaum entitled “Allies fear a potential reshaping of NATO.” Got to hand it to the WaPo editor/headline writers who lately are consistently goofier with vocabulary usage even than the journalists. Here “reshaping” actually means something like what happens to a tray of ice cubes if you put it into a burning woodstove.
Never mind the headline; what’s wrong with the article? Well, nothing you wouldn’t expect in a screen-addicted attention-span-shortened dot-connecting-challenged history-amnesic culturally-singed moment. Let me note just three missing items in fully 58 paragraphs, most of them meandered over to page A13—some of them even consisting of more than one sentence….—of printed text.
Missing first is any mention of what Angela Merkel said in the immediate aftermath of the G7 meeting in Sicily in May 2017--the first close encounter of the orange kind that the leaders of our European allies had with the-then new U.S. President. Bundeskanzler Merkel said, in so many words, that Europe now needed to take its security “fate” into its own hands.[2] This was an epochal moment as these things go, and all serious analysts of contemporary European security policy would cite it as the prelude to the second major event in an on-target chronological mark-up: Bundeskanzler Olaf Sholtz’s reference to a Zeitenwende in German security thinking in the immediate aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022.
At the time, most observers pooh-poohed Scholz’s speech, expressing arch-browed skepticism that the Germans would ever give up their holier-than-thou pacifism for any reason short of a massive and direct invasion of lederhosen- and dirndl-clad Austrian tourists. I thought otherwise, and despite the re-demobilizing impact of Russian military incompetence during the first several months of the war, my optimism was justified.[3] Progress in the Zeitenwende has been slow but steady, which is all one can realistically hope for under the circumstances. But it has been real and populated with some major achievements. “The Germans will never give up the cheap Russian natural gas they’ve hooked themselves on,” many assured us, recalling former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s second career as a Russian energy company celebrity factotum. But yes they pretty much have given it up, haven’t they?
The Washington Post article mentions…..none of this. Nor does it mention, third, the trap foreshadowed in our own headline that Vladimir Putin is now busy setting for Joe Biden. Putin’s plan if Trump wins on November 5 is just to sit back, watch the show, and munch all the free popcorn he can eat. But he also has a plan if Biden wins, one that he is laying the groundwork for even now, and of which the WaPo article hints at not one whit for the simple reason that neither the journalists nor the editors involved seem to understand the strategic situation for what it is.
OK, you may ask, so if a front-page WaPo article doesn’t talk about what significant things have happened in Germany and in Europe in recent years, and if it doesn’t discuss developing Russian policy and tactics, then what can a whopping 58 paragraphs be about? You’ll know if you’ve read the article, but for those who haven’t let me lay it on you: It’s all about….wait…..wait for it….it’s all about…..nearly every single paragraph is about….Donald Trump.
You’re shocked, I know. So we have it full bore: “like wow, did he really mean, could he have possibly meant, that?” and “did he mean that when he broached it before when he was in office?” and “what did H.R. McMaster and John Bolton think about all that then and what do they think about it now?” and “what do Trump’s defenders and supporters argue?” and so on and on ad nauseam.
But maybe, being smarter than the average bear, you’re not shocked. Maybe instead you’re itching to ask, “Hey Garfinkle, you dummkopf, you actually thought Americans would want to read about foreigners when they can once again lather themselves up in an entertaining froth over the wildest and weirdest American magnifico to come along since Huey Long? You know George Santos never really had a chance with the great orange one still on the scene…” Yeah, well, silly me.
So why do I still pay for the Washington Post to be delivered to my front steps every morning? Because someone has to support this be-woke excuse for a news source, besides which I actually used to help a friend home-deliver this thing when I was a kid. I’m the sentimental type, so sue me. Look, if the WaPo goes belly-up the nation’s capital will lack even a semi-serious print daily, and that’ll just turn more people to the toxicity of broadcast news infotainment. Besides, my wife does the Sudoku puzzles and still enjoys the comics along with at least two of the three granddaughters living with us at present and, when it’s not baseball season, the sports section helps to light the fire in the woodstove.
OK, enough fun: Here as promised are the three Singapore-exported questions and my answers, the latter elaborated only a smidgen from what I sent back a few days ago.
Q & A the Singapore Way
Q1. Is Europe ready for the possible return of President Trump? How can Europe prepare for a second Trump term?
A1. Psychologically the west Europeans are getting to where the east Europeans have been already for years, and the shocking Ukrainian abandonment of a Donbas town with many of its wounded left on the battlefield, Navalny's murder, and the Munich Security Conference all coming together helps. But no, they’re not ready for the shock of sudden U.S. abandonment, first de facto and then probably in due course de jure, if Trump wins and returns to the presidency. And, no, they are not ready to take up the security burden if that happens because it takes a long time to put in place effective deterrent and war-fighting capabilities. Even the most worried and active country right now, Poland, is at least a decade away from having the kinds of capabilities that could repel a serious Russian attack.
The European NATO allies need at last to get more serious about defense industrial coordination than the rich clot of individual national companies are about making money. They need to think longer term, and not be smugly reassured by the shocking display of initial Russian military incompetence. And the wealthier allies furthest from the Russian border need to take more seriously the implications for the alliance of the sharp split between their perceptions and those of the Poles and Balts in the absence of U.S. adult supervision.
They also need to bite the bullet and think seriously about a European strategic nuclear deterrent credible even if attenuated from a connection to the U.S. strategic arsenal.
They’re not there yet with any of this, and time is flying by. Inauguration Day is scheduled for January 20, 2025. That’s almost close enough to feel.
Q2. Whether it’s Trump or Biden, some in Europe see the U.S. as an unreliable ally. Do you agree?
A2. Yes, I do, so long as reliability is understood as a verb, meaning a process rather than a static thing that unfurls over many years, not merely many months. Russia is always going to be there, just to Mitteleuropa’s east, and it is probably going to remain autocratic as a political culture for a long time yet to come; hence it will be far more prone for that and other historio-cultural reasons to be expansionist/imperialist. Nations in that near-zone of vulnerability cannot feel secure with an ally across an ocean, one whose own vital interests are not as directly engaged and whose domestic political circumstances are in tumult, that changes its tune about its alliances every four years. And if nations in that near-zone do not feel secure, then neither will—or should—allies further westward, for their security equities are in no small way bound up together with them.
So even if Biden wins and relative normalcy prevails for a while, responsible political elites in Europe will immediately reset their panic timers to 2028, or to the 2026 midterms depending on congressional balances after November 5--and they would be justified in doing so because by then they will still not have the capabilities or internal cooperative mechanisms fully in place to deal confidently with the Russians.
The reliability of U.S. security guarantees to Europe is ultimately a function of the trajectory of U.S. domestic political culture at its deepest level--the level of America’s self-worth as one of history’s very few covenantal states. If Americans as a whole come to believe that the United States is not a virtuous and thus a blessed society, and so is not worthy of being an international leader--if “American exceptionalism” as conventionally understood decays in the heart of the nation, in other words--then the political elite, whether nominally Democratic or Republican, will find little support for an active and constructive international security policy amid the populist-inflected moment we’re in now. Bottom line as that trajectory plays through: the end for all practical purposes of the global U.S. alliance system, even if a formalistic shell of it remains, and with it the end of the order-bearing roles it provides to the global commons. Obviously I hope, this applies to Asia as well as to Europe.
Q3. Trump’s resentment toward U.S. allies in Europe and his affection for strongmen like Putin are well documented. But Putin says he prefers the more “predictable” Biden over Trump. What’s your take on this?
A3. Putin is trying to leverage Republican opposition to arming Ukraine into pressure on the Biden Administration to force Ukraine to a negotiation that, if “successful,” would amount to part ceasefire and part surrender. Putin is saying nice things about Biden to complement his bait about Russia being ready for negotiations, to wit: “All you Americans have to do,” he says, “is stop arming Ukraine and we can talk and settle all this.” He’s lying in order to set a trap, that being his aforementioned Plan Biden as opposed to his Plan Trump. He hopes Biden will reason, “Well, if we can’t arm the Ukes because of the irresponsibility of the GOP-majority House, we might as well force a negotiation because even that would be better than an outright Ukrainian defeat.” So you must see Putin’s public compliments to Biden and his negotiations ploy as two parts of the same tactic.
Putin’s ultimate aims are two-fold: to Belarusianize Ukraine (e.g., destroy its democratic institutions and de facto sovereignty) and to destroy NATO as a coherent and effective alliance. Here is what would probably happen if the Biden Administration takes the bait and forces a negotiated ceasefire on Ukraine, especially if, against the President’s previous strong reluctance, it offers to support Ukrainian NATO membership as a compensation for Ukraine’s begrudged agreement to negotiate.
If Biden wins in November, maybe four months later, maybe eight, maybe ten or twelve, the Russians will resume the war and blame it on some invented Ukrainian provocation. Some will believe the lie for the sake of their own convenience and some won’t, but it won’t really matter. The Ukrainians will not yet have been rearmed in part because NATO publics and elites alike will have been demobilized on account of a negotiated deal they are liable to take far more seriously than they ought. Then NATO, with Ukraine as its newest member, will be put to the ultimate test in resisting resumed Russian aggression, and will likely fail that test for the whole world to see.
Why fail? Because bringing Ukraine into NATO as a consolation prize to secure a non-worst-case conclusion to the current war would raise the stakes all around by joining together more closely than ever Putin’s two goals. The stakes thus raised, the basic underlying matrix of great power interests here is clear: Moscow will never accept as a fait accompli a democratic Ukraine in NATO, certainly not so long as the current marquee-nationalist kleptocratic-mafia regime persists; and, come what may, no serious American vested with decision-making authority will risk death and megadeath in World War III with missile-bristling Russians over Ukraine. Once again, an imbalance of interests, in this case favoring Russia, will prevail over an imbalance of raw power arguably still favoring the United States and its allies. That is a formula for a very much “reshaped” alliance……someone get a mop and a bucket.
Thus, even if Biden wins, the future of the Alliance is very shaky if the Administration fails to find a way to arm Ukraine now to prevent a major shift of combat momentum to favor Russia, and ends up forcing Ukraine to a “dirty” negotiating table for its lack of a viable mean to keep on fighting. Let it be a damned loan, as Trump blurted out the other day with his usual meditation aforethought, instead of a grant if the Republicans will vote for it, because anyway a loan can always be forgiven down the road. The point is, dear Singaporean journalist, that who wins the November 5 election is not the only thing that matters when it comes to the future of NATO.
Not understanding this is the remarkably shortsighted mistake too many people are now making, and the media’s seeming compulsion to fixate on Donald Trump and to view the world through a very near-term strategic aperture is not helping. It is more than just causally misleading; it is contributing to a very dangerous form of strategic myopia now stalking the Atlantic sea- and landscape.
Please understand that I’m not criticizing your questions. I’m just urging you think a little beyond them. Your readers might benefit from the cue.
[1] See Shibani Mahtani and Amrita Chandradas, “In Singapore, loud echoes of Beijing’s positions generate anxiety,” Washington Post, July 24, 2023.
[2] See Guilia Paravicni, “Angela Merkel: Europe must take 'our fate' into own hands,” Politico, May 28, 2017.
[3] See my “The Zeitenwende,” Cosmopolitan Globalist, March 14, 2022.