Weapon of Power Pt 2 Archived Message Posted by Keith-264 on June 17, 2023, 11:52 am, in reply to "Weapon of Power, Matrix of Management NATO’s Hegemonic Formula" .... Such qualms failed to move the White House, which praised Kiev’s assistance to the Implementation Force (ifor) in Bosnia, kfor—it formed a joint UkrPolBat with Poland—and the International Security Assistance Force (isaf) in Afghanistan, not to mention the American-led coalition in Iraq. ‘Ukraine is the only non-nato country supporting every nato mission’, Bush pronounced with satisfaction on an April 2008 visit.footnote55 In 1995, the North Atlantic Council had approved Ukraine’s PfP agreement, and it embarked on manoeuvres and joint exercises—no fewer than 469 by the end of the decade—with unmatched vigour.footnote56 Beginning in 1997, these included recurrent ‘Sea Breeze’ naval drills in the Black Sea, to the consternation of Moscow and periodic protests from the inhabitants of Crimea. In 2000, a particularly provocative training exercise (one of 200 in that year alone) held on the eastern part of the peninsula, Cossack Steppe-2000, took as its premiss the subdual of a Russian-supported ‘ethnic rebellion’ in the region. Military and political ties with nato augmented from 1997, which saw the signature of a Charter on a Distinctive Partnership, establishing a consultative crisis-response mechanism and expanding the remit of cooperation in civil-military relations, defence planning and armaments acquisition.footnote57 That same spring, a nato Information and Documentation Centre set up shop in Kiev. Exchanges soon began between the Ukrainian National Defence Academy, the nato Defence College in Rome and the shape operational academy in Obergammergau. All without undue regard for Ukrainian public opinion, which was largely opposed to nato membership at the time of the Bucharest summit, or for the vagaries of political leadership in Kiev, which oscillated between West and East.footnote58 Portentously, in August 2008, soon after Bush floated the idea that Georgia, too, was on track for nato membership, President Mikheil Saakashvili started shelling the Russian-controlled breakaway region of South Ossetia, prompting a fierce counterattack. us-Georgian joint military training that July, under the auspices of the nato Immediate Response 2008 exercise, raised questions as to whether Saakashvili might have received American encouragement, as did a visit to Tbilisi by a senior advisor to Vice President Cheney in the lead-up to the assault.footnote59 Whatever the case, bipartisan Russophobia dominated much of the 2008 us election cycle, Republican candidate John McCain proposing that nato combat forces be deployed directly to Georgia, Democratic eminences Brzezinski and Strobe Talbott calling for Russia to be barred from the World Trade Organization and expelled from the G8. Robert Kagan, adviser to McCain, detected in the Russo-Georgian clash nothing less than the ‘return of History’.footnote60 ‘The details of who did what’, Kagan commented, ‘are not very important’. Illusions of a pacified, posthistorical Europe were ceding to more ancient precepts. Rearmament was the order of the day. 6. into africa Democratic victory in the 2008 contest left the outlook from Washington unchanged in its fundamentals. Obama, having campaigned as a critic of the Iraq imbroglio, sharply intensified the nato operation in Afghanistan. More emollient in style towards European leaders than his predecessor, he adopted a no less jaundiced view of their vanity and impotence. Early in Obama’s presidency, a report for the German Marshall Fund criticized the still-twitching reflexes of ‘re-nationalization’ in Europe, patent not only in debates over nato’s push into the former ussr—revealing the persistence of ‘national, rather than collective, defence goals’—but on the ground in Afghanistan, where the Bundeswehr’s legalistic rules of engagement (relaxed not long thereafter) invited mockery.footnote61 Under these circumstances, the 2011 nato blitz on Tripoli was seen to redeem the fortunes of coalition warfare under the flag of humanitarianism. ‘Ten years earlier’, wrote saceur James Stavridis and the us ambassador to the alliance, ‘in nato’s war in Kosovo, the United States was responsible for dropping ninety per cent of all precision-guided munitions’. In Libya, the proportions were reversed.footnote62 Little Denmark and Norway alone took out as many targets as did Britain. Sweden also participated, together with Qatar. In a fuller audit, six months after Operation Unified Protector wrapped up on 31 October 2011, the same authors acclaimed a ‘model intervention’. Not only had nato succeeded ‘by any measure’, it did so for a song, at a cost of only $1.1 billion for American taxpayers, suffering through the Great Recession—nothing compared to the sums expended in the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan—and not a single soldier lost in combat.footnote63 Obama later observed that the operation itself ‘was part of the anti-free-rider campaign’, an endeavour to compel other nato states to do their fair share; on that basis, Americans could congratulate themselves.footnote64 Inter-allied decision-making had also been less contentious than in 1999. Now, us commanders were seen to favour destruction of ‘soft targets’ and civilian infrastructure, whilst French and other European air forces privileged the more challenging task of ‘plinking’ armoured vehicles and artillery.footnote65 British and American special forces, abetted by electronic warfare aircraft, collaborated in pinpointing the location of the Libyan head of state, Muammar Gaddafi, who was captured by rebel militiamen and murdered on the spot. To be sure, clouds darkened this otherwise rosy tableau. A majority of nato members had declined to take part in the overthrow of Gaddafi. Germany, notably, abstained from voting on the relevant un Security Council resolution and refused to commit its armed forces, although it contributed weapons and volunteered to step up sorties over the Hindu Kush by way of compensation. Beyond nato, the Libyan war proved a tipping point. China and Russia, after acceding to us demands not to veto the un endorsement that underwrote the Libyan expedition, were agitated by the transformation of a supposedly humanitarian enterprise into an experiment in regime change. The next year, the two powers blocked attempts to win equivalent licence to overthrow the Syrian government. Turkey, ambivalent over the ouster of Gaddafi, appealed in vain for nato intervention against its Ba’athist neighbour; denial (the us preferred proxy or covert means) spurred Ankara to seek momentary rapprochement with Moscow, a va-et-vient fated to destabilize the theatre. Wars in the Greater Middle East had blooded nato soldiers untested in the Balkans campaigns and associated ‘peacekeeping’ tasks. Nevertheless, as the Global War on Terror entered its second decade, the alliance registered military and ideological stalemate from Zuwara to Helmand, while Washington increasingly re-focused on the Pacific. Protracted, unpopular warfare in the Middle East, coupled with revelations in 2013 of nsa espionage against us allies and a secret assassination campaign in Afghanistan, saw support for nato cool in Germany and elsewhere. But solace could be found in the triple-pronged advance into the Balkans (Albania and Croatia), the Black Sea (Romania, Bulgaria) and the ex-Soviet Baltic states. Eastern expansion, eu equerries pulling up the rear, represented a hegemonic stroke. Service under unified command, whatever the utility of the units committed, helped disseminate shared ways of thinking in allied militaries, just as they lent newly minted post-Soviet member states the occasion to distinguish themselves from the Old World ‘axis of petulance’.footnote66 For Western capitals and like-minded local elites, candidacy itself, formalized in the map process after the first round of expansion, turned up a multitude of mechanisms for intervening in the affairs of would-be allies, from promoting ‘good governance’, collaboration with ngos and economic reforms to drafting legislation. If there was a ‘paradox’ in such undemocratic promotion of ‘democratic norms’, it was forgivable.footnote67 Expansion also brought concrete territorial gains, broadening the already globe-girdling array of American bases and logistical hubs. But its dynamic—and the promise of future pacts—hastened the long-foretold confrontation with Russia, now recovered from its post-Soviet trough. Crisis in Ukraine at the end of the year arrived as a divine surprise. Just as the Maidan protests against Ukrainian President Yanukovych seemed to be winding down, with an agreement on early elections, they received an unexpected boost: sniper fire, its origins still disputed, legitimated the storming of government buildings, putting Yanukovych to flight. As the State Department’s Victoria Nuland and her colleagues nominated the new Ukrainian government’s leaders, Putin’s men in green materialized outside regional government buildings in Crimea and counter-Maidans gathered force in the Donbas, with Russian backing.footnote68 7. extending russia, aiming at china nato’s formal abandonment of any pretence to comity with Moscow, announced at the September 2014 Wales summit, marked the twentieth anniversary of the PfP. At its meeting in Newport, the alliance settled on a ‘Readiness Action Plan’ for semi-permanent stationing of combat brigades in Poland and the Baltic states, in disregard of the 1997 nato–Russia Founding Act, and the pre-positioning of matériel. Military planners alit on the Suwałki gap, the 65-kilometre-wide corridor spanning Belarus and Kaliningrad, as a prospective battleground. Nominally neutral Finland and Sweden entered into a collective Memorandum of Understanding with nato, allowing alliance forces to operate out of their territory, and the alliance vowed to redouble ‘military-technical assistance’ to Ukraine. The Wales summit also coincided with a series of meetings between Russian, Ukrainian, French and German representatives in Belarus, to negotiate an end to ongoing fighting in southeast Ukraine. Yet well prior to the signature of the Minsk Accords, a powerful coterie of American hawks moved to thwart compromise with Moscow. With the outbreak of hostilities in the Donbas in spring 2014, Allied Supreme Commander Philip Breedlove took point position in sounding the alert of an imminent, full-fledged offensive from the east. Advised by Wesley Clark, another former nato supremo, and a network of neoconservative operatives in the orbit of Nuland, Breedlove conspired to undermine diplomacy and sway the White House into equipping the Ukrainian armed forces for a protracted struggle.footnote69 For the war party, escalation was self-evident. Decisive action would not only cow Russia and check German ambitions in the region, but signal resolve to Beijing. ‘China is watching closely’, Clark wrote to Breedlove in April 2014: China will have four aircraft carriers and airspace dominance in the Western Pacific within five years, if current trends continue. And if we let Ukraine slide away, it definitely raises the risks of conflict in the Pacific. For, China will ask, would the us then assert itself for Japan, Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, the South China Sea? . . . If Russia takes Ukraine, Belarus will join the Eurasian Union, and, presto, the Soviet Union (in another name) will be back . . . Neither the Baltics nor the Balkans will easily resist the political disruptions empowered by a resurgent Russia. And what good is a nato ‘security guarantee’ against internal subversion? . . . And then the us will face a much stronger Russia, a crumbling nato, and [a] major challenge in the Western Pacific. Far easier to [hold] the line now, in Ukraine than elsewhere, later.footnote70 Breedlove and his associates stewed over Obama’s apparent reluctance to supply more advanced matériel to Ukraine.footnote71 In the new year, as a tenuous ceasefire took hold, the General repeatedly warned of a forthcoming Russian conquest of Donbas, to the astonishment of European spy agencies. The head of French military intelligence complained that American sources monopolized nato threat assessment, aggravating a tendency towards inflationary doomsaying.footnote72 Berlin was sufficiently irked to lodge a complaint with the North Atlantic Council; German diplomats reported that every visit to Kiev by senior us commanders and politicians left their Ukrainian counterparts more gung-ho to retake the separatist oblasts by force.footnote73 Obama declined to provide anti-tank weapons directly to Ukraine, despite bipartisan clamour in Congress and prevailing consensus in his own administration, reportedly for fear of compromising German and French support for sanctions against Russia.footnote74 Technically orchestrated by the eu, these have been renewed by unanimous vote every six months since 2014, a display of ‘bloc discipline’, as Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov put it, ‘stricter than the discipline that existed within the Warsaw Treaty Organization’.footnote75 Obama acceded, however, to hard-liners’ demands to boost American presence at the Yavoriv training facility on the Ukrainian border with Poland, site of joint nato exercises since the 1990s. His successor in the White House, withal heretical claims on the stump that the alliance was ‘obsolete’ and Ukraine might not be a national priority, deferred to the same coalition of interests; undermined even before he took office by Democratic connivance with Ukrainian nationalists, Trump’s agreement to pony up fgm-148 Javelins did not prevent impeachment for insufficient promptness in delivering them. Outrage greeted his disobliging comments about allied tithes and trade policies on the eve of a 2018 nato summit in Brussels, complaints voiced by American leaders for generations. Rhetoric, more than substance, grated in the President’s cavalier treatment of America’s foreign entanglements. ‘Demeaning those commitments as if they were transactional protection rackets’, bemoaned the New Yorker, ‘is corrosive and self-defeating’.footnote76 Defending the Natopolitan outlook was a vastly expanded galaxy of think tanks, whose numbers have grown in tandem with nato’s ever more capacious concept of ‘security’, now encompassing everything from fossil-fuel consumption and pandemic preparedness to digital media. They nourish the Atlanticist mass media with a steady supply of insider information and op-eds. Containment, it could now be admitted, never really fired the imagination; at best, it was the counsel of prudence, a purely negative message. Democratic norms, economic aggiornamento and global governance yielded more energizing material. This was the idiom that animated sponsors of nato expansion from the 1990s. Since the turn of the 2010s, attention has trained on the arena of so-called hybrid threats, where ‘disinformation’ occupies pride of place.footnote77 This watchword, meant to describe Russian and Chinese attempts to influence the politics of Western states, is better understood as a mechanism to sidestep traditional diplomacy and inflate threats, justifying increased defence spending and ‘public-private partnerships’ across sectors like surveillance, artificial intelligence and cyberwarfare. Viewed accordingly, the us, partly via organisms like the German Marshall Fund and the Atlantik-Brücke in Berlin, the International Institute for Security Studies and Royal United Services Institute (rusi) in London, and the Center for European Policy Analysis in dc, exerts by some measure the most powerful external influence in European politics. These are complemented by some two dozen nato ‘Centres of Excellence’, alliance-accredited think tanks that operate in tune with us strategic objectives. As Washington has effected a ‘pivot’ to Asia without letting Russia out of the crosshairs, its ideological apparatuses combat allied complacency with talk of a new Cold War. Historical analogies, for what they are worth, may be looked for less in the mid-century freeze between the two blocs than in the late-70s crisis of détente, catalysing what has been called the ‘Second Cold War’.footnote78 The Carter–Reagan offensive took place in a context of relatively diminished American economic and military supremacy, deepening contradictions in the Western camp, and a shift in gravity away from the European theatre. After a flurry of protest, these years also witnessed a remarkable reversal of much of the European left, with anti-Soviet feeling trumping antipathy to American imperialism. The parallels are curious, if unintended, after two decades in which the us unilaterally unwound Cold War-era arms-control agreements, from the scuppering of the abm to the 2019 abrogation of the ban on intermediate-range nuclear forces (inf), the accord that brought the so-called Euromissile Crisis to a close.footnote79 In this respect, the brigading of allied nations into the Sino-American face-off bespeaks broader strategic intentions. In 2019, White House pressure on nato allies to adopt a more aggressive posture towards Beijing provoked an indignant response from Macron. ‘Is our enemy today Russia? Or China?’ he asked rhetorically at a press conference. ‘Is it the goal of nato to designate them as enemies? I don’t think so.’footnote80 But subsequent events returned a different verdict. At its June 2022 summit in Madrid, nato for the first time officially fixed China (labelled a ‘systemic challenge’) in the gunsights, amidst us efforts to ‘leverage’ action on Ukraine into ‘more concrete support for its policies in the Indo-Pacific region’.footnote81 In the past few years, American strategists have consciously evoked the rising tensions of the 70s, when the rationale for pushing Europeans to increase their nato outlays was to free the us to expand operations farther afield. A digest published by rand in 2019 cited Andrew Marshall’s 1972 report for the think tank, Long-Term Competition with the Soviets, as inspiration for ‘cost imposing’ strategies vis-à-vis Moscow. ‘One historical reference point for such measures’, the report noted, can be found in the policies of the Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan administrations through the 1980s. These included a massive us defence build-up, the launch of the Strategic Defense Initiative (sdi, also known as Star Wars), the deployment of intermediate-range nuclear-armed missiles to Europe, assistance to the anti-Soviet resistance in Afghanistan, the intensification of anti-Soviet rhetoric (the so-called evil empire), and support to dissidents in the Soviet Union and its satellite states.footnote82 Stepped up support for the Ukrainian military—‘already bleeding Russia in the Donbas region’—was another means of ‘extending Russia’, raising the likelihood that the Kremlin might counter-escalate, committing more troops and pushing them deeper into Ukraine. Russia might even preempt us action, escalating before any additional us aid arrives. Such escalation might extend Russia; Eastern Ukraine is already a drain. Taking more of Ukraine might only increase the burden, albeit at the expense of the Ukrainian people.footnote83 Such an approach was not without risk. Were Ukraine overwhelmed, or forced to accept a Carthaginian peace, ‘us prestige and credibility’ could suffer. Flooding the theatre with weaponry likewise called to mind undeniable hazards. ‘On the other hand’, the authors observed, ‘Ukraine is certainly a more capable and reliable partner than others to whom the United States has provided lethal equipment—for instance, the anti-Russian Afghan mujahidin in the 1980s’. Updated in a militant synthesis by the Atlantic Council, similar reflections guided the agenda of the Biden Administration from early 2021.footnote84 Thus, beginning in January 2021, two us destroyers deployed for seventeen days to the Black Sea, where they participated in a multi-domain surface, air and subsurface warfare drill with the Ukrainian navy, Turkish frigates, F-16s and a P-8 reconnaissance plane. In an appearance at nato headquarters in Brussels, Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal announced plans to construct new bases in the Black Sea and the Azov Sea, and saceur Tod Wolters trumpeted nato’s ‘enhanced forward presence’ in the region, ‘with superb support from Georgia and Ukraine’.footnote85 That June, the British destroyer hms Defender entered Russian territorial waters off Cape Fiolent, leading to a volley of warning shots from a Russian patrol boat. On the heels of Defender-Europe 21, one of the largest nato exercises since the end of the Cold War, the Royal Navy joined in the annual Sea Breeze exercise and a land drill in Mykolaiv Oblast named Cossack Mace. The uk took the lead in the modernization of Ukraine’s Command, Control, Communications and Computers (C4) capabilities and the development of a ‘mosquito fleet’, equipped with British anti-ship missiles; a report by rusi noted that London is perceived by the Kremlin as ‘willing to go to the edge’, with ‘fewer reservations about confronting Russia’ than other alliance members.footnote86 By late 2021, the us and uk claimed to have trained tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers, substantively bringing the country’s military in line with nato standards.footnote87 Over the course of the year, the alliance ratcheted up its ‘air-policing’ activities over the Baltic, with a reported 370 sorties.footnote88 Belligerent notes in Washington and Kiev, compounded by signs that Ukraine was acquiring a combat drone capability on the Azerbaijani model, accompanied Russia’s military build-up on the border throughout 2021.footnote89 At an October briefing in the Oval Office, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley outlined a fourfold blueprint of ‘us interests and strategic objectives’: 1. Don’t have a kinetic conflict between the us military and nato with Russia. 2. Contain war inside the geographical boundaries of Ukraine. 3. Strengthen and maintain nato unity. 4. Empower Ukraine and give them the means to fight.footnote90 Before the month was out, a Turkish-made Bayraktar tb2 under Ukrainian command carried out the first drone strike against rebel forces in Donbas. This sustained escalation around Ukraine was the context for the accelerated pull-out from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021. Brzezinski Sr, welcoming Obama’s 2009 ‘surge’, had cautioned that a nato defeat in the country would entrain catastrophic consequences for American credibility and trans-Atlantic harmony.footnote91 When Kabul fell to the Taliban on 15 August 2021, the us withdrawing without so much as consultation with its allies, voices resounded to declare the end of Pax Americana. At a cost of $2.3 trillion, the 20-year war had taken more than 7,000 lives on the invaders’ side and an untold number of Afghans. In December 2021, nato foreign ministers convened in camera at the atta Centre in Riga to discuss the conclusions of an ‘Afghanistan Lessons Learned Process’, disseminated to the public in a page-long factsheet. This document struck a basically upbeat note, although it regretted the failure of the (non-nato) ‘international community’ to rebuild a functioning state.footnote92 In the meantime, the Biden regime retargeted sanctions on Kabul and seized $9 billion in central bank reserves, leaving the country ruined and millions prey to starvation and death.footnote93 Months later, as Russian troops and armour poured across the Ukrainian border, all could be forgotten. ‘nato has been revitalized, and the United States has reclaimed a mantle of leadership that some feared had vanished in Iraq and Afghanistan’, the New York Times announced two weeks after the offensive began.footnote94 The Ukraine war opens a new chapter in nato’s story, yet to be written. What balance sheet can be drawn of the trajectory of the alliance so far? From the Balkans to the Dnieper, its claims as guarantor of peace in Europe disclose on examination their opposite—a career of brinksmanship, Machtpolitik and provocation. In terms of capability aggregation and military throw-weight, the record of Franco-British showboating in North Africa and the failure after twenty years to subdue the Taliban speaks for itself. Ankara’s performance as gatekeeper to Finnish and Swedish accession, all while pursuing its ongoing campaign against the Kurds in Iraq and Syria, illuminates the circumference of the Atlantic ‘community of values’.footnote95 In other respects, however, nato chiefs may be entitled to boast that theirs is ‘the most successful alliance in history’.footnote96 Midwife to liberal rebirth in Eastern Europe, sheriff of globalization, warden of international outlawry: the variety of its missions, if not always compatible with its principles, attests to the prepotency of its helmsman. nato’s ranks more than doubled in the first three decades after the end of the Cold War, new members inducted into a compact unbounded in all but name by the geographical ambit of the North Atlantic Treaty. The eu’s relationship of dependency to it is codified in the 2009 Lisbon Treaty, which stipulates that no European security policy jeopardize commitments to the Atlantic Alliance. As a mechanism for disciplining allies, mediating their disputes and managing imperial problems, its record in enforcing American hegemony over Europe cannot be gainsaid. Far from the sole such implement, readily dispensed with when inconvenient, it nevertheless bids fair to be the most influential. Integration is not merely a matter of standardizing munitions, refining doctrine and coordinating command protocols. Equally, if not more importantly, nato seeks to ensure ‘mental interoperability’. Atlanticism, de Gaulle once observed, ‘is in us, amongst our ruling layers and those of our neighbouring countries.’ ‘It is in our heads'. 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