Consequences of a Weak US President

U.S. troops near Siauliai Zuokniai, Lithuania, April 26, 2014      
Photo Credit: AFP/Petras Malukas

The U.S. and our NATO alliance are now facing the consequences of a weak U.S. President encouraging aggression by a Vladimir Putin controlled Russia. As we discussed in A Failed, “Lead from Behind” Foreign Policy(1),  President Obama, suffused with guilt over past assertive U.S. policies and wanting to focus resources into federal government domestic programs, did not want to even acknowledge the existence of foreign threats. Barack Obama did his very best to will threats away, not expecting his attitude would whet the Russian imperial appetite. Obama’s priority was to reduce U.S. armed forces and steer the U.S. into an isolationist path. See A Failed, “Lead from Behind” Foreign Policy(2) for the many different ways Obama has demonstrated his weakness.   

Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin has been lured by this display of foreign policy weakness to exert progressively more Russian military control over lands outside the Russian Federation, particularly those once under the dominance of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics before its dissolution. See our posts Putin’s Russia and the West and The Growing Threat of Russia. Putin’s first probe to feel out NATO’s resolve was an invasion of the very small sovereign Republic of Georgia in August 2008. In the end Putin was deterred from completely swallowing Georgia by little more than implicit threats by the Bush administration and the Nato alliance. Nevertheless, the appeasement offered by statements of some European government officials (e.g. the Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs and some German leaders) must have made an impression on Putin.

Putin’s next probe was early in the second year of Obama’s second administration in early 2014, when Putin began to support Russian-speaking rebels in Ukraine’s southern province of the Crimea, a peninsula jutting into the Black Sea.

This was followed by overt annexation of the Crimea into the Russian Federation in March 2014. There can be no doubt a large part of his motivation was to secure the southern port of Sevastopol on the Black Sea for the Russian Navy. However, motivated by the feckless U.S. foreign policy of Barack Obama, he also must have been testing NATO resolve to resist his military expansions.

By now Putin may have convinced himself that Obama is too weak a President to oppose serious Russian military challenges – a conviction that may have been certified by Obama’s confused reaction to Russia’s military moves into Syria. Some descriptions of U.S. responses are provided in the posts Russian Military Operations in Syria and A Failed, “Lead from Behind” Foreign Policy (2). If Putin has convinced himself of this, he has only a little more than a year to exploit Obama’s weaknesses, perhaps in regaining the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania for the Russian empire. Russia has certainly been exerting a lot of military pressure on all the countries bounding the Baltic Sea. Russia has issued threats of nuclear attacks on Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, should they join or otherwise cooperate with NATO. In the case of Finland, Russia just wants to get it back into their empire, no matter what.

The Baltic States are a very special case because they are already NATO members, and should they come under Russian attack, the United States and other NATO members would be obligated under Article 5 of the NATO Treaty to come to their defense and make war on Russia. The former head of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, has warned, “There is a high probability that he [Putin] will intervene in the Baltics to test NATO’s Article 5.”

Yet “hope springs eternal in the human breast”! There are some small signs that the NATO states and Barack Obama are growing themselves a backbone. I suspect that naked fear has been the motivator for the European NATO states. Eastern European states, particularly Poland and the Ukraine, along with all of the Baltic states, are dramatically increasing their defense budgets, while the U.S. decreases defense spending. In Barack Obama’s case I nominate the current Department of Defense Secretary, Ashton Carter, as the source of any new backbone he might have.

Ash Carter, uncharacteristically for an Obama administration appointee, has been very realistic in his threat assessments. See here and here and here and here. Could it be under Carter’s tutelage that Obama is beginning to realize existential military threats face the United States?

In meeting with NATO’s new Secretary-General, Jens Stoltenberg, last May, President Obama emphasized NATO challenges “on the Southern front”, meaning the Jihadist organizations of ISIS, the Taliban, and Al-Qaeda. Both Obama and Stoltenburg re-pledged their support of Ukraine against Russia and Russia’s rebel allies in eastern Ukraine, but did not say what else they would do in support of the Ukraine. Ominously, nothing was said about the threats to the Nordic and Baltic states, and pessimistic voices concerning U.S. help for NATO are not hard to find.  One can only hope Ashton Carter can prevail on Obama not to ignore the deadly threat to NATO centered on the Baltic Sea.

We are most assuredly living that apocryphal old Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.”

GO TO HOME

Sharing is caring!