U.S. Alliances: Will They Last?
States with U.S. military relationships: Dark Blue are the NATO members, Purple are major non-NATO allies, and Pale Blue are signatories of Partnership for Peace with NATO
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Sesmith
The short-sighted Obama administration seems absolutely determined to allow our foreign alliances, NATO in particular, to wither away through neglect. It would seem the only threat keeping us from withdrawing into a complete isolationist shell is the jihadist threat from ISIS, al-Qaeda, Iran, and other jihadist organizations. Recoiling from the costs of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the American electorate, along with the Obama administration, would like nothing better than if the world would just go away and leave us alone.
Is the U.S. Becoming Isolationist?
No one should find it surprising that the Democratic Party would seize onto the American isolationist zeitgeist to severely cut back U.S. military involvements and power. At least as far back as the Vietnam War, progressives have viewed the United States as usually the bad guys in international affairs. In addition, lusting after the large Department of Defense budgets, they have continuously desired to redirect much of those assets into their social programs. This is a tradition with which Obama agrees. In fact a common theme in Obama’s foreign policy has been that America must atone for its past international sins, as evidenced by his penchant for offering apologies for past U.S. deeds during international tours.
Because of Obama’s isolationist instincts he ordered the complete withdrawal of the U.S. military from Iraq in December 2011 — a premature withdrawal that opened the way for ISIS to seize large areas of Iraq and Syria. It is rather ironic that ISIS’ rise has been forcing Obama to grudgingly recommit U.S. troops back to Iraq, bit-by-tiny bit.
In fact, the spectacle of jihadist barbarities, particularly by ISIS, appears to be turning many Americans away from isolationism as they begin to fear for their own lives. Over the last several years they have been assaulted by videos and reports of ISIS executioners killing even innocent children, as well as any christian they can get their hands on. In addition, the threats of ISIS to destroy Western civilization and to place their black flag over the White House have been shown to be serious by their actions, with major terrorist attacks in France, Belgium, Great Britain, and the United States among other places. Faced with these horrors, many Americans have begun to realize they can not unilaterally decide there will be no war with the jihadists. Since the jihadists insistently declare there will be war, they have the deciding vote so long as they are willing to back up their declarations with actions. As a result, last December a CNN/ORC poll showed a majority of Americans (53%) would be willing to send U.S. ground troops against ISIS.
The Probing of the Periphery of U.S. Alliances by the Revisionist States
Unfortunately, Americans have been hearing far less about other and even more deadly existential threats to the United States. In three different posts, The Growing Threat of Russia, The Purposes of Iran, and Is China a Threat?, I noted an informal, de facto alliance between Russia, China, and Iran. Each of these three countries in its own way poses either an existential threat or an existential threat in development. In foreign policy discussions, all three of these states are often referred to as revisionist states, as opposed to countries such as the United States or those of Western Europe, which are referred to as status quo states. Status quo states are those that like the current international system between nations, thank you very much, and who are not seeking any changes that would directly give them any new powers over other countries. Revisionist states in contradistinction are those who seek to revise the international system, particularly by becoming a region’s hegemon.
In a recent book entitled The Unquiet Frontier: Rising Rivals, Vulnerable Allies, and the Crisis of American Power (Reference [FP1]) , the authors Jakub J. Grygiel and A. Weiss Mitchell discuss how American inattention to its system of allies over the past eight years is encouraging the revisionist powers to probe for weaknesses they can exploit. Simultaneously, facing what might become abandonment by the U.S., some of our allies may be searching for alternatives to American support. How else can our allies interpret statements like the following excerpt from an Obama speech before the United Nations General Assembly on September 23, 2009, and quoted at the beginning of Chapter 2 of The Unquiet Frontier?
No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed…. The traditional divisions between nations … make no sense in an interconnected world; nor do alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of a long-gone Cold War.
Yet, before uttering these words Obama failed to consult with Russia, China, or Iran on whether they agreed modern realities made irrelevant and nonsensical their seeking of empire. Remember, military conflicts require only one side of the confrontation to determine war for both sides.
Russia would like to regain control over much of the old Soviet empire, particularly over Central and Eastern Europe and the Baltic States. Probing the NATO alliance in Georgia in 2008 and the Ukraine beginning in 2014 and continuing to the present time, Russia has been testing NATO to see just how seriously NATO would react to these invasions. Even more ominously, the prospect of a possibly weak U.S. response if they invaded the Baltic Sea states — Latvia, Estonia, and
Photo Credit: NATO/RAF
Lithuania — has led them to probe the Baltic Sea area with military and Naval forces. The Baltic States are a very special case because they are full 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.”
In addition, Russia has been engaging in mischief on NATO’s southeastern borders with their incursion into Syria. I have discussed Russia’s Syrian adventure in the posts Russia Inside Syria, Russian Military Operations in Syria, Sitrep on Russia’s Syrian Campaign, and What Is Russia’s Game in Syria? Although their exact motivations for going into Syria, other than to keep Bashar al-Assad in power, might be controversial, one probable motivation appears to have been to push a flood of Syrian refugees into Southern Europe. Doing this they could hope to destabilize Europe to some degree, especially if ISIS could sneak their own operatives into Europe hid within the flood.
Russia does not seem to be cooperating with Obama’s wish to ignore the rest of the world as much as possible.
In the next post I will discuss the challenges of China and Iran to U.S. security, as well as the weakening of U.S. alliances from revisionist state probes and the decaying U.S. armed forces.
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