Can NATO Survive Peace With Russia?

TWO carpenters work on a house. They both start at 8 a.m., but one quits at 10:30 a.m. while the second works till 4 p.m. The second carpenter then tells the first, “You’ve really got to put in more time on this.” Furious, the first responds by accusing the second one of not caring about the job. That’s the NATO debate in a nutshell. We spend much more on our military than our allies do. There are 100,000 US troops in Europe, more in Germany than in any other country. We’ve sent Special Forces to the Baltic nations to serve as a tripwire against possible Russian aggression. And we’re told we don’t care?

The debate only gets sillier from there. After President Trump complained about European allies who weren’t paying their way in military spending, German Chancellor Angela Merkel tied the issue to climate change. Since Trump wanted out of the Paris climate accord, the United States was no longer a reliable military partner. Given that, and given the Brexit, she announced that it was time for Europe to “really take our fate in our own hands.”

Memo to German chancellors: When you complain about American and British threats to Germany, please don’t do it in a Munich beer tent.

Truth is, climate change is a religion for some people, and anti-Americanism plays well with German voters. Here’s how the popular German weekly Der Spiegel reacted to Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris accord. His “hypocritical and dishonest” speech was a “break from centuries of Enlightenment and rationality . . . a nationalist manifesto of the most imbecilic variety.” His “primitive brutality ... sowed the seeds of international conflict,” one deeper than any since World War II. Easy there, fella. Let’s back up and recognize that Merkel had a point: Germany can’t be faulted for its level of military spending. It’s not as if the West is facing the kind of threat from today’s Russia it did 40 years ago from the Soviet Union.

Remember the Fulda Gap, the idea that we might have to use nuclear weapons to stop an invading Soviet army? Sure, our planes buzz each other, but there’s no comparison.

Back then, the Europeans could be accused of free-riding on the American military. Today, it looks more like realism.

That’s because everyone recognizes the possibility of Russo-American rapprochement of the kind Hillary Clinton proposed with her “reset,” but without a strong president behind her to seal the deal. It’s a bargain that’s waiting to happen, one that holds the promise of a cessation of Russian bad behavior and a pivot toward the threats from a more serious adversary in Iran.

Everyone knows the Trump administration wants to pursue a Russian reset, and that it’s merely been delayed from doing so by the baseless charges of collusion with the Russians over last November’s election. Those charges are going nowhere; the attempt at a reset is going to happen — indeed it is happening even now, at a discreet low level.

Knowing this, how would you expect our NATO allies to react? We don’t know whether an accommodation with Russia is possible. We can’t predict what Putin will do — even if we can make a pretty educated guess. Which means we won’t let up our guard — that would signal a bargaining weakness. But does it really make sense for the Germans to begin a great military build-up if today’s geopolitical adversaries just might become tomorrow’s friends?

Trump has proposed a revolution in American foreign policy. Whether he can carry it off depends upon how his adversaries, foreign and domestic, react. But if he succeeds, old alliances like NATO will need to reinvent themselves if they’re not to become historical footnotes.

And could NATO reinvent itself ? Not if it sees climate change as a military threat; not if it fails to address the threat of Islamic terrorism within its borders; not if the United States abandons “coalitions of the willing” to effect regime change in the Iraqs and Libyas of the world.

Anyway, do we really want a German military buildup? Isn’t that kind of like wishing that EPA lawyers would work harder?