IS THE WEST GOING TO FAIL UKRAINE?
Two events of the last couple of days have set me thinking, the assassination of Navalny Alexei and the withdrawal from Avdika. I realise that I have rarely if ever been so depressed and concerned by international events. I wasn’t alive when the West abandoned Czechoslovakia in 1938 in favour of ‘peace in our time’. I was in hospital with an eye injury during the Cuban crisis and remember listening to the hospital radio. I was an undergraduate when we did nothing to help Czechoslovakia (again) in 1968. Finally with the end of the Cold War, a few years of hope. Solidarity, the fall of the USSR, the velvet revolution, the opening of global trade, even the Arab Spring…. perhaps there would really be a true peace dividend.
False hopes of course. The assassination of Rabin meant for me the end of nascent hopes of a genuine movement to a lasting peace in the Middle East. Now we have a horrendous conflict in Gaza with no hope of a peace process let alone a settlement - as long as the current Israeli right continues to wield political power in return for keeping the current regime in power.
The rise of Putin meant the end of any hopes of a genuine if fragile democracy developing in Russia, and now we have a major conflict on the European landmass for the first time since WW2. But it’s not the fact of the war itself that depresses me so much, it is the growing feeling that once again the West will ultimately fail the countries in Central Europe. I fear more and more that we will let Ukraine lose, because of war weariness, national party politics, a news cycle that prioritises the tragedy of Gaza, and a lack of enough military production capacity. Urgently needed financial help for Ukraine is being held up in possibly the most ineffective House of Representatives in my time by a leadership so in thrall to the probable Republican candidate. The Speaker won’t even bring the bill to the floor of the House, despite knowing it would pass, but that could be seen as a victory for Biden so he won’t do it.
And of course, we now have squabbles over money in NATO, undermining any pretence at Western unity. Even here Trump is misleading us all, if not actually lying. It’s not just Europe that has failed to keep up military expenditure, it is the USA too. While I agree that NATO members have to show America that they are serious about taking on more responsibility for their defence, it is worth looking at the US’s own trends in defence expenditures.
America, which under Ronald Reagan spent about 6 per cent of GDP on its military, bankrupting and eventually bringing down a Soviet Union that could not keep up, now spends just 3.5 per cent to meet its Nato commitment, arm its Indo-Pacific partners, and defend its trade routes and global supply lines. Government revenues this fiscal year will increase by $23.9 billion, just short of 5 per cent. But military spending, adjusted for inflation, remains at last year’s inadequate level, and claims a smaller share of the budget than interest payments on the debt. In other words America already spends more paying the interest on its debt than it does on defence, and some politicians would be mightily tempted to shrink the military even more to meet the rising interest burden. I am no fan of the Heritage Foundation in any way at all but it produces a quite informative annual index of military strength. Its tenth report is interesting… “The current US military force is at significant risk of being unable to meet the demands of a single major regional conflict while also attending to various [military] presence and engagement activities.” Trump and other conservatives continually decry European declines in military spending, but will never acknowledge their own.
Putting more money into defence would sadly entail higher taxes, cuts to public spending or additional borrowing at a time of higher interest rates. At the Munich Security conference Evika Selina, Prime Minister of Latvia, said this required political leaders to be frank with their electorates about the need to accept changes, although some larger NATO states could afford to put more funding into their armed forces without “such big sacrifices”. Last month Estonia added 2 percentage points to its VAT and income tax rates to raise its military budget to 3.2 per cent of GDP. Latvia has also recently unveiled higher taxes on lenders and certain categories of imports as it aims to spend 3 per cent of GDP on defence by 2027. Other front-line states are making similar tax/spending adjustments. I don’t see the same sort of willingness in other major NATO nations to accept that increased military capacity means higher revenue or cuts in other expenditure.
“We Baltics are making these sacrifices,” Silina said. “[we have to ]explain to people how important it is to be secure and to be strong, because there are some countries outside Europe, outside NATO, that will [only] understand the language of strength, not the language of diplomacy…They will need to see us as a strong Europe, a strong NATO, not only on paper but also in reality, in its military capabilities.” I believe she is entirely correct, but I doubt that many will listen. Hence my depression and concern.
((I gratefully acknowledge sources for some of the above factual statements, Irwin Stelzer, Evika Salina, and the Times of London.))