Putin’s Accidental Restoration of NATO
zlotx5
Thu, 05/18/2023 – 08:57
There is no more iron commandment in politics and international relations than the Law of Unintended Consequences. Vladimir Putin intended his invasion of Ukraine to strike a proxy blow at NATO, exposing its rifts and leaving it crushed and humiliated after his blitzkrieg on Kyiv. Instead, the Alliance is at its strongest, most focussed, and soon will be at its most territorially extensive.
As recently as November 2019, President Emmanuel Macron declared NATO “brain dead,” Germany was putting such anaemic amounts of money into her defense that her reservists were training with broom-handles instead of rifles, and Sweden and Finland pursued separate defence policies outside NATO with no active plans to join.
The West’s humiliation during its scuttle from Afghanistan in late August 2021 was of course primarily the fault of the Biden administration, but the other nations of the coalition were humiliated in America’s wake and felt it. Small wonder that the Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping thought it an opportune moment further to test NATO with the invasion of a European country, albeit the latter did stipulate that it was not to happen until after the Winter Olympics in …read more
Source:: Hoover Institution