RESPONSIBLE STATECRAFT
APR 05, 2024
April 4 marked the 75th anniversary of the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty by the foreign ministers of the original 12 members of the NATO alliance. And rather serendipitously, it was reported this week that NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg has proposed standing up a new $100 billion fund to help Ukraine continue its effort against the Russian invasion — just in time for the anniversary.
While only in the planning stages, the so-called Mission for Ukraine proposal would also see NATO take control of the Ramstein Group which the U.S. set up to coordinate military supplies to Ukraine (This particular aspect of the plan was immediately met with a cold shoulder by the White House yesterday). The alliance support for the proposal, which seeks to “Trump-proof” support for the Ukraine war in the event the former president is reflected and seeks to pull the plug on U.S. funding for Ukraine, is spit along lines one might expect, with support coming from the Baltics, Poland, and The Washington Post, and opposition from Hungary.
Critics, such as the legendary American diplomat Chas Freeman say that the plan is simply “a case of throwing good money—in this case, borrowed money—after bad.”
Freeman sees this as a case of NATO clutching at straws, after all, as he tells Responsible Statecraft, “NATO has run out of Ukrainians to sacrifice on the battlefield as well as the armaments production needed to equip the existing, greatly depleted Ukrainian armed forces. A bond fund will neither create more Ukrainians nor produce more weapons to arm those who have so far survived.”
What both Europe and Ukraine really need, says Freeman, “is peace, and this demands negotiations with Russia. This is a shameless attempt to use financial capitalism to avoid that reality, while further enriching munitions manufacturers. NATO is not a hedge fund and should not attempt to behave like one.When alliances attempt to borrow money for lost causes, you would be right to judge that they know the jig is up.”
Stoltenberg has reportedly pitched the plan as a means “to shield the mechanism against the winds of political change.” As such it is redolent of the way the European Commission functions when it seeks to supplant national law with supranational diktat. If voters in the U.S. or Canada or France or Germany seek to elect people (like Trump) who want to defund the war effort, the existence of such a fund essentially overrules them, i.e., “Trump-proofing.”
Chicago-based international affairs analyst Neil Bouhan sees this as an attempt to “insulate a fundamentally political body, NATO, from the politics of the body’s most important member, the U.S. It hands over billions of dollars to NATO and seemingly discretionary control over the U.S. military.”
Indeed, the proposal raises a number of questions, such as: does it violate the NATO charter? The NATO treaty posits that “an armed attack against one…shall be considered an attack against them all.” But Ukraine is not a NATO member and the treaty, in any case, merely calls for consultations in the event “the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the Parties is threatened.”
Does it mean American military assets in Europe will be controlled by an unaccountable bureaucracy in Brussels? After all, as an unnamed diplomat told the Financial Times yesterday “This will be crossing a Rubicon. Nato will have a role in coordinating lethal support to Ukraine.”
As of now the White House seems to be taking a ‘wait and see’ approach. But the Biden administration seems to have a fatal attraction to bad ideas, of which this is yet another in a rather depressingly long series.
James W. Carden is a columnist and former adviser to the US-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission at the U.S. Department of State. His articles and essays have appeared in a wide variety of publications including The Nation, The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, The Spectator, UnHerd, The National Interest, Quartz, The Los Angeles Times, and American Affairs.
The views expressed by authors on Responsible Statecraft do not necessarily reflect those of the Quincy Institute or its associates.
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From the same site:
When Does NATO Actually Promote US Interests?
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/nato-anniversary/
“Freeman sees this as a case of NATO clutching at straws, after all, as he tells Responsible Statecraft, “NATO has run out of Ukrainians to sacrifice on the battlefield as well as the armaments production needed to equip the existing, greatly depleted Ukrainian armed forces. A bond fund will neither create more Ukrainians nor produce more weapons to arm those who have so far survived.”
Pure kremkrapp.
Yup. This questionable pundit James W. Carden should get some scrutiny, especially his Russian connections. His claim to fame is that he allegedly had been “adviser to the US-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission at the U.S. Department of State”, at an unknown time. Stragely, I can’t find any info that this commission ever existed; in two different search engines, all hits only lead to James W. Carden himself. Did he simply make that up? Not the only suspicious detail in the work of this author, who both claims that Trump is nuts and that the Jan. 6th riot had been a harmless protest. That guy looks like a total loony to me. 🙄
This commission did exist, I can’t find any evidence that Carden was involved in it. There is a pro Russian site called the East-West accord, which Carden is the executive editor. which was founded by another pro russian called Stephen F Cohen, and it was endorsed by none other than the well known pro Russian called Paul Craig Roberts, who actually worked for RT.
https://2009-2017.state.gov/p/eur/ci/rs/usrussiabilat/c41721.htm#:~:text=President%20Obama%20and%20then%2DPresident,security%2C%20economic%20well%2Dbeing%2C
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Committee_for_East%E2%80%93West_Accord
https://usrussiaaccord.org/
Ok, I trust you on that the commission existed, but when, under which president? Maybe Carden had worked for his campaign and thus got a cozy job at the State Department? And, yeah, I found his contributions to the East-West Accord, too, which makes it obvious that this guy’s at least a voluntary (if not paid) lobbyist for Russia. His connection with Cohen explains why Cohen’s wife Vanden Heuvel’s lefty magazine “The Nation” ran so many of Carden’s opinion pieces there, btw. Carden himself most probably ain’t left wing, his anti-government attituxe rather puts him in the libertarian corner. It’s difficult to pass judgment on such a confused mind, making contradictory claims, though. 🤔
The commission was set up by Obama and Medvedev in 2009, not that it ever achieved anything.
Ah, that’s interesting. If I remember correctly, among Carden’s weird opinion pieces was one where he praised Obama as the better choice for conservative (!) voters. Now this makes sense. Hmm, interstingly, from Putin’s point of view, tge ine perienced and tolerant Obama certainly was a better bet than the hard boiled cold warrior John McCain…
😕
This comes from the “Quincy Institute For Responsible Statecraft”, a weird think tank which was funded by money from both George Soros and Charles Koch. Its mission is to promote isolationism and for doing so, it assembled a team of rather unhinged “experts”, including not only the usual suspects Walt and Mearsheimer, but also even crazier jerks like the Outin stooge George Beebe and the author of this nonsense, James Carden, apparently a Qanon fan (he occasionaly collaborates with radical lefty Katherina Van den Heuvel, imagine that!). If the FBI was seriously investigating undue foreign manipulation of US public debate, this dubious Institute and its team of nutcases should be very high up on the list. 😠