das heutige Europa ist der Zappelphilipp der Weltgeschichte. Unfähig, sich auf das Wesentliche zu konzentrieren, zum Beispiel auf die geostrategischen Herausforderungen, ist Europa für jede Ablenkung dankbar. Der Typus des hypernervösen Rettungspolitikers hat sich herausgebildet. Mehrere Jahre lang rettete er Griechenland, ein Land, das weniger als zwei Prozent der europäischen Wirtschaftskraft besitzt. Mittlerweile ist die europäische Elite zur Rettung weitergereist, um den politischen Selbstmord der Briten zu verhindern. Heute Nacht beschloss der EU-Sondergipfel in Brüssel eine Verschiebung des Brexits um einige Wochen. Die treffende Überschrift zu diesem diplomatischen Großaufwand kann eigentlich nur lauten: Rasender Stillstand.
Die anderen Mitspieler der Weltgeschichte haben die Jahre seit der großen Weltfinanzkrise anders genutzt:
► Amerika unter Präsident Donald Trump justierte das Verhältnis zur aufstrebenden Weltmacht China neu. Die Experten sprechen vom „Decoupling”, also der Entkopplung der ökonomischen Wertschöpfungsketten in den Bereichen der Hochfinanz und der Hochtechnologie mit dem Ziel, den Aufstieg Chinas zu verlangsamen. Amerika first ist kein Slogan mehr, sondern seine Strategie.
► China verfolgt – diametral zur Isolierungsabsicht der Amerikaner – den Plan, sich mit den Rohstoffbesitzern in Afrika, den Pufferstaaten in Asien und den exportsüchtigen Europäern zu vernetzen. Das von der Zentralregierung in Peking mit rund 900 Milliarden Dollar unterstützte Projekt der „Neuen Seidenstraße“ ist die ehrgeizigste geostrategische Offensive der Neuzeit. Damit umarmt China 4,5 Milliarden Menschen in 67 Nationen und Territorien, die für ein Drittel des globalen Bruttoinlandsprodukts stehen.
► Und Europa? Zappelt weiter vor sich hin, wobei die südlichen Hände und die nördlichen Füße sich gegenseitig Fallen stellen. Das Establishment in Brüssel ersetzt Strategie durch Taktik, in der Hoffnung, dass dadurch die eigene Planlosigkeit nicht auffällt. Der aktuelle Europa-Gipfel war ursprünglich dafür gedacht, einen Blick auf die neue Weltordnung zu werfen und sich mit dem Verhältnis zu China zu befassen. Doch wieder absorbieren die störrischen Briten mit ihrer anti-europäischen Allergie alle Aufmerksamkeit. „Wir hoffen, dass unsere europäischen Freunde die Nullsummen-Mentalität überwinden werden“, spottete der chinesische Botschafter in Brüssel, Zhang Ming.
Doch dem Kontinent gelingt es seit Jahrzehnten nicht, sich zu konzentrieren. Amerika revitalisiert sich. China denkt groß. Europa ist hibbelig. Die anderen machen Politik, Europa macht Mätzchen. Im Märchen vom Struwwelpeter, verfasst von Heinrich Hoffmann, nimmt die Sache für den Zappelphilipp jedenfalls kein gutes Ende:
Seht, ihr lieben Kinder, seht,
wie’s dem Philipp weitergeht!
Seht! Er schaukelt gar zu wild,
bis der Stuhl nach hinten fällt.
Da ist nichts mehr, was ihn hält.
Im Morning Briefing Podcast kommentiert Udo van Kampen, der 20 Jahre lang das ZDF-Studio in Brüssel geleitet hat, die nächtlichen Ereignisse:
Die Lage ist so, dass jetzt endlich Klarheit besteht und die EU das Heft des Handelns eindeutig in der Hand hält. Noch drei Wochen müssen wir warten, dann sehen wir uns das Chaos an.
dpa
Amerika dagegen wartet nicht, sondern haut schon wieder mit der Faust auf den Tisch.US-Präsident Donald Trump will die Strafzölle im Wert von mehr als 250 Milliarden Euro gegen China aufrechterhalten – unabhängig von einer möglichen Einigung in den derzeitigen Verhandlungen über ein Handelsabkommen. „Wir sprechen nicht darüber, sie zu entfernen. Wir sprechen darüber, sie für einen längeren Zeitraum zu belassen“, sagt Trump. Sein Plan ist nicht unser Plan, aber es ist einer.
On June 24, in her first interview with Western media in well over a year, Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen called on the international community to “work together to reaffirm our values of democracy and freedom in order to constrain China and also minimize the expansion of their hegemonic influence.” These are remarkably strong words for a president of the Republic of China (Taiwan)—even for Tsai, a member of the notionally independence-minded Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).
Since Tsai was elected in 2016, she has remained committed to the status quo in cross-strait relations, despite what she called in her interview “immense pressure” from Beijing. This means maintaining de facto rather than de jure independence for Taiwan, conducting cross-strait affairs in accordance with the ROC constitution and extant legislation, and respecting previously negotiated cross-strait agreements.
Beijing, on the other hand, has intensified its efforts to unify Taiwan and mainland China under Beijing’s “one China” principle. In response to the 2016 election in Taiwan—in which the DPP gained simultaneous control of the executive and legislative branches for the first time—Chinese President Xi Jinping immediately launched a pressure campaign on the island, beginning even while the relatively China-friendly Ma Ying-jeou government was still in office. In the 35 months since Tsai’s victory, Beijing has cut off official communications across the strait, stolen Taipei’s diplomatic allies, used economic leverage to punish Taiwan, ensured Taiwan’s exclusion from international forums, and increased the pace and scope of military exercises in the waters surrounding the island. Xi shows no signs of letting up anytime soon.
Xi’s pressure campaign, however, should not be read simply as a sign of displeasure with the current DPP government. Although the DPP has in the past considered moves toward formal independence, so far the government has not openly threatened the cross-strait relationship. On the contrary, it has eschewed talk of independence and even offered the occasional olive branch to Beijing. The real reasons for Xi’s concern run deeper than any one government or party. Support for unification is plummeting among the population of Taiwan at the same time that Xi is making unification a more important component of his vision for the future of China—his so-called China Dream. Tsai’s recent foreboding remarks suggest that she sees what many in the West are failing to recognize: the relationship between Taipei and Beijing is becoming untenable, and trouble is brewing in the Taiwan Strait.
FAMILIARITY BREEDS CONTEMPT
The nearly 70 years since the initial split between the two governments has been characterized by varying degrees of animosity. But in recent decades, Beijing’s approach to pushing Taiwan toward unification has not always been as outwardly aggressive as it is today. During Ma Ying-jeou’s presidency, from 2009 to 2016, China’s strategy was to increase Taiwan’s economic dependence on the mainland, thus, in its thinking, making unification inevitable. But to the frustration of Hu Jintao, the president of China from 2003 to 2013, and now Xi, the people of Taiwan considered more than just their pocketbooks when it came to defining the nature of their relationship with China.
The signature achievement in the cross-strait rapprochement of the Ma era was the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA), essentially a cross-strait free trade agreement. The ECFA did not have the positive economic impact that many economists anticipated, but even a wildly successful free trade agreement would not necessarily have increased Taiwanese support for unification. Many Taiwanese at the time, especially younger citizens, were wary of tightening cross-strait ties. For them, Beijing had always been essentially a foreign power with malign designs on the island, and they questioned whether rapprochement was in their interests. During Ma’s second term, in 2014, student and civil society groups occupied the Legislative Yuan to halt the passage of the Cross-Strait Service Trade agreement, a treaty aimed at liberalizing trade in services between the mainland and the island. More than 100,000 people took to the streets in Taipei to support the occupiers’ demands. Later that year, the DPP made significant electoral gains in local polls, and in 2016, it achieved unified control of the central government.
The success of the independence-minded DPP occurred in the context of a long-term trend that should be worrying for Beijing, but that it has proved incapable of controlling: over the past three decades, the percent of the population in Taiwan that identifies as Chinese has plummeted as Taiwanese identification has surged. In 1992, 46.4 percent of those surveyed by the Election Study Center at National Chengchi University reported that they identified as “both Taiwanese and Chinese”; 25.5 percent identified as Chinese; and 17.6 percent identified as Taiwanese. In December 2017, dual identification had fallen to 37.3 percent and Chinese identification to 3.8 percent. Taiwanese identification, on the other hand, had risen to 55.3 percent of respondents.
Interestingly, the percentage of respondents identifying as solely Taiwanese peaked at 60.6 percent in 2014, during Ma’s second term, while Taipei and Beijing had a closer relationship than is typical. During the same period, support for eventual independence grew, as did support for maintaining the status quo indefinitely. Support for eventual unification and for near-term unification have both decreased since the survey was first conducted in 1994. Put simply, distance did not make Taiwan’s heart grow fonder, but familiarity apparently did breed contempt.
TAIWAN’S PLACE IN THE CHINA DREAM
All of this spells trouble for China’s goal of unification. In fact, since Taiwan’s first direct presidential election in 1996, China has failed to make any progress toward this goal. The past 20 years of cross-strait relations, together with decreasing support for unification in Taiwan, suggest that at this point un-coerced unification is simply not in the cards.
Since Taiwan’s first direct presidential election in 1996, China has failed to make any progress toward its goal of unification.
But rather than accepting this reality and attempting to shift focus away from the island, Xi has made unification an important component of his China Dream. He began talking about the “great renewal of the Chinese nation”—which, for him, requires formal unification with Taiwan—during a speech he gave in 2012 as the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. Of course, perhaps even more pivotal to the China Dream than territorial expansion is guaranteeing the economic well-being of Chinese citizens. Last fall, at the 19th Party Congress, Xi asserted that by midcentury the CPC would “develop China into a great modern socialist country that is prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced, harmonious, and beautiful.” But as policy experts Derek Scissors and Dan Blumenthal have argued, the Chinese economy may be entering a period of stagnation. “Absent powerful pro-market reform that is nowhere in sight,” they posit, “true economic growth will halt by the end of this decade, no matter what the government claims.”
If Xi turns out to be unable to deliver on his promises of economic prosperity for all Chinese people, as may well be the case, the other components of the China Dream will become more important. Unsurprisingly, he spoke about Taiwan in strident terms at the Party Congress. In what was reportedly one of the speech’s biggest applause lines, Xi affirmed his commitment to “safeguarding China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.” “We have the resolve, the confidence, and the ability to defeat separatists’ attempts for ‘Taiwan independence’ in any form,” he declared. “We will never allow anyone, any organization, or any political party, at any time or in any form, to separate any part of Chinese territory from China!”
Beijing’s coveting of Taiwan is not new, but under Xi its aim has grown steadier. Broadly speaking, Xi’s pressure campaign against Tsai’s government has three primary goals. First, China hopes to isolate Taiwan on the international stage and advance its one-China narrative, with the aim of decreasing foreign interest in Taiwan’s plight and discouraging intervention on its behalf. Second, Beijing seeks to convince Taiwan’s people that the island’s continued existence as a de facto independent state is a lost cause, and that they lack both the means and the allies that would be necessary to resist unification. Finally, China strives to normalize its military operations in Taiwan’s vicinity, all the while wearing down the island’s own military assets by forcing them to constantly react to Chinese military activities.
To be sure, China still prefers to achieve unification nonviolently (although such unification would of course still be coerced). But the possibility of Beijing turning to violence cannot be ruled out—in fact, it is currently seeking to create the conditions in which the use of force against Taiwan would be a more viable option.
ROUGH SEAS AHEAD
In 2013, Xi told Vincent Siew, a former vice president of Taiwan, that “the issue of the political divide that exists between the two sides must step by step reach a final resolution, and it cannot be passed on from generation to generation.” But Taiwan’s leaders have reason to worry about the freedom of future generations should China get its way.
Xi is clearly eager to make measurable progress toward unification, but that is proving difficult to do without a willing partner across the strait. Even if the nominally pro-unification Kuomintang (KMT) were to take back the presidency in 2020, it still might not cooperate with his agenda. Like the DPP, the KMT is shaped by larger societal trends. Given the direction in which public opinion is moving in Taiwan, in coming years it is more likely that the KMT will move closer to the DPP on China than vice versa.
China and Taiwan are looking more and more like an unstoppable force and an immovable object, separated by only 100 miles of open water. Taipei has proved itself a responsible actor in East Asia and will seek to avert a potentially cataclysmic collision, as long as doing so does not require submitting to Beijing. Whether Beijing will accept anything less than submission, however, is not at all clear. If Xi finds he cannot deliver on his promise of a better life for all Chinese, he may welcome a confrontation with Taipei. The Taiwan Strait is already known for its strong winds and choppy waters—but rougher seas lie ahead
China verliere „seinen Wow-Faktor“, schreibt Asien-Experte Daniel Moss von „Bloomberg“. Aber das trifft nur auf Menschen zu, die sich das Staunen abgewöhnt haben. In Wahrheit erleben wir, dass sich das Märchen von Hans im Glück auch rückwärts erzählen lässt: Aus dem Schleifstein des Mao Zedong wurde ein Schwein, aus dem Schwein in der Zeit von Deng Xiaoping ein Pferd, bis die heutige chinesische Führung unter Xi Jinping schließlich einen Goldklumpen in den Händen hält.
Wir sind Zeitzeugen eines Aufstieges, der auch dann märchenhaft bleibt, wenn das chinesische Wachstum sich jetzt auf 6,5 Prozent verlangsamt. Richtig ist: Damit wächst Chinas Wirtschaft so langsam wie seit 1990 nicht mehr. Richtig ist aber auch: Deutschland hat Wachstumsraten dieser Höhe zuletzt unter Ludwig Erhard erlebt. Unser Wow-Effekt hieß damals Wirtschaftswunder.
Das wahre Ausmaß des chinesischen Höhenflugs wird erst dann sichtbar, wenn man die Wachstumszahlen ihrer Abstraktion entreißt und auf die Anzahl der Menschen bezieht. Der nur moderate Bevölkerungszuwachs der vergangenen Jahrzehnte, begünstigt durch die staatliche Ein-Kind Politik, katapultierte Millionen Menschen aus der Armutszone in Richtung Mittelschicht. Aus Bauern wurden Bürger. Pro Kopf stieg das chinesische Bruttoinlandsprodukt kaufkraftbereinigt 2000 bis 2020 um sagenhafte 362 Prozent, derweil die Inder nur um rund 188, die Deutschen um 27 und die Amerikaner um 24 Prozent zulegten.
Drei Dinge machen die chinesischen Wirtschafts- und Finanzpolitiker besser als die Amerikaner:
► Die USA brüskieren die Welt, China vernetzt sie: Seit 2008 sind die weltweiten chinesischen Direktinvestitionen um 834 Prozent auf 1,9 Billionen US-Dollar gestiegen. Das Projekt Seidenstraße ist attraktiv auch für den Westen. Heute Nacht erklärte Italien als erstes G7-Land, dass es sich an dieser Neubelebung eines tradierten Handelsraumes beteiligen will.
► Die chinesische Führung hat erkannt, dass der Kapitalismus am besten dann funktioniert, wenn er von einem starken Sozialstaat begleitet wird. Das Konzept der „Harmonischen Gesellschaft“ ist dem amerikanischen Konzept einer „The-winner-takes-it-all-Society“überlegen.
► Amerika fährt seine Staatsverschuldung nach oben, der chinesische Staat ist nur mit 50 Prozent der Wirtschaftskraft verschuldet. Erst wenn man die Außenstände der Privathaushalte und der Firmen hinzurechnet, ergibt sich jenes Bild, das den westlichen Alarmismus erklärt.
Bei der Bekämpfung der Wirtschaftsflaute allerdings ergeben sich Parallelen. Um die Binnennachfrage zu stimulieren, will die KP (genauso wie Trump) die Angebotsbedingungen der Firmen verbessern. Unternehmen sollen um 263 Milliarden Euro entlastet werden, sagte Premierminister Li Keqiang auf der Jahrestagung des Volkskongresses, der gestern in Peking begonnen hat und noch bis zum 15. März dauert. Die Mehrwertsteuer auf Industriegüter wird von 16 auf 13 Prozent gesenkt. Kredite an kleinere Firmen sollen um 30 Prozent gesteigert werden.
Fazit: Die Warnungen des Westens vor einer chinesischen Vergreisung, vor einem Platzen der dortigen Immobilienblase und den Folgen einer zu hohen Verschuldung sind in Wahrheit westliche Hoffnungen, die sich als Furcht tarnen. Die neue Weltmacht geht trotz all dieser Herausforderungen seit Jahrzehnten ihren Weg und wird bis 2030 die mit Abstand bedeutendste Volkswirtschaft der Welt sein (siehe Grafik).
Die Funktionäre der Kommunistischen Partei debattieren auch auf diesem Volkskongress in einer Ernsthaftigkeit und Offenheit, wie man sie sich im Bundestag und auf Capitol Hill nur wünschen könnte. „Der Abwärtsdruck auf die chinesische Wirtschaft nimmt weiter zu“, sagte Premier Li in seiner Antrittsrede: „Deswegen sollten wir uns in ausreichendem Maße auf härtere Kämpfe gefasst machen.“ Bei den DAX-Konzernen nennt man das Erwartungsmanagement. Das wahre Motto des Volkskongresses müsste lauten: Vorsprung durch Panik.
On February 1, the Trump administration made official what had been in the offing for some time: the United States will withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. Signed in 1987, the treaty banned the United States and Russia from developing or deploying any ground-launched missiles that could travel between 500 and 5,500 kilometers, or about 300 to 3,400 miles. Washington claims—correctly—that Russia is building and testing systems prohibited by the treaty, including a new cruise missile that the United States claims can travel at prohibited ranges. The Russians have responded by announcing their own plans to withdraw and develop new weapons.
The INF Treaty was one of the few arms control agreements that became an institution in its own right. The first treaty to eliminate an entire class of nuclear delivery systems, it was the foundation for denuclearizing most of Europe. Today, Russia is violating the agreement, and the Trump administration is right to protest. But provocative as Russia’s cheating may be, the U.S. decision to walk away rather than make a serious effort to bring Moscow back into compliance will undermine the long-term security of both Europe and the United States.
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The INF Treaty removed the most dangerous nuclear weapons from European soil: “intermediate range” weapons that are meant neither for the battlefield nor for long-distance strategic strikes but for nuclear attacks deep into NATO or Russian territory. The limited reach and short flight times of these weapons ideally suited them for a large but geographically confined theater, such as Cold War Europe. Dramatically outgunned and overmatched in terms of conventional firepower, NATO deliberately placed these nuclear missiles in the path of Soviet forces. If Moscow invaded Western Europe, its advancing troops would force NATO leaders to use or lose these weapons, potentially setting off a nuclear war. This risk, the thinking went, would deter the Soviets from trying to overrun Europe.
But placing these arms on the frontlines of a possible East-West war was immensely destabilizing, as it gave leaders only a few minutes to deliberate in the event of a crisis. NATO’s strategy did not keep the peace so much as it made both sides look for a way out of an unsustainable and unbearably tense situation. Soviet leaders were so on edge that a NATO military exercise in 1983 nearly convinced them that an attack was under way. In his memoirs, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev described U.S. intermediate-range weapons as “a pistol to our head”—a sentiment shared in Europe and the United States about similar Soviet missiles aimed their way. In 1987, Gorbachev and U.S. President Ronald Reagan found an exit in the form of the INF Treaty, under which both sides physically destroyed their intermediate-range missiles, accompanied by regular mutual inspections.
Critics argue that whatever its merits in the past, the treaty has outlived its usefulness. They cite—rightly—Russia’s reckless cheating and argue that the United States cannot sit idly by as the Russians develop new nuclear systems. They also point to China’s huge arsenal of intermediate-range missiles as proof that the treaty is a needless straitjacket for the United States in East Asia. At the very least, we are told, the United States needs to rethink arms control commitments from the last century.
Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev signing the INF treaty at the White House, December 1987
The problem with this line of reasoning is that it mistakes war-gaming for strategy. The case for abandoning the INF Treaty and developing intermediate-range missiles focuses almost entirely on operational thinking about complex battlefield scenarios. By contrast, little thought is given to a logically prior question: whether these weapons increase or decrease the chances that war might break out in the first place. Put simply, any discussion about intermediate-range missiles must begin by asking how they affect deterrence. The answer, in almost all cases, is that they corrode it.
AN OUTDATED STRATEGY
Consider the situation in Europe. Today, the biggest threat to NATO is no longer a full-scale Russian invasion but that Russian President Vladimir Putin will make a grab for Baltic or Polish territory, perhaps as an attempt to distract his increasingly restive population. Putin might be tempted to show that NATO is a paper tiger by taking a small patch of allied territory, daring the United States to eject his forces while acclimating Europe and the world to yet another “frozen” conflict, as he has done in eastern Ukraine.
Western nuclear threats will mean little to Putin in such a circumstance. The Russians know that a conflict on the edge of central Europe is not the same as a Soviet march to the Rhine or the English Channel and that Washington will not risk a nuclear holocaust over a localized and relatively small conventional conflict.
The INF treaty’s critics mistake war-gaming for strategy.
Indeed, how could U.S. leaders even begin to make such a nuclear threat credible? Imagine, for the moment, that the United States redeployed intermediate-range nuclear missiles to Europe to deter Russia. Where would it place these weapons? Unlike in 1985, today NATO includes Poland and all of the Baltic states. For U.S. missiles to lie directly in the path of a possible Russian attack, they would have to be deployed right along the Russian border. To situate them there would be insanely provocative and would furnish Moscow with a convenient excuse to aim hundreds of similar weapons at the capital of every NATO member, as it did in the 1980s.
In truth, NATO has the conventional power to eventually dislodge a Russian incursion without nuclear weapons. Russian leaders know this and have sought to offset NATO’s superiority by threatening to go nuclear should they find themselves losing a conventional war, even if they are the aggressor. This is exactly the threat that NATO reluctantly relied upon over 30 years ago. Today, the burden of nuclear escalation rests entirely on Moscow. Why would the United States voluntarily relieve Russia of this problem by engaging in a new nuclear arms race?
STORMY WEATHER
Never mind Europe, critics contend: the real threat lies farther east. China—which is not a signatory to the INF Treaty—has deployed intermediate-range systems on its territory and may well use them in a future conflict. Freed from the shackles of treaty compliance, Washington can now respond by shoring up its regional presence with similar weapons systems.
Yet doing so inevitably raises the same strategic questions as in Europe. Assuming that Japan or South Korea agreed to station U.S. missiles on its territory—an unlikely proposition—this would instantly make either country a legitimate target for a preemptive Chinese nuclear attack in the event of a crisis. Would deterrence and strategic stability in Asia be enhanced as a result?
Arming the missiles in question with conventional rather than nuclear warheads won’t solve these problems. The United States could, of course, develop ballistic and cruise missiles that can strike quickly and destroy important targets without using nuclear force. In practice, however, even these conventional systems could quickly bring the United States close to the nuclear precipice, since opponents cannot tell ahead of time whether they are being targeted with conventional or nuclear weapons if the delivery systems can be armed with both. The same goes for launching platforms that are indistinguishable from systems also designed for strategic attack, such as submarines.
MAXIM SHEMETOV/REUTERSJournalists and military attachés examining components of the cruise missile system SSC-8/9M729, which the United States claims violates the INF treaty, Moscow, January 2019
We know this from close calls in the past. As recently as 1995—a time of relative Russian-U.S. comity in the happier days right after the end of the Cold War—the launch of a single Norwegian weather satellite was enough for the Russian military to hand then President Boris Yeltsin the nuclear codes. Yet today’s advocates of a new arms race in both Europe and Asia are confident that if the United States launched a swarm of missiles in a future conflict with Russia or China, leaders in Moscow and Beijing would wait until impact to assess the damage and calmly fine-tune their response.
The underlying problem here is that advocates of an intermediate-range missile arms race gloss over the interests at stake and the risks involved—yet strategy is about choice within constraints, including the limitations imposed by risk. Too often, the starting point is to simply “assume a war” and then calculate which weapons systems will give U.S. forces an edge over their opponents. Such is the result when analysts spend too much time looking at charts and specifications in the sterile environment of think tanks and simulation rooms, as thinkers such as former U.S. National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy and the military historian Sir Michael Howard warned us during the Cold War.
In the heat and fog of war, with the safety of the homeland at stake, real decision-makers will act like normal human beings: they will make assumptions, jump to conclusions, and commit errors. Above all, they will probably not wait to see if incoming warheads are appropriately configured for the next iteration of the game.
WHAT ARE WE FIGHTING FOR?
To account for the unpredictable behavior of humans in high-stakes situations, weapons should be designed and deployed with an underlying strategic logic rather than based only on their technical characteristics. The Trump administration, like the administration of Barack Obama before it, lacks the most important ingredient of such a strategy: an actual set of policies that defines U.S. interests and goals in Europe and Asia.
In the heat and fog of war, decision-makers make assumptions, jump to conclusions, and commit errors.
Under Obama, the United States mortgaged much of its foreign policy to the overriding goal of reaching a nuclear deal with Iran. The Trump administration’s approach, meanwhile, reflects the president’s general ignorance of, and hostility to, alliances and treaties. As it stands, the U.S. reaction to Russian cheating has amounted to an admission that Washington doesn’t like the INF Treaty any more than Moscow does and that it wishes everyone in Europe the best of luck as it heads off to start arms racing the Chinese. More by necessity than conviction, NATO has declared its support for the U.S. exit from the treaty, but the message to Europe is clear: “You’re on your own.”
What would a more comprehensive U.S. strategy look like? First and foremost, it should disentangle American interests in Asia and Europe. The United States is time limited in its decisions about Europe, where the equally important New START treaty is set to expire in early 2021. Responding to China’s rise, meanwhile, will take much more than reopening the door to any single weapons system: more investment in conventional forces and especially a recommitment to U.S. naval power in the Pacific.
Responding to China’s rise, will take much more than reopening the door to any single weapons system.
In Europe, the United States should engage Russia on several issues that both sides care about, such the New START treaty, sanctions, and Ukraine. The United States should go into these talks with clear plans for exacting a price for Russian intransigence. Linking such disparate issues might not have been advisable in an earlier time, when Washington and Moscow still had open lines of communication to discuss them separately. Today, however, relations are at such a low point that only a forceful and comprehensive engagement can head off a larger conflict down the line.
For such talks to be successful, the United States needs to treat NATO members like allies rather than clients or serfs and to work with them to reinforce the alliance’s eastern borders. A more powerful conventional defense bolstered by U.S. forces would serve as a deterrent, ensuring that Russia would lose any conventional engagement quickly and decisively, before its half-baked nuclear threats could even come into play.
Most important, U.S. leaders should ask themselves what, exactly, they are willing to fight for, and why. The United States needs a better plan than to keep leaning not only on the crutch of nuclear weapons but on weapons systems it got rid of more than 30 years ago.
