‘Ambiguous Warfare’ Providing NATO With New Challenge
08.29.2014 at 05:53am
'Ambiguous Warfare' Providing NATO With New Challenge by Peter Apps, Reuters
Since Russia's annexation of Crimea in March, NATO has been publicly refocusing on its old Cold War foe Moscow. The threats it now believes it faces, however, are distinctly different to those of the latter half of the 20th century.
The West then was defending against the risk of Soviet armor pouring across the North German plain. Now, officials and experts say, it is "ambiguous warfare" that is focusing minds within NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Confrontations are viewed as more likely to start with cyber attacks or covert action to stir up Russian minorities in Europe's east than from any overt aggression…
What?!?!?!
But Madhu, our offensive operations are defensive. My imaginary versions of T.E. Lawrence and Orde Wingate tell me so….
Yeah, let’s go there instead of counseling good inclusive governance and not banning languages and not stealing Western funds and firming up borders. It’s a perpetual motion machine of war making and money making and war making.
Turkey supports IS in a defacto way, and Pakistan and Saudi Arabia support the Taliban, and they are NATO or NATO allies, and Poland/Lithuania/etc. trades heavily with Russia and complains when it can’t, and on and on and on and on….
Because if there is one thing we’ve learned over the years, it’s that mucking around with proxy wars and in the internal affairs of other nations always works out well for us.
I know it’s just a Reuters article but can you imagine anything written like this during the Cold War? The very fact that anyone talks this way just underscores that whatever threat Russia is, it’s not the old Soviet Union because only the crazies and the Dr. Strangeloves talked about stuff like this. We are paying such a heavy price for having completely militarized our thinking. The crazies on all sides have been let out of the box. Where are the adults?
The Washington Consensus wants to regime change everyone, first Iraq, then Syria, then Russia, then China, then what, ourselves? Well, if they don’t blow up the world or blow up the world economy or the very liberal western order they claim to want to defend.
How did we get here as a nation and as a society? The fever dreams of the elite and their fantasies. Hard to believe some people in Russia think the West is out to get them, first humiliate them in the 90’s economically, and then constantly throw propaganda. You can hate Putin’s guts and still see that Russia and its people exist. What, are we going to socially engineer them too? Create new Western men just like the 60s modernizers imagined for the “developing world?” Just like in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan? Nation building and regime change and re-education, I mean modernizing, forever….
How badly educated current publics and reporters generally are, can you imagine anyone during the Cold War except for the crazies that would have thought of anything but the Cuban missile crisis when discussing internal destabilization of a nation with so many nukes?
At what point then? At what point do the boarders become relevant? Important enough for some substantive – definitive (dare I say kinetic) – response? When Russian Armour Tank divisions roll into Poland? Chech Republic? Slovakia, Hungary, Austria, Germany, France…UK? Seems reminiscent of a little spat we had 75 years ago with a funny looking little turd with a funny looking mustache. I agree, we can’t go willy nilly or emotionally half cocked into the geopolitics of the matter, but if the boarders do not matter in the Ukraine, then they don’t matter at the waters edge of the continental U.S. Perhaps you’re on to something. Our southern boarders don’t seem to matter much either. My friend this is not an attack on your position or reasoning, but I see this as something – a problem much deeper and ominous. Some would say that the idea of Russian tanks rolling west is folly, but the same was said when Germany rolled tanks east and west. The same would have been said on September 10th, 2001 of the Al Qaeda attacks. We have lost something as a country. We have lost something of our standing in the minds of these…provocateurs. We don’t instill pause in the minds of our adversaries, which says a great deal about our resolve and our concern of the interest of ally’s, which are our interest if not in the very near term, certainly in the long term. Can we be counted on anymore?
Here is the link to the article “Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West’s Fault” by John Mearsheimer, which can be found in the September issue of Foreign Affairs:
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/141769/john-j-mearsheimer/why-the-ukraine-crisis-is-the-wests-fault
Here is Mearsheimer’s suggestion for a solution:
“There is a solution to the crisis in Ukraine, however — although it would require the West to think about the country in a fundamentally different way. The United States and its allies should abandon their plan to westernize the Ukraine and instead aim to make it a neutral buffer between NATO and Russia, akin to Austria’s position during the Cold War … ”
Note here that I am not the only one that sees our attempts to “westernize” outlying states and societies as the “root cause” or many/most of the world’s — and our — problems today.
Ukraine a top small arms exporter?
Ah, yes, I remember well Churchill’s fiery speeches on Ukrainian small arms exports….
It’s almost like the majority of western foreign policy commentators, think tank analysts, the NYT, the Washington Post, every “fearful of being ostracized by the in-crowd” crony for the DC consensus, are completely and utterly full of it. (Well, not everybody, naturally):
http://www.defenseone.com/threats/2014/06/sending-weapons-ukraine-wont-help/85666/
Bremer II and the disbanded Iraqi Army.
The US/NATO and EU make a play for Ukraine–which has been going on for twenty years in a mixed up way with genuine desire to help the state–and has only enabled this process, hasn’t it? Just as in Afghanistan, so too in Ukraine.
Perhaps official DC is simply embarrassed by its serial failures since the end of the Cold War and wanted a “win” at any cost? That the Russians were more realistic about their proxies doesn’t mean that the answer is now for the US to shovel more aid toward our proxies. The poor Ukrainian people, but, then again, this is what happens when corrupt elites (and well meaning internal and external modernizers) are encouraged by outsiders with fantasies of using the Ukrainian state for its own power plays and expansionism.
In a multifactorial world, why can’t we talk about the multiple factors in Russia, Ukraine, and the US/EU/NATO that have all led toward this point? I suppose propagandizers can’t use real understanding to grandstand, so they simplify.
I can’t edit comments for some reason.
Move Forward said we don’t or didn’t supply Ukraine with enough arms or training JUST AFTER I posted that Ukraine is a TOP TEN ARMS exporter and has plenty of arms, and that NATO HAS TRAINED Ukrainian soldiers via NATO but the corrupt government pocketed the money for training, pay, more soldiers etc.
The soldiers ran out of ammunition and had other logistical problems and yet, at a MILITARY blog, no one is discussing these things? Instead, we are all focusing on the latest DC propaganda.
Everyone is lying through their teeth on all sides as far as I can tell: Russian, Ukrainian, and NATO/EU/US, and not even very well. Maybe Putin was trying to say that if he had fully invaded Ukraine, we’d know it because the tanks would be in Kiev. Black and white photos with a few trucks on a road? A full on INVASION! Proxies maybe, sure, but come on. OSCE reports sound different.