Scott Ritter: “NATO is screwed”

My third in a row on the overreach of the mediocrities managing with breath-taking ineptitude the West’s accelerating decline. Below yesterday’s post – see Europe aside, the world wants Trump – Bryan commented:

Mark Sleboda worries that a Trump presidency would offer just enough to Russia to bring the war in Ukraine to a halt – leaving Russia vulnerable to a rearmed Ukrainian rump state further down the line

To which steel city scribe (having noted Putin’s personal sense of betrayal by Merkel and Hollande over Minsk, and his making a point of not repeating past errors) replied:

Even if Putin were to be so unimaginably and atypically foolish as to agree a peace which allowed the West respite in which to tool up for an attack five, ten or twenty years hence, neither Kremlin hardliners nor the Russian public would allow it.

Implicit to both is the continued existence in some form or other of NATO. Park that thought.

Meanwhile, far from acknowledging – nay, recognising – the epic scale ¹ of its hubris over the Ukraine, ² the West is not only doubling down on its shrill insistence that Russia be brought to heel. It now speaks of NATO – once assumed to be superfluous to post USSR requirements by Reagan, Thatcher and fellow hawks not known for bleeding heart pacifism but whose grasp of the true nature and purpose of Cold War I was narrow and brittle ³ – expanding its remit and operations to the South Pacific.

Here too the hubristic denial of reality is staggering. ⁴ Earlier this month, in Modi in Moscow, I wrote that:

[a] false perspective flows from years of foreign policy based on “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” . We can counter in general terms. We can say that’s all well and good for an empire at its uncontested zenith, but the checks, balances and greater complexity of a multipolar world call for the diplomatic skills of a Metternich; skills lost to the US  when the USSR imploded and Neocons saw a barn door opening on a New American Century; when Karl Rove could say “we make our own reality”, and Madeleine Albright that “we are the indispensable nation”.

Such hubris is not conducive to the cultivation of diplomacy. It begets philistinism. That a stance of ‘With Us Or Against us’  betrays monumental hubris is obvious. Only slightly less obvious is its dulling of the intellect, blunting its sensitivity to nuance. Take the way Washington assumed it had New Delhi firmly onside, for a raft of reasons reducible to Sino-Indian tensions real but overstated. In short, decades of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”  left the US incapable of grasping that far from being threatened by Russia’s friendship with India, China welcomes it. And that far from being threatened by Russia’s friendship with China, India sees opportunity.

Park these thoughts too. They serve as lead-ins to Scott Ritter’s insistence, in a twenty-eight minute dialogue late yesterday with Danny Haiphong, that not to put too fine a point on it, NATO is screwed.

* * *

1. “Epic” is an overused term but here I stand by it. Should the world survive in spite of “the mediocrities managing with breath-taking ineptitude the West’s accelerating decline”, historians will write tomes, and students exam answers, on the string of poke-the-bear provocations, many of them set out on this site, which led Russia to recognise Donbas and Luhansk independence on February 22, 2022, and launch her SMO two days later. Likewise on the distortions of hyper-financialised Western economies which led their leaders to underestimate so badly Russia’s power, both military and economic. Likewise on whether such visceral hatred of Russia was a cause, or simply an unusually powerful catalyst, of Western suicidalism.
2. Since ours is an age where colonial geography is under scrutiny – out with Bombay and Burma, Peking and Middle East; in with Mumbei and Myanmar, Beijing and Western Asia – I intermittently follow those pioneers who put the definite article back in Ukraine. The word means “borderland” (a truth whose significance is lost on most of us in the West, especially in literal and de facto islands like UK and USA) so it makes sense to refer to that historically fluid entity as The Ukraine.
3. In a footnote to a post last month – Where might Zelensky store his F-16s? – I wrote:

   The old cold war was only superficially ideological. Russia’s vast natural wealth, markets closed off to Western capital, and above all 500 years of the West fearing a Pan Eurasian threat to its supremacy were – and remain – its key drivers. Putin’s error, failing for all his passion for history to grasp these realities, was to think the West would embrace a post Soviet but not subservient Russia. That’s a delusion he no longer labours under, as Russia turns decisively to the east – very much to the cost of Europe.

   In a mirror image of this point, I part company with Scott. Around 24:15, near the end of his dialogue with Danny, he touches on 1982 and US placement in Europe of Pershing II nuclear missiles that could hit Moscow in twelve minutes. True, but in arguing that now is worse than then – it is, but not for the reason he gives – he says that in 1982 the West did not have the goal of strategic defeat of the USSR. Sorry Scott, it assuredly did; just not for the reasons its leaders gave and I think believed.

4. A few niche Western media do show signs of breaking with denialism. Investor-oriented Bloomberg is a case in point. On July 10, in a piece featured at 18:12 (!) in Scott’s dialogue with Danny, it ran with Putin is Meeting a Lot of World Leaders for a Global ‘Outcast’.

   The title says it all. We are told repeatedly the RF President is a pariah in the international community. What, this one?