Politico’s Susan Glasser has a report on the recent contretemps that arose when President Trump failed to affirm Article 5 of the NATO treaty:
When President Donald Trump addressed NATO leaders during his debut overseas trip little more than a week ago, he surprised and disappointed European allies who hoped—and expected—he would use his speech to explicitly reaffirm America’s commitment to mutual defense of the alliance’s members, a one-for-all, all-for-one provision that looks increasingly urgent as Eastern European members worry about the threat from a resurgent Russia on their borders.
That part of the Trump visit is known.
What’s not is that the president also disappointed—and surprised—his own top national security officials by failing to include the language reaffirming the so-called Article 5 provision in his speech. National security adviser H.R. McMaster, Defense Secretary James Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson all supported Trump doing so and had worked in the weeks leading up to the trip to make sure it was included in the speech, according to five sources familiar with the episode. They thought it was, and a White House aide even told The New York Times the day before the line was definitely included.
Deceiving his own National Security team – this has given rise to a lot of clucking among the punditry, and deservedly so. I have two thoughts:
- Long term consequences: This demonstrates that a democratically elected leader of the most powerful country on Earth can make decisions which are highly damaging to both the United States and the balance of the Western Democracies. This, consequently, damages the credibility of democracy as an effective form of government.Think about that. An overwhelming majority of the United States is raised with the idea, an ingrained idea, that they have the right to be part of the government process, at the very least by voting; by the same token, by putting themselves forth for governmental positions and perhaps attaining high positions in the government. That, in essence, is the great promise of democracy, as encapsulated in the revolutionary rallying cry No taxation without representation! Sure, France and Germany have demonstrated the ability to elect respectable leaders. That’s good. But is that good enough? Is this going to be ammunition for autocrat Vladimir Putin to use for persuading other countries to abandon democracies? How about Saudi Arabia?And it’s a valid question for the United States as well. Do we return to the bloody[1] past of monarchies? How about a stroll down the path of Dominionism?Or is it time to try to draw up another form of government? Who’s up to sing the praises for their Robot Overlords[2]? If we are set on moving forward, though, I might favor the form put forth in Heinlein’s Starship Troopers – you must earn your privilege to vote by volunteering for government service, wherein the government service inculcates the virtue of putting greater society ahead of your individual desires. Whichever path we choose to tread, it is irrefutable that Trump has done some damage to the entire concept of Democracy as a credible governmental approach – which, incidentally, is the system under which he has made and lost and made and lost his millions[3]. He’s basically committing a sort of philosophical suicide.And we may find that evolving to some other form of government is an unhappy, fraught process.
- The source of this action. Glasser’s informed speculation is in accord with my initial thoughts:
The president appears to have deleted it himself, according to one version making the rounds inside the government, reflecting his personal skepticism about NATO and insistence on lecturing NATO allies about spending more on defense rather than offering reassurances of any sort; another version relayed to others by several White House aides is that Trump’s nationalist chief strategist Steve Bannon and policy aide Stephen Miller played a role in the deletion.
This is congruent with my own speculation on Mr. Bannon’s views as an alleged white supremacist – his hatred for the form of government that deprived him of hereditary (one supposes) position as a slaveowner. This simple omission from a speech is reverberating throughout the democracies of the West, shaking an historic alliance to its roots. It’s hard to overstate the importance of NATO in historical context, even if Article 5 has only been invoked once in its history. Perhaps the best way to think about it is using the “fleet in being” concept, where the very existence of a force, even if not deployed, modifies the behavior of the adversary. For example, the Soviet Union, so long as it believed the NATO treaty nations would support all of its articles, could never really dare to indulge in aggression against any of those members because then it would face the military opposition of all the nations. I suppose the Warsaw Pact could be viewed in a similar way.
And what would have happened if Ukraine had been part of NATO when Russia invaded Crimea a few years ago, a part of Ukraine? This leads to the other possibility, that Putin told Trump to omit this part of the speech, as he conducts a low level war against the United States, the great enemy of Russia. However, there is little inside information to prove this supposition, merely the observation that Russia will benefit most from the demise of NATO.
1And I’m being quite literal here – neither monarchies nor theocracies have done well in the humane government department. Basically, gouts of government-sanctioned blood cover their books to an upsetting degree.
2Not me. Although I suppose I should have said “Artificial Intelligences” rather than Robot, but Robot Overload has a better ring to it. And the AI overlords are probably two or three hundred years in the future anyways.
3I’m not actually sure of Trump’s current location in that cycle.
