An Orange Specter Hangs Over Europe
The Dork Mike Johnson Can be a Hero to His Country by Putting the Bill to a Vote, or he can be a Traitor to the World
I thought Daniel Henninger’s acerbic column in the Wall Street Journal, “Trump Owes Americans Some Answers on Foreign Policy”—specifically “why 2024 won’t be another 1938,” as he put it—was roundly deserved.
However, as congressional Republicans play partisan games with the collective defense of Europe to hang the border around Biden’s neck, all to boost the most patently and categorically unelectable, and, despite every alternative, the worst Republican nominee, ever, I think I have a more prescient historical analogy…
I. Not 1938 but 1919
Much like Biden and Blinken promising Europe that America will aid Ukraine “as long as it takes” (amended more recently to, “as long as we can”)— after the carnage of the Great War, the fear that Woodrow Wilson’s security commitments to Europe via a “League of Nations” were meaningless haunted the postwar settlement negotiations in Paris. Indeed, as quoted in Robert Kagan’s book—from which it takes its title, The Ghost at the Feast, America and the Collapse of World Order, 1900-1941—one of the delegates to the 1919 Paris Peace Conference remarked that American fickleness “was the ghost at all our feasts.”
For argument’s sake, if you consider that the idea of a multilateral “League of Nations,” which would provide collective security to all members, was the precursor to NATO, it’s not that surprising in historical context if America again thinks it can duck alliances, especially with the looming prospect of another war in Europe.
Perhaps the news headlines or Tweets from congressmen on “X” would have you believe the grandstanding, hinging on whether we should continue aiding Ukraine is just another feature of the same ongoing morality play between the two factions, one of which believes in helping a beleaguered ally just because it’s beleaguered (vis a viz woke ideology), while the other believes we shouldn’t, not before dealing with what it alleges are: other problems here at home (i.e. the border, fentanyl, drag queens, the blue collar working class identity crisis). However, that is not what the Ukraine-aid-border drama is really about. For the subtext of this gross theater is actually NATO, and it runs no deeper than the breadth and scope of America’s commitment to a Europe, in George HW Bush’s phrase, “whole and free” since the Second World War.
II. A Europe Un-whole and Unfree
To be fair, although it might ultimately be the responsibility of House Republicans if America does decide to feed Ukraine to the dogs, the Biden administration’s feckless, pathological foreign policy of “deescalation,” and the West’s failure to integrate Ukraine into NATO after the fall of the USSR, surely deserve much of the blame, without which we probably wouldn’t be in this mess.
To be sure: If Bush succeeded, despite opposition from Germany and France, to give Ukraine a path to NATO membership; if Obama didn’t refuse to send Ukraine lethal aid after 2014 or enforce his redline in Syria; if Biden didn’t idiotically withdraw from Afghanistan; if Biden didn’t say that he would countenance a “minor incursion;” and if Biden didn’t slow-walk weapons shipments for arms critical to ensuring a Ukrainian victory, and had allowed Ukraine to strike Crimea or otherwise deep inside Russian territory; or if Biden didn’t incidentally welcome hundreds of thousands of migrants illegally into the country; and if he could at least give one articulate speech cogently explaining why Ukraine’s defense was in America’s interests: then perhaps the final judgment might not have fallen to Matt Gaetz, JD Vance and Josh Hawley to decide what Europe’s future looks like.
For the record, America’s commitments to Europe were always tenuous and contingent, liable to shift with the winds of political circumstance, and after 75 years of peace on the continent, the US has done virtually nothing to guarantee peace since the fall of the USSR. In fact, to be brutally honest, in all of our dealings with Putin since he took over from Boris Yeltsin, we have consistently pursued a horribly misguided policy of engagement, over and over underestimating the Kremlin’s deeply engrained hostility to the West, and downplaying the nature and scope of Putin’s fascist ambitions.
From Clinton to Biden, right up until practically the eve of the invasion, and even after, the US looked the other way: when Putin razed Chechnya and assaulted Kazakhstan; he invaded Georgia in 2008; and in 2015 he annexed Crimea and parts of the Donbas after a decade of meddling in Ukraine’s fragile democracy since at least 2004. He propped up Assad’s dictatorship in Syria in the 2010s and provoked a Muslim refugee crisis in Europe to boost far-right parties and politicians. He consolidated a proxy state in Lukashenko’s Belarus. Some analysts say his cyberoperations were pivotal to Britain’s decision to leave the EU under the Brexit referendum. And he even meddled in America’s 2016 presidential election.
Still no one cared.
Germany built a pipeline to import cheap Russian oil and gas, even while Putin hurled Syrian refugees at Germany’s borders. Donald Trump is an open admirer of Putin. Perhaps it says more about the intellectual and moral rot of conservatism in the West, but people have such a delusion about the lack of threat Putin poses, that a sizable fraction of right wingers think he’s a benign anti-woke culture warrior. And no thanks to Tucker Carlson, they seem to imbibe all the lies peddled by the Kremlin—that Russia’s invasion was provoked by NATO’s eastward expansion, that Ukraine is not a democracy, it’s full of Nazis, and perhaps it’s technically a part of Russia. Even the slightly less extreme brand of Trumpism, led by Ron Desantis, considers the war a distant “territorial dispute” between morally equivalent sides. The capstone to this perennial addiction of ignoring the Russian regime perhaps was Biden’s offer to extradite Zelensky who responded, “I need ammunition. Not a ride.”
I can’t think of a more devastating indictment of America’s post-Cold War Russia policy than that it was Ukraine who finally got us to take Putin seriously. Not the competition with China or Russian meddling in our elections. Similar to how Hamas had to butcher 1200 Israelis for Iran to appear on anyone’s radar, Ukraine had to get savaged for America to finally give a shit and stop trying to engage with Putin, or what Obama called a “reset.” The Biden administration said originally that it wanted to “park” Russia and pursue a “stable and predictable relationship.” If Ukraine didn’t choose to fight and instead went the way of Afghanistan, I think it’s worth pausing to imagine how much worse things would be. And hell even with Ukraine fighting on our behalf at 5-6% of our defense budget, there’s a good chance America still might cock it all up.
Why?
III. A Snapshot of America’s Reluctance to Involve Itself in the Affairs of the Dark Continent and its Internecine Squabbles and its consequences
To stick it to Europe per our age-old tradition, of course!
In one of the most interesting parts of his epic book, Kagan describes the partisan Republican campaign to demagogue Wilson’s proposal of a “League of Nations,” led by House Majority Leader, Henry Cabot Lodge, sort of the Mike Johnson of a hundred years ago,
A central plank of Lodge’s anti-League campaign consisted of playing to traditional anti-European sentiments. He denounced the League as a new “Holy Alliance” that threatened American independence and security just as the monarchies of Russia, Austria, and Prussia had in the days of Monroe. California’s progressive Republican senator, Hiram Johnson, spoke of a “sordid, cunning, secret, and crafty” design of “European and Asiatic governments” to control “the economic destinies of peoples.” Beveridge had a simple message: “Get out of Europe and stay out.” He warned that shady international financiers were “weaving a net that would entangle the American nation in a European Asiatic balance of power.”
And a little like Trump’s attitude to Article 5,
Lodge and other League opponents focussed most of their fire on Article 10. Despite Wilson’s repeated insistence that it did not bind the United States to act and did not take away Congress’s constitutional right to declare war, Lodge and others warned that it would allow other nations to force America into foreign conflicts in which Americans had no interest. Lodge asked whether Americans were “willing to have the youth of America ordered to war by other nations without regard to what they or their representatives desire,” to defend “the territorial integrity of the far-flung British Empire, including her self-governing dominions and colonies, of the Balkan states, of China or Japan, or of the French, Italian, and Portuguese colonies of Africa.” These were effective arguments even if inaccurate. As David Miller recalled, “the false and fantastic vision of American (or Canadian or Brazilian) mothers praying for their sons in the Balkans was as real to many uninformed minds as a movie.”
This brings to mind the populist right droning that the war in Ukraine is a “forever war.” Like the war in Ukraine that’s been going on for two years—where a noble people are fighting for their survival after a rapacious dictator brutalized their sovereign country, and in the space of a year was rapidly reversing the invader’s gains with Western support—is in any way analogous to the twenty year counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan.
Just like Johnson today, Henry Cabot Lodge was under tremendous pressure as the majority leader from an isolationist faction nicknamed “the irreconcilables,” headed by William Borah, who like today’s “Freedom” (watch-the-world-burn) caucus, blackmailed Lodge by threatening his speakership,
Lodge faced enormous pressure from the irreconcilables to oppose a league in any form, with or without reservations. Borah opposed, “any political alliance, co-partnership, or league with Europe or the old world. When Lodge at one point looked a bit too willing to discuss alternative means of supporting a league, Borah and other irreconcilables summoned him to a full-scale dressing down. They threatened to disrupt the convention and bolt the party if he permitter any endorsement of any kind of league. When Lodge offered to resign his post as majority leader, Borah responded, “You won’t have a chance to resign! On Monday I’ll move for the election of a new majority leader and give the reasons for my action.” Lodge backed down and thereafter blocked all attempts by Root and others to insert an endorsement of a league, or indeed any kind of commitment to Europe in the party platform. In the end, Lodge would not even permit a Republican platform endorsement of his own reservations.
And Lodge stuck the League treaty with so many caveats that it could never pass through congress, like Republicans are attempting to use border concessions today, to effectively sink America’s obligations to Europe. Indeed what Biden is to the GOP today, Wilson was after the First World War. As for Johnson who supported Ukraine in the beginning, so it was for Lodge who had once supported the concept of a League of Nations— foreign policy, say what you will about it being life and death, is a political means to an end, no more immune to politics than anything else potentially.
Henry Cabot Lodge
Ting Shen Bloomberg Getty Images
(And I’m not sure Biden was above using Ukraine’s immiseration to scold isolationist Republicans as a way to elude charges of responsibility for Ukraine’s failed counteroffensive for which he is directly responsible. Only now is he starting to realize how important it is to keep Ukraine going, now that he sees it would reflect worse on him if Ukraine lost the war even if it were Republicans that held the Ukrainians out to dry)
IV. Where does the Orange Specter fit into this?
Seth Wenig Getty Images
A generous interpretation of his NATO comments, that he would invite Russia to attack a NATO ally that fails to hit its defense spending target, would be that this is Trump’s unconventional, abrasive way of strong-arming Europe to defend itself, which could be good for Europe. In principle, it would strengthen NATO.
Trump supporters might point to the fact that Europe’s defense infrastructure improved while Trump was in office. But Trump’s threats to pull out of NATO, his suspicion of treaties, trade agreements and defense commitments, his paranoia that allies are all ripping America off and that every democracy is run by an elite cabal that is out to get him, that predate his counterintuitively strategic rhetoric: belie any authentic concern he might sometimes evince for Europe’s security and his desire to support and protect Europe. His paranoia runs counter to a lucid understanding of why democracies require a common defense architecture.
If my interpretation of his comments is cynical, then it is still a more realistic assessment of the measure of his commitment to NATO and the G-7. I would add that no one who really cared about NATO would dare to undermine deterrence with the sheer recklessness of these asinine comments, even if it incidentally boosted our allies’ defense spending. Just as his obsession with the trade deficit is a pretext to pull out of every free trade agreement, his mania about our allies paying their fair share is a veiled threat and more importantly a functional excuse to pull out of NATO, or else fail to honor our commitments if a NATO ally were actually attacked. He has overtly implied this on multiple occasions.
Key to understanding why Trump would pull out of NATO is to understand Trump’s worldview. Trump erroneously views America as one giant company. Governance and policy-making, for him, is a business enterprise. And as in business, because everyone ultimately wants to maximize profit for themselves, you don’t have any real friends, so, in geopolitics, you don’t have any real allies. Even your business partners are not your friends. A business partnership is a pragmatic relationship of convenience, meaning that if one of your partners benefits, and you don’t, he can only be benefiting at your expense; so, Trump views NATO as a joint stock company, in which America is doing more, because its partners are doing less and vice versa.
But an alliance is not a business partnership, and America is not a giant company. We’re not trying to maximize returns here and earn profits. National security is not a financial investment. Lives and land are not reducible to profits and losses. In foreign policy, it matters much less than in business who inevitably does most of the work. On that basis hypothetically, should America not have intervened to win World War II, because our European allies didn’t do as much of the work as we did? Because Britain and France didn’t have the capability to drop two atomic bombs on Japan, should we not have? Should we slash our defense budget to the size of Germany’s? To listen to Trump, you would think that an enterprising businessman would compete with his allies to see who can spend the least on defense. Let’s see who can defund their military the fastest and cut that negative externality!
One thing that has always painfully aggravated me about Trump is that as the world’s biggest economy, with the biggest military, it’s supposed to be America’s pride to do the heavy-lifting. We’re supposed to be leading by example, not shrinking back from our responsibility to deter adversaries and aid our allies, cowering and whining that we’re importing more than we’re exporting and that the Europeans are a bunch of “delinquent” free loaders, as if America were some kind of weak and helpless victim that shouldn’t lift a finger unless fucking Germany or Australia does.
And America is the victim? Really? Of our own allies? Like Ukraine isn’t a victim of Russia? Is Israel not a victim of Hamas?
V. How Border Security is a Prescription for International Insecurity
In Congress and on Fox News, and outlets like those, we are seeing this utterly insane dynamic play out, in which Republicans are refusing to aid Ukraine, because Biden has failed to secure the border, as if one were the inexorable consequence of the other: Ukraine can’t be helped as far as we’re concerned, because the border dam is leaking. Until we fix it, we can’t afford to give Ukraine air defenses, or tanks, or missiles.
Maybe we don’t need air defenses on the border exactly, but a hundred billion is too much money to bankroll an interminable war, as if we could always know precisely how long any given war is supposed to last, and Biden’s $ 1.2 trillion in clean energy handouts isn’t too much money.
Yeah the green welfare Biden dumped out of helicopters on Chinese wind and solar technology is fine. Just not the $100 billion on Ukraine. This is an absurd idea in theory. It is also risible on the merits. Ukraine, thanks to our support, was doing better on the battlefield, even as the border situation deteriorated. There is no practical reason to secure the border and conserve resources in order to fund Ukraine’s war effort.
The only import such an argument has—why should we defend Ukraine’s borders if we can’t secure our own?— is sentimental. It is emotional. It has no basis in hard-headed empirical argument. The true reason that Trump supporters want to cut off Ukraine (besides to bash Biden)—indeed the main reason they like Trump—is because they want attention. For the ignorant Trump supporter, who can’t see how America’s security follows from the world’s security, who demands that he matters, it couldn’t be a bigger insult than that Ukraine does. “America First” really means Me First. Or Me Alone. Only Me. How about that for a campaign slogan?
But not to trivialize it. The upshot of Trump’s entitled fiendishly whiny base— and their pathetic crybaby arguments and the partisan theatrics of buttoned-up choir boy student-council-president dorks like Mike Johnson, and Matt Gaetz with his hideous, used-car salesman suits—is to gravely endanger America and the Western free world.
John Raoux Associated Press
VI. The Price of Withdrawal
There is a lot of talk about appeasement in the op-ed pages of newspapers, the GOP’s appeasement of Putin, Biden’s appeasement of Iran, but what about the more subtle but no less perilous prospect of withdrawal?
To return to Kagan, in his narrative, America’s fear of involving itself in Europe by the 1930’s led France to withdraw troops from the Rhineland despite the dictates of the Versailles Treaty, which helped to catalyze the Weimar Republic’s descent into autocracy and green-lit the Nazi party’s revanchism.
Kagan says provocatively of the Versailles Treaty that,
…the biggest problem with the treaty, however, had nothing to do with its terms but America’s unwillingness to implement and defend the agreement against inevitable challenges. The treaty was never intended to be implemented without the United States, and it could not be. The agreement reflected the balance of power as it existed on November 11, 1918, in which American power was central. The Germans would not have accepted the peace had the United States not brought its weight to bear. In all likelihood they would not have even lost the war. So the peace reflected the fact that the United States had indeed become part of the equation. When the United States failed to ratify, the peace no longer reflected the distribution of power in Europe. The potential strength of Germany remained enormous. France was weaker than it had been before the war. Russia was out of the picture. Without continued American involvement, it was only a matter of time before Germany regained its hegemonic position on the continent with all that meant for European stability.
The consequences for the world would be no less catastrophic than if Putin were to take Ukraine. To take Ukraine would be a major step in terms of furthering his grand strategy to divide NATO and balkanize the West, weaponize agriculture and energy exports, blaze alternative Eurasian trade corridors, and realize Putin’s fantasy of a new Russian empire, Novorossiya, bending the Western world to his fascist will. Ukraine in so many ways, geographically, domestically, politically, ideologically would greatly expand his ability to project power throughout the Euro-Atlantic. In less than ten years, maybe even less than five by some estimates, his army would have the capability to retool and rearm then take the Baltics, Georgia, and Moldova, Poland, and then Germany. They would all fall like dominoes without the backing of a credible American deterrent.
VII. The Road to War
If we were to let Ukraine lose, let alone pull out of NATO and pull troops out of Eastern Europe as Trump has proposed, World War III with a nuclear superpower would be almost inevitable. Biden has done bad enough failing to give Ukraine the right weapons at the right time critical to helping Ukraine win. Now Mike Johnson has a choice. He can put the Senate bill to a vote in the House and likely pass it with bipartisan support at the risk of losing his speakership, or he can demagogue it to do Trump’s bidding.
Well for those of us who know about Lodge, Wilson and the League fight, and how William Borah’s subsequent takeover of the Republican Party fundamentally recast American foreign policy in the inter-war period, we all know how that worked out.
— Jay