The Dark Continent

When the Americans step out of the picture, the great engine of European history starts up again.

We’ve got an essay by Joshua Treviño for you at the Cosmopolitan Globalist explaining why Americans should care about Europe’s fate. We were moved to publish it in light of the letter sent by Senator Josh Hawley to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken:

Already, President Biden has announced that the United States will send more conventional forces to Europe, if Russia invades Ukraine. Such a deployment can only detract from the US military’s ability to ready and modernize forces to deter China in the Indo-Pacific. But those opportunity costs pale in comparison to what would be expected—indeed, required—of the United States, were NATO actually to admit Ukraine as a member.

This analysis and others like it are patently disingenuous. Hawley knows very well Ukraine is not about to join NATO. He knows the standoff with Russia has nothing to do with this. Putin is threatening to invade the rest of Ukraine because he wishes to reverse by force the territorial and political settlement of the Cold War. If the United States were to capitulate, as Hawley suggests, it would make our allies in Asia more vulnerable, not less.

Hawley also knows that Biden has said, repeatedly, that he will not send US troops to Ukraine. His suggestion that sending US forces to reassure our NATO allies, as Biden has done, “can only detract from the US military’s ability to ready and modernize forces to deter China” is risible. The provision of military aid to NATO allies such as Poland and Romania, and the readying of sanctions against Russia, are meant to deter Russian aggression. Were Putin to conquer Ukraine in a Blitzkrieg and then, flush with excitement, press on through Eastern Europe and the Baltics, the United States would be treaty bound, by NATO’s Article 5, to respond as if it were an attack on the United States. Now that would be a scenario that “detract[s] from the US military’s ability to ready and modernize forces to deter China in the Indo-Pacific.”

It would also be a catastrophe. And in the nuclear era, it would be a catastrophe fraught with unthinkable risk. The only reasonable policy available to an American president under these circumstances is to do what Biden is doing: attempt to deter Russia from doing this by demonstrating that the costs of such an exercise would be high. There’s a Latin maxim applicable to situations like this. (But who among us hasn’t confused “Si vis pacem para bellum” with “Deditio in dicionem?”) Deterrence is the policy that kept the better part of Europe at peace for nearly 80 years. It’s a proven strategy.

The open question isn’t whether Biden is doing too much to deter Putin; it’s whether he’s doing too little. As Joshua Treviño writes at Armas, our annual exercises in Europe during the latter half of the Cold War involved as many as 125,000 US soldiers in Europe on the move. (We did not hold these exercises because we were eager to fight a massive war in Europe. We held them because in demonstrating that we were prepared to fight such a war, we prevented it—a point Hawley surely understands; and if he doesn’t, he will understand it readily if he asks himself why the United States has a nuclear arsenal.) As Joshua writes,

REFORGER kicked off in early 1969, with the transit of a single mechanized division plus two cavalry squadrons to Europe. By the mid-1970s REFORGER regularly involved multiple divisions. In 1975 it returned the Marine Corps to Europe for the first time since the glory days of Belleau Wood. By the mid-1980s REFORGER involved multiple divisions plus integration with National Guard and Reserve units, as the exercise born in the circumvention of the Army’s institutional depth finally incorporated it. The 1988 REFORGER achieved a truly epic scale: one hundred twenty-five thousand soldiers on the move, the largest group of forces in action in Europe since May 1945.

But then, he continues,

The armies of REFORGER won without a shot, and within half a decade of the 1988 chapter, the epic show of force and readiness came to an abrupt end. REFORGER 1992 was the last to see an American division cross the Atlantic. REFORGER 1993 involved no Atlantic crossing at all: far from a return of forces to Germany, it was an exercise of forces already in Germany. There was no REFORGER 1994, nor thereafter.

Americans may scarcely remember this, but we can be sure Putin remembers it. Biden’s announcement that the US will rush 8,500 troops to the assistance of our NATO allies may be meant to demonstrate our seriousness, but it will escape no one in the Russian military command that this is, as Joshua writes, “a minuscule portion of an ordinary REFORGER.”

The sharp end is still there, but the sinews are attenuated. It has been more than a generation since this particular problem set, once upon a time the only problem set, was worked out. For nearly a full century the contestation of Europe was the very lens of American understanding of itself abroad. It would surprise that century’s Americans to know how swiftly we forget it.

It would not surprise them how swiftly we need it back.

In any event, Joshua Treviño explains here, in detail, why Europe’s fate matters to Americans. I’ll send a copy to Hawley’s office:

The Dark Continent

… When the Americans step out of the picture, the great engine of European history starts up again. Strategic imperative endures. Interest endures. The character of nations endures. Almost no one grasps the alternative.

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Speaking of which, what Josh wrote reminded me very much of an article I wrote on the eve of the 2018 NATO summit, one no less appropriate today, so I’ll reproduce it.

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Claire Berlinski, July 10, 2018 PARIS—Modern Europe—liberal, democratic Europe—is a creation of the United States. This story was once known to every American, but as the generation responsible for this achievement dies, it seems this knowledge is no longer passed down.