NATO, Article 5, and resource strangulation/cyber attacks

Does it constitute shilling for a new high hit-count day if I post twice in one day for the first time in like, ever? Probably, but I’m going to do it nonetheless, if only to make Jason stop whining.

So while my more thoughtful friends and acquaintances are carrying on meaningful email dialogues and challenging me to think about putting fingers to keys on some bigger-think strategic questions, I’m going to direct you to this short piece that I saw last week about Ivo Daalder’s first trip to Europe as the U.S. ambassador to NATO.

Wallerstein on American primacy

A number of IR theorists have long warned us about the specter of balancing coalitions to counter U.S. influence, resulting in global multipolarity.  (Realists, unfortunately, have been among the most confident forecasters of this alleged inevitability.) Unfortunately the expanding financial crisis is giving everyone a reason to resuscitate this argument.  The subject is a tired one, and I’m not going to spend words and energy going into it at the moment [if you care, look here, I guess]. But reading this poorly-executed piece on the competing theories about American preeminence, one particularly egregious claim jumped out at me. 

Robert Kagan Tries to Slander Realism, Fails

Robert Kagan is a serious, clear-headed man. While the rest of us have been distracted by the orgy of internationalist optimism, he’s been fixing his keen eye on foreign intrigue in places we scarcely knew existed (a la Ralph Peters). Lest you forget, “the nature of nations, like people, never changes. Today’s political realists” – and chumps like you and me – “say that economics rather than military might has become the guiding principle of countries, but the conflict in Georgia shows us otherwise.” And you can bet that Kagan is going to tell us how. [A warning before the jump: I went a little crazy, to the tune of 2,300 words.]

Blast from the past re: Russia and Europe

I should probably have a better recollection of the things that I’ve put up on the blog, but I’ve got to be honest with you: considering my memory, unless I wrote it in the last week, I’ve probably forgotten. (Note to parents and Dr. hab. Zdzislaw Mach: this does not include my graduate thesis.) So in my recent efforts to revive the blog, I’ve been glancing through some of my old writing. This afternoon I came across this, from way back in April 2007.  It seems topical in light of recent consternation over the impact of the Georgian war on Russia’s place in the international system. An excerpt after the jump.

Vostok Battalion in Georgia, via Ralph Peters via me

Russia’s recent invasion of South Ossetia (and later, Georgia proper) has given foreign and security policy types plenty to write about. I’ve saved comment for a few reasons, the largest of which being that this blog has basically died a gradual death. Most of my energies of late have been devoted to work, and the reading, thinking, and writing that I’ve occupied myself with has been channeled in a more formal direction. (Well, that’s the idea, anyway.) Of course, I never seem to escape my nasty TexAgs habit, more specifically the Business/Politics board. Photos after the jump!

Russia as a European state?

Nikolas Gvodsev has some interesting comments on his blog at The National Interest after returning from a European energy security conference in Berlin. The Russian-Polish-German relationship is a very significant one when it comes to energy issues in the EU, as Germany has shown a tendency to negotiate a sort of separate peace with Moscow on supply. This means that we’ve got pipelines bypassing Poland and other central European states, forcing the Poles to either purchase from alternate suppliers or suck it up on the German markup of Russian gas.

Here’s what Gvodsev has to say about the overall dynamics of this three-way relationship:

Russia announces suspension of CFE Treaty

Putin today announced that Russia will suspend its participation in the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, an agreement dating from the late Cold War that—as you might imagine from the name—limits the deployment of troops between the Atlantic and the Urals. I’m not going to get into the details of the treaty here, but you can read about it here on the Arms Control Association website if you’re interested.

First of all, let’s make something clear: this treaty was negotiated while the Soviet Union was still in existence, but it is very obviously an agreement with the Russian Federation. (The treaty was adapted in 1999 to establish parity between individual states instead of blocs, but this form has been ratified only by Belarus.) By November of 1990 there were significant indications that the chances of conventional conflict in eastern Europe were dramatically decreasing, but the treaty also created an inspections regime that contributed to an unprecedented level of transparency in the region. The CFE treaty basically helped consolidate rules in Europe, which is something that – despite the contrary assertions of the Bush Administration – is in the American national interest. Tying a number of nations (including Russia) into binding, verifiable agreements on the status of forces in potential conflict zones reduces the possibility of miscalculation and unnecessary hostilities, something that is even more important now that the Cold War has ceased to exist.

Behind the curve already

Just like that, a few posts back into my committed relationship with writing, I go a week without putting anything up. So here’s a reprint of a post from TexAgs addressing the question of Russian and Chinese obstructionism and the myth of the anti-hegemonic alliance: