Retrospective: Alaska Summit and the New National Security Strategy
As President Donald Trump had ruler Vladimir Putin’s buy-in for what looked like a cameo episode of “The Apprentice,” the script was probably set between the two if for no other reason that Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, wearing a USSR onesie said that Russia “never plans ahead.”
At this point, most Americans would be relieved if the 47th Admin was maintaining strategic ambiguity toward Russia and Europe so as to keep them flying blind and make the United States less predictable in defeating dictatorial powers’ campaign to supplant U.S. relationships abroad, isolating the U.S. and slowly constricting and controlling international trade to and from North America.
The new U.S. National Security Strategy looks more like a hasty, mercenary abandonment of our Eastern Hemisphere allies, partly rooted in insecurities mounting in the U.S. strategic competition (including some gray warfare) with China.
Yet the logic of the new U.S. National Security Strategy is strange. Why, if the U.S. is great on its own, is it not greater with the diplomatic and commercial trade instruments of power it gained in poly-mutual alliance with other free nations? Diplomatic alliances are an instrument of power the U.S. has benefitted from for over a century. This is also true in the Pacific today.
How adaptive in the face of autocratic world war risk driven by Beijing and Moscow with their intertwined human and natural resource symbioses, will the U.S. be better off abandoning NATO, EU, UK, and Ukraine alliances against Sino-Soviet imperial aims?
To lose the E.U. as a chief ally and trade partner is to put the E.U.’s economy, warm water ports, and Eurasia into the sphere of influence of the Chinese Belt and Road expansion with Russia the natural resource state behind it. It also threatens to isolate the U.K. Conquest or control of the E.U. is how Moscow and Beijing could systematically deny the U.S. and U.K. ports for global trade and military basing. It is a slow constriction approach.
The National Security Strategy seems to trust Moscow to observe peace agreements in Ukraine. Rhetorical question: when have the Soviet minded rulers of Russia now in power ever proven trustworthy and reliable in any arrangement? Is that not how Ukraine ended up under attack by predictably broken Soviet promises after they had obtained the last asset they wanted?
The lost Ukrainian real estate to Russia during U.S. Admin 47 suggests something worse than strategic ambiguity from the Admin. And yet some real losses have to be part of a good ruse, right? Most historically studied Americans have broken fingers by crossing them intensely on this issue, trying to understand the rank abandonment of U.S. allies against the recommendations of successful combat commanders that the divisive 45th Admin had worked to purge, sideline, force into retirement.
Americans who respect NATO, the U.K., and the European Union as solid trade partners providing a unified deterrent against historical aggression from the East and destabilizing, historic enmities across populations in and at the EU borders would consider healthy alliances in Europe, Northern Europe, and the Pacific as superpower multipliers for the United States. Those of that mind also would expect Admin 47 to aid Ukraine in forcing a culmination of Russian invasion forces, and a steady liberation of their sovereign territory.
If that does not happen, new questions arise as to the risk of failed states on both sides of the Ukrainian border with Russia, and how that could sooner trigger a global contagion of war to control a massive swath of Asia. That discussion is found at Small Wars Journal, here:
