Rolled over in bed and grabbed the iPad to check email and the news before starting my day. The above story resulted in a lot more one-fingered typing on a virtual keyboard than I usually do, and so I'll just copypasta the highlights over here now that I'm on a real computer...
This has the potential to spin right the f*** out of control before anybody involved realizes what they're doing.
To the suggestion that Russia would just continue to punk NATO with no response:
Yeah,
see, sooner or later some individual fighter pilot or other trigger
puller isn't going to understand that he's supposed to be punked.
To the suggestion that NATO should buzz off:
Clearly.
A mutual self-defense organization to counter a militarized Soviet
Union is a relic of the past, since toothless and cuddly Russia is a
friend of Europe now and has no territorial ambitions beyond their own
borders.
So,
you don't necessarily mean NATO needs to go away, just that we need to
get ourselves out of it? That I could maybe get behind. We've been
subsidizing the welfare states of Europe for far too long by effectively
acting as their Ministry of Defense.
To the allegation that NATO has been expanding too aggressively:
You mean, not recognizing the legitimate territorial claims of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact?
If
I were the Baltic states, I'd join any organization that offered to
help me keep Moscow from its regular incursions. I'd like it if it kept
the Germans out, too, but frankly Berlin is just not much of a threat
these days.
[I]f
you'd had the Russians camping out in your master bedroom for forty
years (or much longer in some cases) and they left, would you not lobby
to join an organization that promised to help you if they came back?
(I
will add, however, that if NATO did go away, this is France's best
chance to hand Germany a one-on-one curb stomping since the Congress of
Vienna.)
On our naive fascination with Popular Uprisings:
I
understand the initial American infatuation with the Arab Spring.
Delight at people toppling tyrants is baked deeply into our cultural
DNA. But certainly by a couple of years ago, we should have seen what a dog's breakfast it was making of the region. Continuing to support
anti-Assad forces is farcical and a willfully obtuse denial of
realpolitik.
On the value of American promises to our allies:
We
have here a stunning reminder of why it never pays to trust Uncle Sam's
word too much. Our Uncle has a bad case of Bipolar disorder and
promises lots of shit that, four years later, he decides he has no
intention of delivering.
Taiwan
could teach other countries a graduate level course in the topic; it's
been putting up with our national schizophrenia for a half century now.
This whole mess is why I was pulling for Admiral Josh Painter in the '08 elections, instead of President Hope'n'Change.
