So… I think I’ve seen a good contender for The Dumbest Video on the Internet: How NATO & Russia are Preparing to Fight Total War
Exactly what part of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine indicates that:
- Russia is going to win?
- Russia is going to capture Moldova?
- Russia is going to war with a NATO-member?
- NATO isn’t going to back up its member states?
It’s possible that Ukraine falls but we’ve seen Russia try to accomplish that for two years without success so I don’t think we can draw the conclusion that Russia is achieving that goal by looking at the past two years.
Russia got into (apparently) unexpectedly hot water over their invasion of Ukraine, so for them to go after Moldova seems like a big risk. Capturing Ukraine was presumably to seize their areable land and natural gas but Moldova has only areable land so it doesn’t seem particularly enticing even if Ukraine falls under Russian control.
Now, these two points are up for debate. The status of Ukraine and Moldova isn’t written in stone and Russia is no stranger to making decision that are really, really harmful to Russia. But going to war with a NATO country seems like it’s even beyond the poor choices made by Russia. Let’s consider that they haven’t established air superiority, that they rely on unencrypted radio, that they have had to field T62 tanks because they have lost thousands of armoured vehicles and don’t have as many T72’s as they thought, that we haven’t seen a single T14 tank, that they have lost several naval vessels to a navy that exist mostly in theory and that they thought that occupying Ukraine would be viable when occupying Afghanistan failed massively during the days of the Soviet Union. They also seem to have suffered casualties in the 100 000-range.
So what exactly would Russia stand to gain when going up against NATO and its 1000 F35 jets? Sweden donated rocket-propelled grenades to Ukraine and told them NOT to use them against tanks because said RPG’s were only designed to destroy lightly armoured vehicles. Ukraine ignored that and used the RPG’s against Russian tanks to great effect(and to some surprise in Sweden). Russian military hardware is doing very, very poorly against western weapons and have nothing with which to counter western aircraft.
Russia is quite capable of churning out ammunition and manpower to further its war-aims but the past two years have demonstrated how that doesn’t equate to success. They have had their asses handed to them for two years by a country with a lower GDP than Sweden. If Ukraine poses a formidable challenge to Russia, how well would they do against all of NATO?
Now, I agree that Russia is most likely going to use non-obvious measures against NATO countries, making any Russian groupings in the Baltic states into armed insurgents, jamming GPS, attacking pipelines and other infrastructure in international waters, flyovers with aircraft and so on. Countries bordering on Russia are prepared for that and already dealing with it. Nothing about it invites Russia to proceed.
And that ties in to the willingness of NATO to back up it’s members. Let’s consider the hundreds of billions of dollars provided by NATO and EU states to Ukraine over the last two years, to which none of these countries owes anything. The EU’s mutual defence clause was interpreted as sort of vague before(and it is vaguely written) but the EU gives more support to a non-EU member than people thought EU countries would give each other in case of war. Similarly NATO has moved troops into the Baltic states and Eastern Europe and it has expanded to include Finland and Sweden. Where can we find any indication that Russian aggression against the Baltic states will be met with indifference?
I will agree that the US can’t be relied upon as a NATO member. It’s not so much that Trump seems quite opposed to NATO, because the US arms industry would take a nose-dive if the US gave an indication that it wasn’t supporting NATO. So Trump has less room to maneuver in the regard than he might think. No, the reason European NATO countries can’t rely on the US is more a matter of whether or not the US will be functioning entity in the coming decades, which isn’t a certainty. From the many failures of the legislative assemblies, to the chaos on their southern border(the current administration could have at least kept the southern border secure and orderly to rob the Trump-campaign of using that as a rallying-cry), to the opioid epidemic to their ballooning government debt Europe can’t rely too much on the US.
There is more and more reasons for European countries to get nuclear weapons than was the case before but to be honest we’re not quite there yet. I would argue that making nuclear weapons would be entirely sensible for a country that wishes to defend itself against Russia if it isn’t part of a NATO alliance which entails a nuclear deterrent and if Russia seems like a prominent threat. That last part is where I think we find a stop today. If all nuclear-capable nations leave NATO and Russia seems like a viable threat then countries like Sweden should develop nuclear weapons, but Russia has spent the past two years convincing everyone that nuclear weapons aren’t necessary to fight off Russia. I’m sure that wasn’t Russia’s intent but none the less, here we are.