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NATO’s Unity and the Challenge of Article 5
All of us have felt safe in the belief that, should any one of the thirty NATO countries be attacked, it would trigger an automatic response from all members, putting them at war with the attacker. However, today, for the very first time, I read in the Sunday Times that this is not the case. For Article 5 to become a reality, unanimity is required. If a single country were to demur, then it would not happen.
Now, in any situation that requires the unanimity of so many, it is next to impossible to envisage a scenario in which such a large number would agree. It is almost certain there will be one or more who will not, especially when what they are being asked to agree to is war. Some might argue that, in a real-world scenario, Article 5 is, therefore, worthless.
In the context of the war in Ukraine, there are two countries — Hungary and Bulgaria — who we know already would not agree, and there are likely to be more recalcitrants; one that springs to mind immediately is Turkey.
The alarming situation which now presents itself is that if a desperate Russia strikes out against either of the three Baltic states, or indeed Poland, which all four now see as a real possibility, then NATO will be shown to be impotent.
The only solution that stands any chance of making Article 5 mean what it says, which is almost certainly the reason why all of its members joined in the first place, is if the European Union came to the rescue. It could make it clear that any dissenting state would forfeit its place in the Union. Such a loss would be more than likely to bring any of the foot-draggers to heel.
In providing such a guarantee of its own, the Union would be protecting its own best interests since war in Europe would likely shatter what it has lovingly accomplished over the past seventy years.
As for NATO itself, it will need to look to the future—if there is to be one for it—at this impossibly high bar of unanimity and opt for a threshold of, say, 60%. Any member who will not agree to this should be invited to leave. That way, the remaining members will have what they have long, mistakenly, believed they always had: a cast-iron guarantee.
Unmasking Russia’s WWII Narrative
A crucial aspect of history has not received the attention it deserves: responsibility for starting WWII does not rest at Germany’s door alone; Russia was a joint partner in the enterprise. We, the British, had pledged to take up arms were Poland to be attacked. Well, she was—by Germany from the west and Russia from the east. When the two attackers met at the agreed line, their soldiers shook hands, and Poland disappeared for four years.
What the world was unaware of at the time was that the two dictatorships had secretly agreed between themselves, in that stunning Non-Aggression Pact—between two former ideological enemies—that they would share Poland between them. Russia went even further, getting the Germans to turn a blind eye to their seizure of the three Baltic states. Only an understandable reluctance to engage simultaneously with two major powers prevented Britain from declaring war on Russia as well.
Three more misconceptions, I submit, still cloud our vision of those times. Russia never refers to that conflict as the Second World War for a very good reason: it prefers instead to call it The Great Patriotic War. This spin allows it to pose as an innocent victim attacked while it had a peace treaty with a treacherous fascist power. Were it to acknowledge 1939, with the invasion of Poland, as the start of WWII, then its joint invasion would put it squarely in the crosshairs of culpability.
The third myth insisted on is that their country did the lion’s share of the dying. In fact, it was their subject peoples: the Ukrainians, the Belarusians, the Caucasians, the five Muslim Stans, and the Siberians, who took an even bigger hit than the Russians themselves. The Bolsheviks, when they took power, liked to pretend that they respected the sovereignty of all the nationalities that their Tsarist predecessor had vanquished; but they were never willing to give them back their freedom. They insisted on retaining the former empire’s conquests in their entirety, and they fought a bloody civil war to do so. To camouflage the empire’s continuance, they came up with the fiction of the USSR—a Union of Soviet (read committee) Socialist Republics. This, they held, was no empire like the British or French but a heartfelt union of free-minded people.
Yet another myth that the communists cultivated is that they won the war virtually unaided. How many people know that half the tanks used to stave off defeat in the Battle for Moscow were given, free of charge, by the British? How many people know that we and the Americans provided Russia with 20,000 aircraft, 19,000 tanks, and a veritable arsenal of every kind of war material you can think of, including the boots that the Red Army marched in? And that’s another thing; they didn’t need to do much marching. Its long advance towards Berlin was almost entirely motorised—courtesy of those same allies they still insist were of next to no help. Over one hundred Royal Navy ships went down in the freezing waters of the Arctic, where survival time in the water was two minutes, in getting those supplies to Russia.
Can anyone seriously doubt that, were a quarter of Hitler’s armed forces not tied down facing us in the west and been available for the attack on Russia, it would not have been successful? It very nearly was anyway. Moreover, if these enormous supplies were taken into the equation, can anyone further doubt that Russia’s defeat would have been even more catastrophic than that of France a year earlier? Hitler had no plans to exterminate Frenchmen as he did Russians.
History will eventually catch up on Russia’s false narrative of winning the war almost single-handedly. As for the bloodletting of the non-Russian nationalities, they too will receive the just homage they deserve. Not for a minute am I saying that the Russians themselves are not to be saluted. Their bravery and steadfastness in World War II are the stuff of legend. However, it is their leaders who cannot come to terms with democracy and seek only a continuance of the authoritarian model, which is all their benighted kinsmen have ever known. Theirs is almost the saddest of histories of any nation on the planet. One day, events will draw down the curtain on this mournful history and set them on a new path. Those events may be happening before our very eyes right now in distant Ukraine. A prostrate, defeated, and humiliated Russia may see its captured nations seize their chance to gain their independence. Across a front stretching for thousands of miles, Russia will be quite unable to contain their rebellions. Japan, still technically at war with Russia, might take back the Kurile Islands stolen from it at the very end of WWII. China apart—with its occupation of Tibet and Xinjiang—we may be about to see the breakup of the world’s last empire.
As for ourselves, in that titanic struggle a full lifetime ago, we were offered a very tempting deal at the beginning by Hitler: accept his dominance of Europe, and he would accept our dominance of that quarter part of the world our empire controlled. Funnily enough, it was the same deal that Napoleon had offered 140 years earlier. We rejected Hitler’s deal as we had Napoleon’s and, against all the odds, chose to fight on alone, which we did for over a year. It is fair to say that that hugely moral and brave decision saved the entire world from a dystopian nightmare that might very well still be with us today.
As Afghanistan suffers and slips back into darkness, America licks its entirely self-inflicted wounds and Europe stands aghast
America used to proudly boast that it never lost a war, but now Afghanistan joins Vietnam in destroying that claim.
As a ragbag force of 83,000 Taliban sweeps to final victory in a single week over a well-trained, highly equipped government army three times bigger, the US has suffered a humiliation every bit as great as that inflicted by the Vietnamese 45 years ago. Even that jaw-dropping scurry from the embassy roof has found a fresh equivalent.
A geopolitical catastrophe has been inflicted on the West as well as on NATO by a naïve, increasingly inept president and his predecessor. NATO had hitherto been seen as the longest, most successful military alliance in history and, indeed, it was. Now that hard earned credibility has been seriously jeopardised by its leading member. What is so galling is that the forces deployed before the collapse of its mission were minuscule compared to that it had deployed to bring relative order to the country. Yet this tiny force had been sufficient to encourage the Afghan army to do its job and stiffen poor decision making with its ranks. It also gave it state of the art equipment as well as training. Why, then, did the Afghan army fall apart so precipitously and succumb to a hugely inferior enemy?
It did so because of a terrible feeling of abandonment. Also, because its corrupt masters had stopped paying it – pocketing the huge funds its western backers were sending, when a foolish president set a date for withdrawal. The crooks in government knew that a day of reckoning was fast approaching with the austere men with long beards. Those funds went to myriad offshore accounts in the run-up to departure and before the crooks scurried off to their seaside mansions.
Over the course of twenty years, Afghanistan – and particularly its women – have come to engage with the modern world and enjoy its freedoms and opportunities. All this is about to be snatched away. Society will be plunged back into feudalism. Women, again, will become the playthings of men, suffering torment, cruelty and anguish with their Human Rights cut from under them along with education and job opportunities.
Although bringing overwhelming firepower to bear, once the heavy lifting had been done, the West only needed to maintain a fraction of that effort to hold things together. But its guiding light lacked the backbone to see the job through. Sadly, it stands to pay a heavy price for its pusillanimous. Had the Taliban, like the IRA, faced an enemy willing to stay the course, its stomach for a never ending fight would, eventually, have evaporated.
Afghanistan, more and more, would have moved into the modern world and there would have been no turning back. That kind of resolve, demonstrated by NATO over 45 years, eventually broke the back of the mighty Soviet Union. It will have to be summoned up once more to contain the assertive designs of a totalitarian China that binds the human spirit in chains of a sort never before available to tyrants.
Meantime, Afghanistan suffers and slips back into darkness. America licks its entirely self-inflicted wounds and Europe stands aghast. Has our stalwart ally and protector lost the plot, as well as its bottle? Can we rely on it as we always felt we could? We in Europe are half a billion people – rich people at that. Has the time come that we have to look to ourselves, while remaining in closest concert with our Atlantic neighbour? These are urgent questions, and they must be addressed. Meanwhile, laughing in the wings are China, Russia and Iran.
It seems too much to hope that the Taliban Mark 2 has seen the error of its former ways. Even if its now elderly leadership might wish to do things differently, its young foot soldiers out in the countryside can be expected to exact Quranic justice as per its 7th century origins. There are a lot of scores to be settled.
Afghanistan remains a tribal society with animosities that run as deep as did those between Scottish Highland clans. Perhaps one of its warlords will cobble together a challenge to the Taliban, much as the Northern Alliance did successfully. But then, again, perhaps we may all be wrong and it really is a changed Taliban. They certainly won’t want a fresh invasion, which is what they will get if they facilitate renewed terror attacks.
Above all, they crave international recognition for their renewed Emirate and only good – or at least better – behaviour can secure that. They have pledged to eradicate poppy production and appealed to the world to help them replace their narcotic dependency with alternative crops.
Afghanistan developed expectations as a result of thirty years of exposure to a fastmoving world – first the USSR and then NATO. It is just possible that the now weary old men can succeed in reigning in their hothead younger men and settle society down as has been achieved in our own backyard of Northern Ireland.
The Last Foundling 