The 2% Solution

Yesterday, President Donald Trump chastised the many members of the NATO alliance for not living up to their commitment to spend 2% of their GNP n defense. Of NATO's 28 members only Great Britain, Estonia, Greece, Poland and the United States are meeting or exceeding this commitment. For decades the other 23 countries, including France and Germany, have shirked this commitment without recourse ... relying on the United States to pick up the slack. And when Trump reminded those slackers of their deficiencies, the representative from Luxembourg turned the Macron, the President of France, with a hand-covered snide remark and a snicker ... see: Fox News Video. To me, this is the height of sophomoric haughtiness. Perhaps Trump will find a way to remind this Euro-jerk of America's part in the history of  20th Century Europe.

And I have a prediction ... yes, some of these countries now in default (I'm thinking France and Germany) will find a way of meeting this NATO treaty obligation ... but do it with accounting tricks and not with genuine military buildups. Wait and see.

Management 101

His First Challenge

Fresh from his disastrous faux pas about not having a strategy to combat ISIS, President Obama today in Estonia tried to reassure Americans and the world ... on the same day we learned that ISIS has beheaded another of our journalist ... that we will shrink ISIS into a "manageable problem" ... see: Politico Story. We have also learned tonight on Fox News that the United States has not supplied the Iraqi Kurds with the heavy weaponry that we promised them many weeks ago.

I suppose that being a community organizer and a college lecturer did not supply our fearless leader with the tools ... nor the understanding of what true management is. And on-the-job training is not effective unless the trainee is on the job. If President Obama chooses not to attend the majority of his security briefings or if he allows his National Security Advisor, Susan Rice, to travel to China on the anniversary of 9/11, he clearly knows next to nothing about management ... let alone running the country that is supposed to be leading the free world.

Effectively reading from a Teleprompter is not going to make the slightest difference in how the United States manages its way through the mine fields that Obama has allowed to be sewn around the world by Islamic extremists and Russia's Putin ... when instead he was stopping the oceans from rising and reducing his golfing handicap to five.

War Drums

One must pause to consider seriously what might transpire if Russia decides to go beyond even the Ukraine and invade a member of NATO … such as the Czech Republic, Poland, or perhaps Estonia.  The United States and the rest of the European NATO members (see: NATO Membership) are obliged by Article 5 of the NATO Alliance Treaty to respond in kind … see: NATO Article 5.  The question is would they or we? 

The combined standing European troops of the NATO countries number some five million … and including the United States, over six million.  This would be pitted against a well-trained, well equipped and brutal Russian Army of some 1.5 million.  Of course there is a major difference … these European NATO troops are composed of numerous social and gender experiments ill-equipped and ill-trained to shed blood for any cause let alone a serious tangle with the Russian bear … particularly if such a tussle is over a former SSR.

We have seen the reluctance of even the Ukrainian troops to respond to the recent Russian belligerency in the Crimea. Therefore I am just a bit dubious as to how these same Ukrainian troops might react to a full-scale Russian invasion of Western Ukraine.  And this zeitgeist may well be duplicated in other Eastern European countries which in fact are NATO members ... but which are not that far removed in time from the subservience they were forced to experience under the Soviet Union’s domination.  I hope I am wrong if such a situation transpires, but somehow I would not stake a lot of credence in the stalwartiness of such forces opposing such a Russian invasion.

Of course, I also do not have a lot of faith that President Barack “Another Red Line” Obama would also not go wobbly in such a situation. Let us not forget that, during the height of the Cold War, America’s major deterrent was atomic weaponry which we forswore to use to counteract a much more massive Soviet army if they were to invade Western Europe.  I am reasonably certain that this “mutually assured destruction” option is no longer an arrow in Obama’s quiver. If it were, I think he might have brought it up by now.

The consequences of a Russian invasion of one or more NATO members which were former SSRs and an inconsequential NATO response would not only begin to reassemble the Soviet Union …  it would also effectively kill NATO. This would be a disastrous legacy for Obama … not that I think he would take such a failing too much to heart.

This then is a dangerous game of chicken that Russian President Putin seems to be contemplating. But, if he is using his Barack Obama/Hillary Clinton/John Kerry interactions over the last five years as his measure of the resoluteness of the United States, I am afraid we may be in for some very bad times.