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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   27628 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024

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People saying "if we don't stop him now, he'll take Poland" are fabulists. This is not a realistic scenario.

Why you think that it is not plausible at all? If Russia invades Baltics and NATO effectively does nothing - why you think that Russia invading Poland is not a viable scenario?

I think that it is not very likely (fortunately) but it seems likely enough for me to justify supporting Ukraine.

The Baltics are part of NATO.

And NATO has real (though small) chance to collapse, especially if Trump would be president.

CSTO already did.

Why you think that it is not plausible at all? If Russia invades Baltics and NATO effectively does nothing - why you think that Russia invading Poland is not a viable scenario?

NATO wouldn't do nothing in that scenario - given that the Baltics are members, an abrogation by the US of their mutual defense obligation to fellow members pretty catastrophically undermines their credibility with allies and vassals the world over. This doesn't even take into account that the rest of the EU would absolutely respond to an attack on a fellow member. At the very least Sweden, Finland, Denmark would become directly involved. Once you've got a hot war involving wealthy member states on their own territory I don't see France, Germany, the UK etc. just sitting that one out either.

That's certainly the theory. But there are some cracks in that theory.

First: Nato isn't a country, and has no unified military. It would take time, at least a few days, for the various European nations to coordinate a response and for the US to send troops over there. Diplomacy in Brussels is famously slow.

Meanwhile, the Baltics are small. The Suwalki gap from Belarus to Kaliningrad is just 100km long, and most of the baltics are not much wider than that. Russia would barely have to advance at all to be within artillery range of their capitals. A strong, quick offensive could cross the gap and occupy their capital in a matter of days, and then present NATO with a fait accompli. Do they really want to go to the mat to liberate these small, useless countries that have already been occupied?

Suppose they do. NATO commanders and politicians agree that, dammit, they've made a commitment, so they fully mobilize their militaries for an all-out war with Russia. At that point, Russia activates its nuclear ICBMs and points them at Europe in a menacing way. Attack us, it says, and we will nuke you, because this is an existential war of survival for us, and we have a lot more nukes than you do.

Europe asks its big bro the USA to help. The USA, after all, has just as many nukes as Russia, and much more advanced ones. At that point Russia points its nukes at the US and says: "do you really want to get involved in this? Are you really going to sacrifice millions of your people to save some tiny little insignificant country in Europe that most Americans couldn't point out on a map? Isn't that insane?" And then the US backs down, and then Europe backs down, and Russia gets a win.

Of course this isn't a new concern, it's been at the heart of NATO strategy ever since it was founded. The solution to this sort of salami-slicing has been the absolute inviolability of article 5, plus a bit of strategic ambiguity and the US's refusal to sign a no-first-use treaty against nukes. Essentially, to make Russia fear us more than we fear them. But I don't know how much that will hold in this modern world where the Republican party (traditionally the more hawkish) has become isolationist, our main rival is now China, and NATO has been unable to manufacture enough basic artillery for Ukraine. I'm not saying that Russia can definitely take the Baltics, and certainly not Poland. But... it's not a complete fantasy, either, it's a real fear.

First: Nato isn't a country, and has no unified military. It would take time, at least a few days, for the various European nations to coordinate a response and for the US to send troops over there. Diplomacy in Brussels is famously slow.

Nato doesn't have a unified military, but member states frequently train together. I'd be surprised if the Scandinavian and Baltic nations haven't jointly planned for this sort of scenario. While a complete military response would almost certainly be co-ordinated at the European level*, individual nations could spring into action much more quickly. The UK would very likely also respond quickly to a situation like this.

*This is assuming that Trump pulls the US out of NATO (over the objections of almost the entire US political/military establishment).

A strong, quick offensive could cross the gap and occupy their capital in a matter of days, and then present NATO with a fait accompli. Do they really want to go to the mat to liberate these small, useless countries that have already been occupied?

That's precisely why the Baltics have insisted on having tripwire troops there. If the Russians overran NATO troops from the major member countries while doing this blitzkrieg, it would be considerably more difficult for those countries to go "whatever, we don't care".

True, that adds to the political calculus and would certainly provoke a big public outrage. But still... when you're comparing against a potential nuclear war, I don't know if the loss of a few thousand troops would be enough.

The CIA had good advance intelligence of the Ukraine War. In the event similar intelligence emerged indicating an invasion of the Baltics, NATO would station 50-100,000 troops there and be capable of repelling the invasion. It’s not a realistic scenario.

NATO wouldn't do nothing in that scenario - given that the Baltics are members, an abrogation by the US of their mutual defense obligation to fellow members pretty catastrophically undermines their credibility with allies and vassals the world over.

Okay, but this doesn't actually say it's not plausible. There is a non-trivial number of Americans who don't want the US to have mutual defense obligations or vassals the world over, and their preferred candidate is one precisely lothed, and reciprocates the feeling, with the Europeans. That candidate- arguably the leading candidate- took a position that he would 'encourage' Russia to attack countries not meeting defense spending cutlines- a line that applied to a majority of NATO countries.

While I would be the first to note that Trump's criteria specifically would not ignore an attack on the Baltic states, and I doubt reading his characteristic hyperbole is worth that much, this is not a man who would particularly care about the credibility he has with allies he has characterized as parasites.

This is without noting that multiple NATO governments are variously politically aligned with Russia as-is (Hungary), or are a very plausible election scenario from coming into governments significantly less interested in EU or NATO as a strategic policy.

This doesn't even take into account that the rest of the EU would absolutely respond to an attack on a fellow member. At the very least Sweden, Finland, Denmark would become directly involved. Once you've got a hot war involving wealthy member states on their own territory I don't see France, Germany, the UK etc. just sitting that one out either.

The issue isn't whether they'd sit out, the issue is that most of them are militarily irrelevant to a war in continental Europe, because decades of mismanagement and capability cuts have rendered them unable to mobilize units at scale or supply them with ammunition to sustain fires at the scale Russia has and is.

Further, one of the significant factors of the Balkan scenarios is that the wealthy member states would not be fighting a war on their own territory: rather, they would be presented a fait accompli in a rapid Russian occupation of the much smaller (and poorer) Balkan fringe, and then faced with the question of whether they really want to pay the high cost in blood and treasure to try and fight their way through the Russian forces there.

This returns to the question of credibility, where while the Americans face the doubt if they would show up, most of the Europeans face doubts of if they can show up in enough scale to matter.

The issue isn't whether they'd sit out, the issue is that most of them are militarily irrelevant to a war in continental Europe, because decades of mismanagement and capability cuts have rendered them unable to mobilize units at scale or supply them with ammunition to sustain fires at the scale Russia has and is.

If an actual war would break out and Finland conducted a full mobilizatio, we would mobilize 280 000 troops, and at least an implicit common understanding is that a large portion of these would fight in the Baltics. With one of the largest artilleries in Europe and supported by Sweden's considerable air force and naval capabilities, these wouldn't be able to win by themselves, but are nothing to sneeze at.

Finland and Sweden are both two of the biggest exceptions in Europe, and is part of why their decision to join NATO was such a strategic disaster for Russia's NATO-rationalizations for the war.

given that the Baltics are members, an abrogation by the US of their mutual defense obligation to fellow members pretty catastrophically undermines their credibility with allies and vassals the world over

With Trump as president I would not assume that it is impossible (and yes, Trump may also do sensible thing or order nuking Kaliningrad). And Trump has quite decent chances to be a president.

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