Fareed Zakaria, stuck somewhere in 1950 or 1995, is wrong again

If the foreign policy of the Trump administration has done nothing else, it has certainly succeeded in depriving many members of the Washington and European foreign and security establishments of their wits. Talk is rife of the U.S. “leaving NATO,” of the “end of the global order,” of a “new Yalta agreement,” and so on. None of this is true.

A certain crudeness and melodrama in the Trump administration’s approach (and especially language) is partly responsible for this hysterical response. It is also true that certain Trump statements have been utterly wrong, unnecessary, and counter-productive. Threats to take Greenland and aggressive mockery of Canada and Mexico help nobody. Nor do constant threats of tariff increases — even if so far, these have always been followed by practical compromises. Some of the cuts to USAID were correct; others not.

Other factors however are also at work in the overwhelming condemnation of the administration’s foreign policy in Western establishments. Too many analysts are allowing their judgement of Trump’s foreign policy to be clouded by their partisan allegiances and visceral opposition to his domestic agenda. Moreover, a lifetime of nesting cosily in the bosom of the Cold-War-derived Transatlantic establishment and sucking on its certainties has made these analysts incapable of responding to a changing world.

Thus, in an opinion article on Friday in the Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria endorses panicky German views that the U.S. can no longer be relied on to defend Germany and implies that the Trump administration is ready to abandon its commitment to NATO.

In his remarks at the Munich Security Conference, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth stated unequivocally that “the U.S. is committed to building a stronger, more lethal NATO.” He called for much higher military spending and development of military industries by European members of NATO — but this call, though Hegseth couched it in more forthright terms, has been made by every American administration since Eisenhower. As Hegseth said, it was Ike who first accused the Europeans of “making a sucker out of Uncle Sam.”

Germans or others who fear that the U.S. under Trump is leaving NATO and would not defend Germany really just need to ask themselves one simple question: Would any American administration voluntarily leave Ramstein air base, let alone (in some fantasy parallel universe) hand it to Russia? Apart from anything else, even if the Trump administration did not wish to maintain a military presence in and commitment to NATO in Europe for the sake of vital interests there, it would certainly do so for the sake of American power projection in the Middle East.

In withdrawing the vague promise of NATO membership for Ukraine at some indefinite future date, Trump is neither “betraying Ukraine,” “withdrawing from NATO,” nor “upending the European security order.” He is withdrawing from a very new quasi-commitment beyond NATO’s borders that was always not just reckless and dangerous but utterly insincere.

This commitment also had catastrophic results for Ukraine. It fueled Russian hostility without ever guaranteeing the defense of Ukraine.

By withdrawing from this mendacious “commitment,” Trump is not weakening NATO but strengthening it; and this is something that the Balts in particular should be brought to understand. For Baltic security rests on an absolute Russian conviction of the certainty of U.S. and NATO commitment under Article 5.

By continually urging the extension of Article 5 (or a European peacekeeping force with a U..S “backstop” which would be an Article 5 guarantee in all but name) to Ukraine, which NATO countries never intended to fight for, the Balts - if this were to come to pass - would gravely undermine their own security.

With the appointment of former Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas as the EU’s foreign policy chief, the Europeans have imported a representative of this Baltic strategic insanity into the heart of their security consultations. There is however no need for Washington to follow suit.

By the same token, talk of a compromise peace in Ukraine constituting a “new Yalta” is historical illiteracy or deliberate deceit. The Yalta Agreement drew a rigid strategic and ideological line through the heart of Europe and the middle of Germany, less than a hundred miles from the French border. A compromise peace in Ukraine will draw a line between some provinces in eastern Ukraine, 1,100 miles to the east. The only similarity is that in 1945 the Western allies were not prepared to fight their former Soviet allies to drive them out of Central Europe, and today we are not prepared to fight the Russians to drive them out of eastern Ukraine.

As for Zakaria and his allies, having created imaginary Trump policies, he goes on to imagine their apocalyptic consequences. In the Far East, Taiwan will be abandoned and Japan, losing confidence in American protection, will develop nuclear weapons. In a new version of the old “Domino Effect” nonsense this will also embolden China to attack Taiwan. This line is very odd indeed, since the explicit goal of leading Trump officials in seeking peace in Ukraine is to allow the U.S. to concentrate more fully on containing China in the Far East. If nobody in the administration is talking about the U.S. leaving Ramstein, they are certainly not talking about leaving Okinawa.

Perhaps most bizarre of all is Zakaria’s assertion that somehow, through a series of imaginatively constructed links, peace in Ukraine will encourage countries to abandon the dollar as their currency of trade and financial transactions. This is already happening, but because of the ways in which previous U.S. administrations sought to weaponize the dollar and its domination of the global financial system to achieve Washington’s geopolitical aims. Before that, China and Russia were entirely comfortable with the dollar.

At the heart of Zakaria’s mentality, and that of the Transatlantic security establishments in general, is his statement that “All these American moves will have an effect; they will begin to usher in a new multipolar world.” Has he seriously not realized that this multipolar world is already here, and that it has been created not by some error of U.S. policy, but by the vast economic rise of China and India, the partial recovery of Russia, and the determination of countries around the world not to sacrifice their own interests to the agendas of Washington (as witness their refusal to support the U.S. and Europe against Russia)?

It is as if Zakaria can only feel safe and comfortable in a world that is some combination of that of 1950, when an economically utterly dominant U.S. confronted an alliance of totalitarian enemies, and of 1995, when a geopolitically utterly dominant U.S. lacked any serious competitor.

Insofar as those worlds ever existed except in the megalomaniac minds of the Transatlantic elites, they are gone for ever, and the likes of Zakaria cannot preserve them even in imagination.