The Euros need to carry their own weight. Even outside of the Russian threat, there are many issues where they should be doing more and Trump was 100% right in pushing them. They should at least contribute their contractual minimum of 2% GDP for defense.
But that said, even though everyone is talking a big game because Ukraine is in the news and talked bout right now, everyone knows the Russian threat is minimal.
The Soviet Union is gone. The Warsaw Pact is gone. In fact, all of those European Warsaw Pact nations and some former Soviet Republics (which is the crux of the issue for the Russians) are now in NATO!
By the numbers, Russia today has ground forces 55% ours in manpower (not counting this temporarily surge by calling up reserves and drafting people), they have an air force 47% ours, navy 43% ours. They have a population 44% ours and 40% the number of men reaching military age. They do not have a Latin/South America to reach back to for bodies when they need them like we do. The Russian military relies heavily on conscription which brings with it morale and institutional knowledge issues (high turn over creates amateurs). They have an economy by GDP 1/10 ours, less industry, less high tech. And, they have few allies, weak allies (small military, small economy, small population), allies riddled with their own issues that are unable to really deploy large numbers of troops without exposing themselves to internal or external threats (Armenia is worried about the Turks, the Chechen’s have internal issues...). That is the reality.
The ONLY area where Russia has parity with us is in terms of their nuclear deterrent. That is literally it.
Sure, they try to play the game like we do, but they just can’t keep up and they are usually behind us, and far smaller. For example, the Russian bot you mention, we play these games, in fact corporate America plays them too and calls them influencers... When you compare the Russian Intel Community (IC) to ours, you realize in entirety, they are 1/3 or size, with 1/8 our budget. We’re the big boy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Intelligence_Community#:~:text=The%20Washington%20Post%20reported%20in,include%20854%2C000%20people%20holding%20top%2D >850,000 folks in our IC in some fashion, 10,000 locations/sites, > 1,900 private firms supporting it, with more money than Russia times eight (8). Half the time when we lecture industry about some new threat, we are telling them about a tool or technique which we in some cases have been applying for 7 years. Point being we’re in some cases YEARS ahead and far bigger than the Russians. The Chinese are a different story but they are the topic of discussion here.
The big bad Russian bear is more like a small scrawny old black bear:
https://www.adirondackexplorer.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/BearMangebyJoanCollins.jpg
The Euros know it’s all BS and they are stalling, even now, only marginally increasing their defense spending, dragging their feet on it, and already cutting down on what they said they would do at the height of the scare.
That said, the Euros know that missile defense is important and it has been for a while (they are doing far to little and to late) exposing themselves to serious risks. Even Libya had long range missiles able to reach as far as Ireland, and you have Iran, and others to worry about. The ballistic missile threat has existed for a while and dragging their feet on this issue is reckless. But it’s the Euros and they would rather buy votes by spending on elaborate social programs or environmental pipe dreams just like our politicians do when race pandering, throwing money at homos, some union retirement plan that’s broke etc. Politics is about individuals and their party, not what is strategically the best for a nation.
The only Euro countries that carry their own weight (UK and France) are former colonial powers that to this day need to worry about their interests in South America, Africa, or to a lesser degree the Middle East and Asia. Poland is the exception.
The Russians simply are not that powerful militarily, economically, or in high tech.
The only real threat, is if we accomplish our fantasy by eliminating our primary competitor in the energy sector, Russia.
If we gobble up all their frontier nations which we have been doing: Syria, Iraq, Libya, Venezuela (all oil producers ), in Africa and take over their buffer states as we have done in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Ukraine and accomplish in weakening and destabilizing them internally, THAT IS WHEN THINGS GET REALLY DANGEROUS!!!
That is when you get to a place where there is a high degree of uncertainty/unpredictability, where you no longer even know all the variables nor have control over them, that is when you could see major disruptions in the global food and energy supply, the use of nuclear weapons, major theater war, crazy things that are unimaginable.
What people like Graham are advocating is dangerous. It’s not only a total war path, it’s also bad even if we get what we want. No different than Wolfowitz with Iraq, he’s advocating something which while it might sound really cool to some today, will likely pan out as a strategic disaster. Imagine the mess we created in Iraq, only now with a nation 5.5 times the population, which generates much of the worlds food supply, energy and has nukes. If you want to light the (((world))) on fire, make people go to bed hungry.
Fortunately, even for us, it is very unlikely that fools like Graham will get what they advocate. Russia is the underdog here, we’re the big boy. We are the ones pushing into their sphere of influence, not Russia into ours.
But they aren’t some chump like Iraq. They know our game, how we use the dollar, freeze assets, use the media, economically sanction, politically isolate, support every opposition leader and cause, use social media, NGOs, run massive Psyop campaigns, use big tech... and they have mitigation strategies for every aspect. Just an example in one area: There is a reason why Russia has their own version of Google (Yandex - Google is an NSA creation! What do you think they do? https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-cia-and-nsa-research-grants-for-mass-surveillance), their own version of Facebook (VK), their own social media platforms like WhatsApp (Telegram), don’t use Cisco routers, nor even MS based OS’s on government computers (they collaborate with the US IC): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astra_Linux#:~:text=Astra%20Linux%20is%20a%20Russian,order%20to%20replace%20Microsoft%20Windows They are much smaller, behind us, but they aren’t idiots, they aren’t a midget, and because we always play the same game over and over, we’re very predictable. We’re a football team that has the biggest, strongest and fastest players in the world, but we always make the same play, and our opponents know that.
Here’s a reality folks don’t want to accept. The Russians sell something which people “need.” Not a want, but a need. Food and energy are essential and all we accomplished with all our sanctions and blowing up a pipeline is a redistribution of suppliers and recipients/consumers, but Russia is still selling their oil and gas, now just more to China and India, while Europe uses less of it at a huge economic cost to them (higher energy costs cut into economic competitiveness): https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-20/china-s-spending-on-russian-energy-jumps-to-6-4-billion-in-june
and
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/indias-russian-oil-buying-scales-new-highs-may-trade-2023-06-21/
In the big picture, there is a difference because the Russians are selling their oil and gas for less than they potentially could be earning
BUT, our impact simply isn’t as big as some would like to believe: https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/mkt/akpezlzlovr/russianoilprodrevs.PNG
For the most part, I concur.
A few minor quibbles and one disagreement.
Russia and the Russian Federation have never been one and the same.
This distorts much of the data with Mother Russia taking the lion’s share of the resources from the Federation.
Stalin had a plan.
National Territorial Delimitation (NTD)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_delimitation_in_the_Soviet_Union
Now the Russian Federation has more cracks than a mile of bad sidewalk.
Some disputed lines are maintained by Russian troops, now in short supply.
IMO the EURO policymakers watching the TV news have realized they are easy targets, accessible from all directions. And they do not want to give six billion dollars to Iran, even if they could afford it.
Better to spend it on missile/drone defense and claim it as a NATO expense. With a good showing in Ukraine, downstream sales.
-—”Here’s a reality folks don’t want to accept. The Russians sell something which people “need.”
We are all energy addicts and a successful economy runs on it.
“In Moscow, they teach many languages. Russian to those that want to study the past, English and Hebrew to those that want to leave, and Chinese to those that want to stay.”
