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Do American on The Motte feel that the country is generally in favour of breaking from its old European alliances? I am not sure I have got that sense when visiting but I've visited only fairly D-leaning areas in recent years.
From the British/European point of view, one has the sense from current reporting that a significant rebalancing is happening, one that I would characterise as going beyond wanting to reduce American spending on e.g. Ukraine, and towards decisively breaking with European countries out of gut dislike, and beginning instead to form either a US-Russian alliance of sympathies, or if not that, then at least a relationship with Russia that is rhetorically much friendlier than that with Europe. I think the fear is starting to take root in Europe that the US would effectively switch sides in return for Russia granting it mineral rights in Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine. This heel turn seems unlikely, but things are murky enough that it is worrying people.
I feel that this rebalancing is already working in a way towards achieving stated Trump goals – it certainly is succeeding in restoring Europe's appetite for military spending (underinvestment here is one thing Trump has been consistently right about but European leaders have buried their heads in the sand on, hoping he'd go away). But the current situation re Ukraine is also sending confusing signals, as it had previously seemed as though the US wanted Europe to step up and be part of a solution for Ukraine, whereas currently it seems they actively want to stop Europe from having a role in peace talks. The motive for this appears to be stopping Europe from asking terms of Russia that would delay a solution the US and Russia find jointly satisfactory, though perhaps there is more going on beneath the surface.
I did not have the impression that the American population generally has gone through this kind of Europe->Russia realignment in their hearts, Russians still being a regular foil for the good guys in movies (said movies coming from liberal-leaning Hollywood, sure). I have the impression that moving towards Russia is an aspect of foreign policy that Trump has not built domestic support for. But maybe this is wrong. Maybe the average American now thinks not only "Europe should contribute more to solve their own defence problems", but furthermore, "Europe should get its nose out of international affairs and attempt to help only when it's spoken to. We, Russia and China are in charge now."
I'm writing this without especially detailed knowledge of foreign policy, but I'm more interested here in the emotional calibration of ordinary Americans generally. What outcomes would they accept, what outcomes are they afraid of, who do they feel warm to and who not, and to what extent do they feel entirely insulated from global events, alliances and enmities?
I feel like NATO expansion was a complete own-goal. What does the United States get out of any NATO member state that joined after 1990? Are we really expecting the Polish winged hussars to open a second front on the Mongolian Steppes in response to a Chinese attack on the US? These states are a massive liability for no discernible benefit. I would support kicking Eastern Europe out of NATO. If Western Europe doesn’t agree to that, then they can start their own alliance with blackjack and hookers.
NATO expansion to the east was a great move in hindsight.
Russia was always going to be hostile to any nation that tried to project power east of Berlin, so the only options were to either kick Russia while it was down or stand by and let it reassemble the borders of the USSR, then fight it on much more equal terms.
Well no, there are other options: the US could have tried to integrate Russia into NATO, or simply not tried to project power past Berlin. The former seems very hard to get but has incredible payoff, and I am sorry it didn't seem to get much serious consideration from the West (perhaps there were good reasons it was a nonstarter – but I can't help thinking that if we can put up with having Turkey in NATO Russia could surely have been shoehorned in somehow.)
There were attempts to build better relations between Russia and the West during the 90s, then briefly during Obama's first term. They never came to much because Russia never gave up the dream of dominating Eastern Europe.
Refusing to grant NATO entry to countries east of Berlin would have just made them easy targets when Russia regained its strength. The Baltics would almost certainly have been either invaded, or pressured into becoming defacto Russian client states by this point.
Also under Bush. The US has repeatedly attempted a rapprochement with Russia but from what I can tell continues to refuse to make vital concessions to them. Which might be good! But it's not surprising rapprochement fails.
From an American realpolitik perspective it would be infinitely better to have a good relationship with Russia and have Eastern Europe as Russian client states than it is to have Russia as an enemy and be rolling the dice on Eastern European states. However, obviously, some of this is with the benefit of hindsight and also presupposes a stable US-Russia alliance which frankly I think would be a very delicate thing, perhaps an impossible one (Russia has no friends only interests etc. etc.) I don't think it's fair to tell Bill Clinton he goofed up by not anticipating that we would need to pivot to the Pacific badly in 20 years. Obama, however...
Unilaterally withdrawing the US from a major international arms treaty for the first time in her recent(?) history is hardly an act of rapprochement.
I think this was a common pattern. American Presidents wanted to be friendly with Russia, but not as much as they wanted other things.
From the Russian point of view, I can see how this probably looked like getting rugpulled every eight years and fed their belief that America was hostile, even before getting to genuinely hostile acts (such as overthrowing friendly governments).
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An alliance with Russia would be basically impossible if they were gobbling up democratic European states, and even if the US ignored what they were doing I don't see why they wouldn't just become hostile to the US again once they reassembled the borders of the USSR. Putin's Russia is stilly highly ideologically opposed to the US just like the USSR was, but instead of Communism it has negativity towards democracy and hallucinating that the CIA has a 100% effective anti-Russian brainwashing technique in the form of "color revolutions".
Even just having Poland on the US's side is a great deal because they're a fantastic foil for tinpot dictators. It's not inaccurate to think that Ukrainians looked at how Poland was doing, and how Belarus was doing, and said "I think I'll take some of the former, thanks".
And isn't needed, for what I am talking about. If the United States wants to contain China, it needs to prevent alliance formation; forming its own alliances is one way of doing this, but not the only way. China and Russia are not natural allies, but their mutual dislike of the United States pushed them closer together now than they were for much (perhaps all) of the Cold War, when they were ostensibly ideologically aligned.
I don't think this is true. Russia and democratic countries like India, Israel, France, Germany, South Korea all have or have had recently cordial relations, including mutually beneficial trade deals, sometimes for sensitive items such as military equipment. Shoot, after the end of the Cold War, Yakovlev assisted Lockheed Martin with VTOL technology for the F-35B.
In fact, let's talk about Israel. Israel has refused to send military aid to Ukraine or sanction Russia, not because they aren't a US ally (they ostensibly are) or because they are a Russian ally (they aren't) but because they want to maintain good relations with Russia and think they have a lot to lose by angering them. If the United States wants to compete with China, it is in its best interest for Russia to have a similar relationship with it - not necessarily one that is hostile towards China, but one that is not willing to participate in broader coordinated action against the United States. However, I think the ship has sailed on that, but it hadn't probably as late as the Obama administration.
And I don't think that's an insane world. Imagine a simple counterfactual where the US had listened to diplomats like Kennan in the 1990s, drawn a hard line at NATO expansion further east (at a minimum, ruling out Georgia, Finland and Ukraine) and instead promoted trade and investment both between itself and NATO and others (such as Germany) while generally keeping its hands off of former SSRs, perhaps telling Russia that NATO's ranks remaining closed its contingent on Eastern Europe remaining peaceful. Fast forward to the Sino-American War of 2027, and now Russia, instead of having already been hit by every sanction imaginable (and surviving), does brisk trade with the West, still uses SWIFT, has some degree of economic and geopolitical integration with most former SSRs, and does not view the West as a threat. Going to Russia under such a situation and saying "hey just sit this one out, we know you are friends with China, but don't give them your satellite imagery or any new arms deals please and thank you" probably wouldn't be a heavy lift! (From what I understand, Putin, who spent some of his formative years in Germany, is probably pro-Western moreso than pro-Asian in terms of his instinctive biases.)
Now, you can argue it wouldn't be worth Poland getting the Belarus treatment or whatever, sure, but the United States losing a war with China is potentially a Very Big Deal, probably much worse than Ukraine losing the war to Russia, and if that's your #1 priority you're going to want as many ducks in a row as you can get. From where I sit, it really looks like the US tried to have its cake and eat it too and as someone who lives here I am more than a bit concerned that we bit off more than we could chew.
Russia obviously knows this is not true or Putin would have been color revolutioned by now. They are concerned both about color revolutions, however, as well as military threats from NATO.
Am I missing something here? I don't typically think of Poland as being a particularly good foil for tinpot dictators. More like a magnet (no offense to the longsuffering Poles).
Sure. I mean, I don't blame countries for wanting their own sovereignty. But this ultimately means that when, say, Iran tries to get nuclear weapons I'm like "well I can't blame them" and when Israel tries to stop them - yeah, can't really blame them either.
In realpolitik terms, there was no realistic scenario where better relations with Russia would make much of a difference in a US-China conflict. Such a war would be dominated by sea + air power, which Russia is anemic in. Russia would be helpful in terms of sending raw materials to China, so having them embargo China during a conflict would indeed be useful for the US, but there was never a realistic chance for US-Russia relations to be good enough to where Russia would consider that rather than simply profiting and staying neutral while continuing to trade. Even if Russia joins China relatively explicitly, how much of a difference would that make? It might help China with marginal things like initial missile stockpiles and intelligence gathering. Those aren't nothing, but they'd be highly unlikely to turn the tables. And they'd be well worth the trouble if it meant the US had a stronger European contingent of allies to call on, even if they're mostly limited to just economic sanctions against China.
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