An anti-Putin military alliance now stretches from the Barents to the Black Sea.

Just as military planners are often accused of preparing to fight the last war, geopolitical analysts sometimes may be fairly charged with trying to cram new developments into yesterday’s familiar frameworks. Such is the case with Ukraine today.

The security challenges and opportunities in Europe have changed irrevocably since Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. News accounts today focus on speculation about the progress of the Ukrainian counteroffensive and what assurances Ukraine may receive about becoming a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization at the alliance’s summit this week in Vilnius, Lithuania. But the challenge at the moment is a conceptual one: updating our strategic assessment to reflect emerging security conditions.

Mr. Putin gambled and lost. His would-be war of conquest to reconstitute something like the Russian Empire failed more than a year ago. He is now in a war of devastation against an enemy unwilling to lose, and it will end either with his defeat and withdrawal from Ukraine or with a heavily armed, long-term standoff on either side of a de facto border determined by the progress of the fight. 

Unfortunately, Russian rhetoric remains such that we can’t rule out the possibility of massive devastation of Ukraine by a Russian nuclear strike or destruction of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. But that’s the point at which speculation about what would happen next becomes useless, because no one knows. Nor does anyone know what would happen if some aspiring strongman decides to cross the Rubicon that Wagner Group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin approached but didn’t cross. Mr. Putin has squandered substantial power throughout the Russian Federation over the past 18 months. Others may dare to try and seize it.

Even in defeat, however, Russia isn’t going anywhere. It is difficult now to fault Russia’s Baltic neighbors and other Central and Eastern European NATO members for their often-voiced post-Cold War suspicions about Russian intentions. Were postwar Moscow somehow to turn benign, nothing guarantees it would remain so. The security needs of Russia’s neighbors are permanent. That’s geopolitics.

Exactly contrary to his express war aims in Ukraine, Mr. Putin has managed to transform Russia’s geopolitical position for the worse. Sweden and Finland have moved from their long-held tactical position of NATO nonmembership to all-in with the alliance. 

NATO’s Article 5 pledges members to regard an attack on any of them as an attack on all of them. Members have long been inclined to see this as primarily an American security commitment. But in the Winter War and Continuation War more than 75 years ago, Finland successfully fought a war of national survival against Russia. Finland has considerable and growing military capability today. So does Sweden. Each has now not merely accepted an offer to be defended by NATO; they must pledge to defend its other members as well. 

On the central front, Poland seems determined to become a consequential European military power. Ukraine seems likely to join Finland in having fought off an existential threat from Moscow, and its military is now large, capable and battle-hardened. 

Consider as well Europe’s collective response to Mr. Putin’s attack on Ukraine. Once Ukrainians proved everyone wrong in thinking the country would collapse in 72 hours, the conversation quickly moved beyond sanctioning Russia to providing military assistance to a country whose bid for NATO membership most Europeans spurned in 2008. This was the response of Europe to an attack on a nonmember. That bodes well for alliance solidarity. 

Does anyone really think these are merely short-term features of European security? It is now barely a question at all whether Ukraine—if it fends off Russia—would be willing to come to the military assistance of Poland, Lithuania, or Finland in the event Russia becomes restive again a generation from now. 

After 9/11, the Vilnius Group of NATO aspirants in Central and Eastern Europe declared themselves allies in fact, if not yet by treaty: They said they regarded the attack on the U.S. as an attack on themselves. It was the right thing to do diplomatically, and it exposed them to additional risk in a world whose future looked suddenly uncertain.

Ukraine, however, has established that it will fight. Not only in self-defense but also for its European aspirations and, by extension, for Europe, its trans-Atlantic partners, and the values they share.

Ukraine is already one of NATO’s sharpest teeth in a collective defense arrangement that extends from the Barents Sea to the Black Sea. We just need to complete the paperwork.

This article was originally published on July 10, 2023 in The Wall Street Journal

Russia and China are ganging up on the small Baltic state as they test U.S. and EU resolve. 

Lithuania, a Baltic state of 2.8 million with an outsize role in promoting human rights and democracy, is in the crosshairs of Russia and China. Neither Russian President Vladimir Putin nor Chinese leader Xi Jinping has been shy about going after Lithuania. But their recent moves have broader significance, namely testing American and European commitments to allies.

Mr. Putin is raising the temperature on Lithuania by absorbing neighboring Belarus into his security sphere and militarizing Kaliningrad, Russia’s territorial exclave on the Baltic Sea. Mr. Xi is waging a campaign of political and economic retaliation. 

The integration of the Baltic states into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union in 2004 was a crowning achievement of post-Cold War politics. Lithuania helped lead Europe’s response to the depredations of the dictatorial regime of Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus by sheltering opposition leaders and staking out hawkish positions. This is the latest way in which Vilnius has irritated Mr. Putin, who would like to reclaim Russia’s near abroad as a sphere of influence. In Mr. Putin’s fanciful telling, Lithuania is a major source of Russia’s historical insecurity. That places it high on the list of neighboring states he would like to control.

Lithuania drew China’s fury this year for its decision to leave the 17+1 format—the Beijing-designed framework for dealing with Europe—and by allowing the government of Taiwan to open an office for its representation in Vilnius. Beijing declared an import ban on products with goods made in Lithuania—a move damaging to European companies with factories or supply-chain sources in Lithuania. Continental, a Germany-based automotive supplier, is the latest multinational under Chinese pressure to close operations in Lithuania. 

The question is how closely Russia and China will be willing or able to cooperate. In the China-Russia best-case scenario, the EU fails to support Lithuania and EU companies look elsewhere to source goods for the Chinese market. Meanwhile, Mr. Putin impinges, perhaps indirectly, on Lithuanian territory, sovereignty or independence—in the name of ensuring Kaliningrad’s security—and encounters no effective U.S., European and NATO response. 

As Mr. Xi knows, if he and Mr. Putin successfully detach Vilnius from NATO and the EU, there would be immediate ramifications in Asia, where China wants to push the U.S. out and establish regional hegemony. Most military strategists identify Taiwan as China’s best first target for confrontation—and thus the essential test of U.S. resolve. But an indirect opening move in the “gray zone” of conflict aimed at Lithuania might have advantages.

If the U.S. and Europe fail to back Lithuania fully, America’s allies and partners in Asia will doubt U.S. commitment. Rather than working closely with Washington, they might become more friendly with China. Sun Tzu would smile at winning the battle for Taiwan in Lithuania.

He also would admire Mr. Xi’s ability to get Mr. Putin to do the dirty work of testing the depth of U.S. alliance commitments in Asia. This surrogate arrangement has two advantages. First, it exposes Mr. Putin to most of the risks, such as sanctions. Second, it cements a strategic partnership between China and Russia in which Mr. Putin’s Russia assumes the role of junior partner to the far more powerful China. 

After Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, NATO deployed four multinational battalion-size battle groups in the Baltic States and Poland as part of the so-called enhanced Forward Presence mission. For its part, the EU is considering trade measures following China’s boycott of Lithuania to defend member states against economic attacks. These steps are worthy but not enough to check such determined foes as Messrs. Putin and Xi. 

The West too often relies on outdated policy tools. In response to China’s boycott of Lithuania, Brussels has pointed to the World Trade Organization as the best place for relief. In military matters, enhanced Forward Presence is a rotational rather than permanent NATO force of limited size and power. Neither the WTO nor enhanced Forward Presence is enough to guarantee Vilnius’s independence.

Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis recently described his country as a “canary in the coal mine.” America’s allies and partners around the world will study the U.S. commitment before choosing their own paths. As Vilnius feels the heft of Russian and Chinese power, U.S. and European credibility is on the line, in the form of an alliance guarantee. To back down under pressure would prove disastrous for Lithuania, and for the West’s global reputation.

This article was originally published on December 28th, 2021 in The Wall Street Journal by Mr. Lindberg and Mr. Peter Rough of the Hudson Institute.

For all its achievements, the West was increasingly faulted for its deficiencies at home and abroad.

The very title of Michael Kimmage’s work of intellectual history—“The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy”—comes with a shock of recognition. Why, yes, who in the realm of foreign policy now speaks of “the West”? It’s gone. Where did it go? Come to think of it, we more or less abandoned it, didn’t we?

Intellectual history is a tricky genre. In addition to describing what human beings have done, it attempts to discern what people have thought about what they were doing as they did it: how their conceptualization of the world around them shaped them. To try to make sense of this, historians examine what people have said. But there’s no escaping the problem of things that go without saying: the unspoken context of the times, often little understood by those operating within its confines.

Mr. Kimmage rightly believes that he has hold of one of the most important concepts of the previous century, the idea of the West, and capably traces its evolution and context. He purports to limit himself to its role in shaping U.S. foreign policy, but in truth he ranges more widely. He writes with keen observation, for example, on the proliferation of neoclassical and neo-Gothic architecture in the United States after the 1893 Columbian Exhibition in Chicago—part of America’s renewed involvement with Europe. He also draws on such African-American thinkers as W.E.B. Du Bois and James Baldwin, not primarily for their critique of American foreign policy but for the insight arising from their sense of being in the West but not entirely of it. The history of the idea of the West is also, as Mr. Kimmage shows, a history of the critique of the West.

The book proceeds more or less chronologically, charting first the rise of the modern idea of the West through its Cold War heyday; then the emerging critique of the West; and finally its dissolution into the universalism of the “liberal international order.” 

In what Mr. Kimmage calls the Columbian Republic—the period that followed what Frederick Jackson Turner described as the closing of the American frontier at the end of the 19th century—the U.S. began to turn away from its own westward expansion and actively cultivate its European connections, including the shared inheritance from Greece and Rome. The U.S., at last a global power, was at the forefront of Western civilization, or perhaps of civilization as such.

The second period takes us from 1919, when Woodrow Wilson failed to win congressional approval for American membership in the League of Nations, through 1945, the point at which the global dominance of the United States became apparent to everyone. World War II, Mr. Kimmage argues, was fought not only to defeat Hitler but to expunge the fascist blight that had overtaken two historical centers of Western civilization, Berlin and Rome. The war that the U.S. waged on Nazi Germany was fierce and brutal—yet not as brutal, Mr. Kimmage notes, as the war against Japan, a land not of the West. 

In the years before and after the war, America’s leading universities designed programs in Western civilization, unapologetically designating the great books to be read by students so they could understand their place in it. Mr. Kimmage bookends the next period of his history with the publication of William McNeill’s influential “The Rise of the West” in 1963. By that date, the West also stood in opposition to the East, the communist bloc behind Moscow’s Iron Curtain. This East-West dimension persisted through the end of the Cold War.

But, notes Mr. Kimmage, McNeill’s book actually appeared “at the end of an era in American politics and foreign policy.” The triumphalist view of the West found itself being increasingly interrogated for its deficiencies at home and abroad—for racism, imperialism, colonialism and what Columbia University’s Edward Said, in the late 1970s, would identify as “Orientalism,” the patronizing and dismissive Western view of other cultures. The Vietnam War began under the guidance of “the best and the brightest” (as David Halberstam dubbed them) from elite universities that were on board with the progressive purposes of the U.S. government. By Said’s time, the universities had emerged as bastions of a thorough critique of the West and its leading power, the United States.

Partly because of the increasing weight of this critique, and partly because of the breakup of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the utility of speaking of “the West” in foreign policy reached an end. Mr. Kimmage finds it telling that President George W. Bush felt a need to walk back his use of the term “crusade” to describe the coming U.S. response to the 9/11 attacks. It was deemed insensitive, and even the leading architects of the “Global War on Terror” drew a line at insensitivity of this sort.

It is to Mr. Kimmage’s immense credit that he manages to maintain a firm hold on two ropes pulling in opposite directions: First, critics of the West were right about many matters that had previously been ignored or played down: the history of racism and disregard for women, the settler genocides and imperialism. Second, the West got a number of big things right as well: in the realm of foreign policy, the need to defeat fascism, to resist communism, and to promote (however inconsistently and imperfectly) the spread of freedom. There was as well the emergence of a vision of political life based on mutual respect—a proposition that contains within it a basis for the criticism of existing practice and therefore self-improvement. 

Racism and conquest have been ubiquitous in politics. The political wherewithal to call them out and try to overcome them has not. A frank acknowledgment of Western shortcomings, past and present, as Mr. Kimmage demonstrates so persuasively, makes sense only in the context of an appreciation of the singular Western contribution to human flourishing.

This article was originally published on April 24th in The Wall Street Journal

His special envoy makes clear the administration’s priority is depriving the regime of nuclear weapons.

Before President Trump announced in Tuesday’s State of the Union address that he would hold another summit this month with Kim Jong Un, he indulged in a bit of braggadocio: “If I had not been elected president of the United States,” he said, “we would right now, in my opinion, be in a major war with North Korea.”

That may sound strange coming from a president whose engagement with North Korea began with insults and threats, with Messrs. Kim and Trump calling each other “dotard” and “Little Rocket Man.” But Mr. Trump’s alternative history aside, his administration has indeed pursued serious diplomacy with North Korea, taking a novel approach that will shape the bilateral relationship far into the future.

The new tack was made clear in a detailed speech given at Stanford last week by Stephen E. Biegun, the U.S. special envoy to North Korea. Mr. Biegun firmly reiterated the administration’s objective: “the final, fully verified denuclearization of North Korea.” Of course that’s easier stated than accomplished, but the administration has set a standard, and has exposed itself to harsh criticism if it tries to deliver anything less. Continue reading →

When President Trump announced America’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal two weeks ago, critics warned the move would undermine U.S. credibility just when it was needed most: on the eve of negotiations with North Korea over its nuclear-weapons and missile programs. If Mr. Trump was willing to rip up the Iran deal, which had won the blessing of the United Nations Security Council and America’s biggest allies, why would Kim Jong Un believe the U.S. would abide by any new agreement?

The counterargument from Trump loyalists was mainly to blame President Obama for failing to make the Iran deal binding. If it had been ratified as a treaty by a two-thirds vote of the Senate, the agreement would have been harder to depart. But Mr. Obama evidently believed that ratification was unattainable, unnecessary to ensure his successors’ compliance, or both. But what is done by executive action can be undone by executive action. America’s credibility, therefore, wasn’t on the line—even if Mr. Obama’s might have been. Continue reading →

The U.S. military has created a new precedent for how to counter Russian “hybrid war.” Set in a murky clash of arms in Syria in early February, and one averted in March, this precedent—you might even call it a “red line”—will reverberate from the Middle East to the Black and Baltic seas.

The problem is the appearance on your territory of what defense-policy wonks call “little green men.” They come heavily armed and dressed for combat. They operate at the direction of a government, Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Yet they wear no insignia, and their sponsors deny any control over them. Operating outside the laws of war, they pursue Russian political ends such as the illegal takeover of Crimea and the dismemberment of Ukraine. Via a Russian mercenary paramilitary company called Wagner Group, they have turned up to support Russian ends in Syria as well.

Hybrid war, in the popular conception, encompasses all sorts of irregular conflict, from little green men to cyberdisruption to information operations. Its point is the pursuit of political ends by means not readily traceable to their origin. It seeks conflict without accountability. It probes the question of how much gain is possible short of regular military means. As such, it poses particular challenges to deterrence and wartime accountability. These challenges are of especially great and increasing interest in Europe’s east, from Finland and Sweden through the Baltics, Poland and Ukraine, on to the Balkans. What to do? Continue reading →

First, a point about the title of Patrick J. Deneen’s “Why Liberalism Failed”: While the failure he alleges does indeed encompass the progressive element in American politics, Mr. Deneen’s target is much bigger. The “liberalism” that has failed, in his telling, is the very project of modernity itself, whose origins date to the 16th and 17th centuries and whose signal political achievement, arriving in the 18th century, was the founding of the United States. Yes, that “failure”—and that liberalism.

Liberalism went wrong from the beginning, in Mr. Deneen’s view. Its fundamental innovation was to define politics around the liberty of the individual, the protection of whose rights is the purpose of government. Thomas Hobbes reasoned about a “state of nature” in which human beings stand weak and afraid, their lives “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” They band together to create an all-powerful state—“Leviathan,” as he called it—to provide relief from this condition and from the fear of violent death that goes with it. But the human quest to use politics to improve on natural conditions only begins here. Building as well on Machiavelli and Francis Bacon, liberalism seeks not an accommodation with nature and human convention but mastery over nature and liberation from convention. By way of John Locke, who saw human beings as naturally reasonable and tolerant and saw politics as a way of securing their individual liberty, it’s a short step to the American Founders and the Bill of Rights. Continue reading →

Wall Street Journal

Notwithstanding a title that screams of current events, Pankaj Mishra’s “Age of Anger: A History of the Present,” is a book of far greater ambition than its timeliness suggests. Though attentive to all the headline staples—the rise of nationalism and populism, the weakening of liberalism, the threat of virulent strains of radical Islam—Mr. Mishra frames these phenomena as manifestations of a much larger problem. The “age of anger” here is nothing other than modernity itself, as seen through the eyes of those to whom modernity has come late and partially—if indeed it has come at all.

Mr. Mishra’s primary target is the assumption that modernity is synonymous with progress. He traces this view back to the Enlightenment conception of human beings as rights-bearing individuals quite apart from the whims of crown and church. This radical idea spread throughout the West, and then globally, infiltrating the realms of politics, economics, society and culture.

Proponents of modernity, perhaps including most readers of this newspaper, point to the spread of freedom and growing prosperity as a result of market economics, and they are pleased. True, they likely see progress as incomplete, both with regard to its extension around the world and to its development in their own societies. But the direction—forward—isn’t in doubt.

In Mr. Mishra’s view, apologists of modernity are complacent and “self-flattering.” They had the great good fortune to be the initial beneficiaries of “commercial society, the global market economy, the nation state and utilitarian rationality.” For this, the Western (and Westernizing) winners deserve no special credit. In a mistake characteristic of Enlightenment universalism, Mr. Mishra argues, they mistook the advantage they gained from the system for the advantage of the whole world. Meanwhile, the globalizing spread of modernity from its points of origin in Europe and North America caused tremendous disruption of local and traditional patterns of life wherever it went, producing what Mr. Mishra sees as the characteristic trait of modernity: an “existential resentment of other people’s being, caused by an intense mix of envy and sense of humiliation and powerlessness.”

It is this sense of resentment, the defining spirit of the age of anger, that Mr. Mishra spends most of the book exploring. Continue reading →

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From the emergence of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority in the late 1970s through the Christian Coalition’s heyday in the 1990s and on to Republican presidential aspirant Ben Carson’s declaration that he could not vote for a Muslim for president, the role of evangelical Christians in the nation’s political life has been a magnet for controversy. For Democrats and for the left more broadly, evangelicals represent a regressive force that, if left unchecked, would transport America back to a world in which a woman’s place is in the home and a homosexual’s in the closet. For Republicans and conservatives who do not think of themselves as “born again,” the challenge is how to keep conservative Christians voting right while presenting a modern political party with broader appeal.

Mark A. Smith is a professor of political science at the University of Washington, where he also teaches comparative religion. His “Secular Faith” is a spirited and contrarian entry in the debate over what to make of the religious element of the “culture wars.” Against the view that religion is a major influence on our politics, Mr. Smith sets out to argue, as his subtitle puts it, “how culture has trumped religion.” Continue reading →

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We don’t yet know the full story of what a 25-year-old Moroccan citizen was doing on a Paris-bound train from Amsterdam Friday, armed, according to police, with an AK-47, a handgun and a box cutter. The reason we don’t is the quick action of two Frenchmen, a Briton and—most decisively—three Americans to subdue Ayoub El-Khazzani before he was able to act on his intentions.

The six who saved the day perfectly represent the modern face of heroism as it came to the fore in the 20th century: In a situation of extreme danger, they chose to expose themselves to additional risk, thereby saving the lives of others. Nowadays, in our mostly peaceful societies, the word “heroism” is often used as a synonym for everyday inspiring behavior, or steeliness despite suffering, or selfless generosity or any number of other exemplary actions. The actions of these six men, however, were the genuine, life-risking article. Continue reading →