'..Waiting seems more attractive at this point than feverishly developing an expensive, politically iffy project..''Putin’s great power project isn’t necessarily forever and the possibility exists that a future Russian leader will think of Russia as part of some broad European project, as Putin’s predecessor Boris Yeltsin did for a while after the Soviet Union’s collapse. But waiting for that requires an extremely long-term view.
With the U.S., the situation is almost exactly the opposite. Trump’s isolationist project is as new as his presidency, and none of his realistic Democratic rivals in the 2020 election would like to continue with it. The U.S. already has a long-standing cooperation project with Europe, which started with the Marshall Plan and the Berlin Airlift and hasn’t quite ended with Trump, given the strong EU-U.S. trade relationship. There’s a high likelihood that whenever Trump leaves office, be it in 2020 or four years later, the U.S. will try to patch things up — and it’ll be much easier for Europe to accept its advances than to establish a cooperative pattern with Russia.
Just as Macron says, it’s getting harder and harder to pin down what NATO membership really means and what threats the bloc is capable of confronting. But it’s a working structure that has conducted real military operations and practiced coordinating national armies; Macron himself calls the interoperability within NATO “efficient.” Setting up a parallel defense architecture can only undermine this working mechanism, no matter how many times Macron repeats that any EU military project is going to be complementary to it.
Is that worth doing because of what looks to many like a temporary threat from Trump — and for the sake of a long shot with Russia? That’s the underlying question that makes it difficult for Macron’s EU military ambitions to go beyond talk, pilot projects and some defense industry coordination. More decisive progress will only be possible if Trumpian behavior becomes the norm in the U.S. — and if Russia suddenly turns demonstrably pro-European, reversing, for example, its current policy on Ukraine.
Macron sounds bold, strategic, even prophetic at times — but his geopolitical judgments aren’t indisputable or even universally attractive. Most of all, they’re unproven. Waiting seems more attractive at this point than feverishly developing an expensive, politically iffy project. It’ll take much more than his eloquence to make Europe’s geopolitical repositioning a reality.'
- Leonid Bershidsky,
Macron’s Vision of Russia's Future Is Half-Baked, November 8, 2019
Context'..We have a revanchist Russia .. And we have a China, which is still Leninist..'China is 'threat to world' says dissident writer