zondag 13 april 2014

De Krim(p)



“Wil het Westen echt een vuist maken tegen Vladimir Poetin, dan moeten Europese landen stoppen met bezuinigen op defensie,” aldus Obama op de voorpagina van NRC (27 maart jl). Desondanks hebben SGP en CU zonder succes opgeroepen tot verhoging van het defensiebudget. De Nederlandse premie voor defensie is inmiddels richting 1% van het BBP gekelderd. Daarmee zijn we tot de risee van de NAVO geworden. Noorwegen spendeert nog 1,5%, het Verenigd Koninkrijk nog ruim 2% en de VS zelfs 4,5 % van het BBP. Nederland, nota bene de 18e economie in de wereld, surft lafhartig als free rider mee op de veiligheidsgaranties van anderen en voldoet allang niet meer aan de afgesproken twee procentnorm. Vreemd dat een land, waarvan de inwoners zich tegen bijna alles verzekeren, onverschillig staat tegenover defensie. Indachtig beide wereldoorlogen en de oorlog op de Balkan vinden we het kennelijk vanzelfsprekend dat, indien nodig, Amerikanen sneuvelen voor ònze belangen. De krijgsmacht is zo ver afgebroken dat van het “Zwitsers zakmes” alleen nog een bot lemmet rest. Nederland leeft op een roze wolk en ziet behaalde vredesresultaten uit het verleden als garantie voor de toekomst. Dit geldt ook voor de West, waar de afschrikking tegen mogelijke Venezolaanse agressie tot een minimum is beperkt. We hopen op hulp uit de VS wanneer Maduro, als een kat in het nauw, een sprong waagt naar de A,B, C eilanden. De sociale desintegratie in Venezuela begint verontrustende parallellen te vertonen met het Argentinië van Galtieri in 1982. Maar in Nederland weigeren we zelfs na te denken over mogelijke scenario’s en steken ons kop in het zand.

Hoe lang houdt de Amerikaanse bereidwilligheid Europa altijd maar weer bij te staan nog stand? Obama gaf eerder aan dat Europa niet langer een consumer, maar een producer van veiligheid moet zijn. Isolationistische tendensen in de VS worden ongetwijfeld versterkt als Europeanen zelfs niet bereid zijn hun eigen broek op te houden. Zullen Amerikanen weer bereid zijn bij duizenden te sneuvelen voor een Europa dat door zelfverwaarlozing een gemakkelijke prooi is geworden?

Poetin is een Realpolitiker, die geen boodschap heeft aan soft diplomacy. Hij zet in en wint. Onze reactie is ronduit slap. Peace in our time! Enkele collaborateurs van Poetin een inreisverbod naar de EU geven en enkele tegoeden bevriezen heeft hoongelach doen schallen door de gangen van het Kremlin. In de West-Europese postmoderne samenleving denken we dat we onze doelen kunnen bereiken door aardig te zijn, maar in de internationale betrekkingen is er no free lunch.

De annexatie van de Krim, alsmede de momenteel volgens hetzelfde recept opgevoerde spanning in Donetsk en Charkov, toont nog een andere zwakheid aan. We zijn niet in staat tot strategisch denken. Appelig vragen we ons af of we de EU wel zo afhankelijk hadden moeten maken van Russisch aardgas en aardolie. Een derde van deze producten komt uit Rusland. Politici spreken over “de-escalatie”, maar hebben geen flauw benul dat eenzijdig de-escaleren niet bestaat. Poetin vult de ruimte op die we hem bieden. Politiek correcte ”de-escalatie” induceert zelfs verdere escalatie! Wij een stap achterwaarts, hij een stap voorwaarts. Wat is de volgende stap? De Baltische staten?

Si vis pacem para bellum. Wie vrede wil moet zich op oorlog voorbereiden. Wie zijn defensie serieus neemt brengt potentiële tegenstanders tot bezinning. Dit was het succes van de NAVO tijdens de Koude Oorlog. De benodigde basis van hard power is echter weggesmolten in West-Europa. Speak softly and but carry a stick: geen soft power zonder hard power! De kosten van een conflict staan in geen verhouding tot de premie die vooraf nodig is om een tegenstander ervan te weerhouden over grenzen heen te gaan. Alsof je de brandweer afschaft in een dorp waar een aantal jaren geen brand is geweest. Deze domme logica treft ons hoogontwikkeld, maar enigszins naïef land op het gebied van defensie.

Poetin is over grenzen heengegaan, ondanks vergoelijkende woorden van lieden die menen dat hij “begrip” verdient. Begrip van Russisch gedrag biedt geen rechtvaardigingsgrond. De Russen hebben in 1994 samen met VS en Verenigd Koninkrijk de soevereiniteit en territoriale integriteit van Oekraïne (dus met de Krim) gegarandeerd met het Boedapest Memorandum. Oekraïne, toen de derde kernmacht in de wereld, kreeg deze garanties in ruil voor het opgeven van de kernwapens uit het Sovjettijdperk. Poetin schuift dit met een gemanipuleerd referendum terzijde.

Generaal b.d. van Kappen noemde de crisis rondom de Krim een wake up call. Nederland draait zich nog eens lekker om en droomt verder over de verzorgingsstaat. Laat anderen maar de kolen uit het vuur halen. Als onze vrede echt bedreigd wordt lossen zij het wel op, toch?


Dit artikel is in ietwat gewijzigde vorm gepubliceerd in dagblad Trouw op vrijdag 11 april 2014

J.H. de Jonge, is voorzitter van de werkgroep Defensiebeleid en Krijgsmacht (DenK) van de Gezamenlijke Officieren Vereniging (GOV).



maandag 7 april 2014

Al Jezeera TV Interview in Vilnius, Litouwen, met Vytautas Landsbergis 31 maart 2014


Vytautas Landsbergis is the first president after Lithuania declared its independence from the Soviet Union back in 1990. Now he is a Member of the European Parliament. He joined us from Vilnius, Lithuania.

Mr. President, thank you for being with us. I want to play more of what the Secretary of State said. Take a listen.

J. Kerry: The US and Russia have differences of the opinion about the events that led to this [Ukraine] crisis. But most of us recognize the importance of finding a diplomatic solution and of simultaneously meeting the need of Ukrainian people

Mr. President, thank you once more for being with us this morning. But with this backdrop, are you optimistic that the solution of this diplomatic crisis can be found?
V.L.: I am not very optimistic. My greatest concern is evident frustration of the West and their apparent weakness being unprepared for such an unexpected and fundamental attack against the UN-type World order. The UN Charter with all its principles lies in trash and nobody asks openly: Mr. Putin, is this your true decision to leave the United Nations? Is your illegitimate government of Russia also for that?

You say it is weakness. What exactly is the weakness identified. Who is weak?
I see that there is a lack of consistency. If Russia is an aggressor and annexator, it is not properly taken. There are now negotiations going on how to accept what has been done.

I want to be sure that I have heard what you are saying correctly. You believe that the United Nations should act to kick Russia out of the UN?
It would be normal not to kick, but to state that by such a decision and action Russia stays outside the United Nations. It is decision of Russia itself. Nobody is kicking them out - they went out.

So, what do you believe – this is the question that everybody seems to be asking – what do you believe Putin’s game to be, what indeed he wants?
V.L.: What he wants, it is better to ask him or them. Now they are again giving promises to stop with further invasion, but who can trust them anymore? Just see, how they are involving the opponent in conditionalities that mean that Russia’s promises are of zero value, indeed. They simply are using this chance to get the right of force majeure to dictate all Europe until it agrees to it and continues to live in the shadow of an exciting strategic partner or bed-fellow, the putinist Russia.

So what do you think the United States and West needs to do to stop Russian aggression, if that is what you think it is?
I would like to see more consistency in the policies of both the Europeans and the United States, because the first reaction was strong and clear. And now Russian diplomacy succeeded to involve into talks about secondary issues, which are unproved allegations against the Ukrainians that Ukraine is in war against Russia. It is nonsense – Russia is in war against Ukraine. The independence-seeking Ukraine was attacked, Ukraine did not attack Russia.

Mr. President, play a little bit what Russian president had to say. He all along has been accusing the West of supporting coup d’etat by fascist, defending the annexation of Crimea. Listen to what he said to that joint session of the Russian parliament. Just for a second.
I remember very well the explanations given by the Russian president about two years ago in an open interview to the nation when a boy asked him: Mr. President, in our class two boys often fight. Who of them is guilty? And the president gave a lesson to the whole world: the one who was beaten he is guilty. So now the Ukrainians are beaten, therefore they are guilty. Anybody in Europe may be beaten and guilty.

Fifty thousand troops are now at the Ukrainian border. The Russian president is quaranteeing the West that this is a military exercise, that he has no intentions of invading Ukraine. Do you believe him?
They used to say the same words before, which have not been fulfilled. So, who wants to believe them, may believe and be misguided and confused once again. Mr. Putin underlined…

Let me use accurate manner. Do you believe Russian president is lying when he says he has no intentions to invade Ukraine with those fifty thousand troops employed at the border of Ukraine?
Russian politicians, even of the highest rank, are accomodated to lie in a very easy manner. I remember when it was openly said to president Medvedev by the French minister B. Kouchner /surely, by N. Sarkozy/: Mr. President, you should not be a liar. You have promised to withdraw your troops from Georgia. But now you do nothing. Don’t be a liar!
There were open words in the press.

But are you, Mr. President Vytautas Landsbergis, saying that Russian president Vladimir Putin is lying when he says: those troops that are on the border are not part of any incursion, but simply there for military exercises? Yes or no?
I am sure that he keeps for himself many options, also to step forward and become a liar, but for the “highest” goals.

Is this personal pain for you to watch what is happening in Ukraine after knowing what happened in Lithuania?
It is not yet in Lithuania, however, every neighbour of Russia may expect the same, as the program of the restoration of the empire was proclaimed years ago.

So, you believe that what he said when he said the darkest moment in Russian history was the breakup of the Soviet empire? You believe that he wants now brick by brick, block by block to put that empire back together?
Mr. Putin said at the very beginning of his president’s career: do not compare me with Gorbachev. He dissolved and lost the Soviet Union, I will collect them back. These are his words, a quotation.

Defending the annexation of Crimea the Russian president said that he is supporting Russian-speaking people in the region and calling the people that they overthrew the coup d’etat government in Ukraine. Listen what he said. So where do you stand on the issue of Russia protecting Russian in the region?
The Russians in the region are not attacked, they are not oppressed and do not need this defense and protection. In Eastern Ukraine there are sent many petitions of Russians to the Russian president: we are Russians, but, please, don’t protect us! – Listen to it.

But I want to make sure we have this scrap before we go. Your message to the West – to President Obama, to the European Union, to the United Nations would be: do not trust Vladimir Putin or take him at his word.
Indeed, so, because he was confusing all of them so many times. And nobody can say that finally he is a sincere and fair person.

Vytautas Landsbergis is the first president after Lithuania declared its independence from the Soviet Union. He is now a Member of the European Parliament. Mr. President, thank you for being with us this morning.

Thank you very much for this opportunity.

2014.04.07


zondag 6 april 2014

The Wall Street Journal, interview Mr ILves, President of Estonia



An American Ally in Putin's Line of Fire

Estonia's president, who was raised in New Jersey, on how Crimea has changed 'everything' and what NATO should do now.

By MATTHEW KAMINSKI CONNECT

April 4, 2014 7:25 p.m. ET

Tallinn, Estonia

From the pinkish presidential palace here, the Russia border lies 130 miles due east across a flat coastal Baltic plain. Toomas Hendrik Ilves took up residence in 2006, two years after his small Baltic state joined the European Union and NATO. At the time, most people assumed that any Russian threat had been buried with Peter the Great, who first brought Estonia into Russia's empire.

Not so fast. "Everything has changed," President Ilves says almost as soon as we sit down for a Thursday afternoon coffee.

"The post-Cold War order. Peace, love, Woodstock. Everyone gets along—sure we have minor problems here and there, human rights not always so good, but there are no more border changes." After last month, he says, "that's out." Russia annexed Crimea, massed forces on Ukraine's eastern borders, and prodded "Russian speakers" to rise against the government in Kiev. Moscow also pointedly complained about the treatment of Slavic kinsmen in the Baltic states, the same charge used to justify the invasion of Ukraine.

"An aggressive, revanchist power," in the Estonian leader's words, makes the unthinkable thinkable. "We were already caught off guard with Crimea," he says. "Once you lose the predictability factor, you can't be 99% sure they won't do something." The most dramatic something would be a Russian military incursion into NATO's front-line states.


Perched alone up in eastern Baltic are Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Their fear of Moscow propelled them to become the first and only former Soviet republics to seek the refuge of NATO. But now doubts are appearing. The West has responded tepidly to the Crimean aggression. Military budgets are at historic lows as a share of NATO economies. The alliance, which marked its 65th anniversary on Friday, has never faced the test of a hot conflict with Moscow.

In this new debate over European security, Mr. Ilves plays a role out of proportion to Estonia's size (1.3 million people) and his limited constitutional powers. A tall man who recently turned 60, he has the mouth of a New Jersey pol—he grew up in Leonia—and wears the bow ties of a lapsed academic. Americans may recall his Twitter TWTR -2.07% feud two years ago over Estonia's economy with economist Paul Krugman, whom Mr. Ilves called "smug, overbearing & patronizing."

Mr. Ilves was born in Sweden to Estonian refugees who fled there after the Soviet annexation of the three Baltic states in 1940; the family subsequently moved to America when he was a boy. He first set foot on Estonian soil in his early 30s and returned for good after the Soviet collapse. Previously the country's foreign minister, he is a brash presence on the trans-Atlantic policy circuit.

To say the least, Mr. Ilves and his Baltic colleagues were outside the post-Cold War and pre-Crimea NATO mainstream. At every opportunity, the alliance had repeated that it "does not view Russia as a threat." It honored a "three nos" pledge made in the 1990s to Moscow that NATO has no need, no intention and no plans to deploy troops or nuclear weapons in any future new-member states. The 67,000 U.S. forces in Europe are based west of the Elbe River, mostly in Germany. The alliance refused for years even to draw up contingency plans to defend the Baltic states, considering that an unnecessary provocation to Moscow.

The Russian attack on Georgia in 2008 set off alarms in the Baltics, which renewed their push to strengthen their defenses. Germany vetoed them and the U.S. concurred. An American diplomat in 2009 called Estonia "paranoid" about Russia, in a confidential cable released by WikiLeaks. Since the outbreak of the Ukraine crisis, Estonian leaders have steered clear of the I-told-you-so's. "I don't get any, unfortunately, thrills out of vindication," says Mr. Ilves. "But we have been told by some of our friends, 'We did think you were paranoid and overreacting and now we think you're right.' "

Estonia's relations with Moscow were always fraught, but the security alarm bells rang only recently. In 2007, after President Ilves ordered the relocation of a Soviet war memorial in Tallinn, the country was hit by a massive cyberattack, presumably from Russia. Mr. Ilves, a champion of "E-stonia" (birthplace of Skype), calls the episode "an own goal" for Estonia and a blessing in disguise.

"We've been far ahead of everyone in terms of the Internetization of society, and we knew all along we were vulnerable," he says, adding that Estonia's allies had dismissed the country's fears of cyber's military potential as "science fiction stuff." Soon after the attack, NATO put a cyberdefense center in Tallinn.

In recent years the Baltics have watched the modernization of Russia's military up close. Unhappy with the performance of his troops in Georgia, Vladimir Putin has poured resources into the military. The Russian defense budget is set to grow 44% in the next three years and account for a fifth of all central government spending, according to Jane's Defense.

Russia has doubled the number of troops in the Baltic region since 2009, says Kaarel Kaas of Tallinn's International Center for Defense Studies, and it has focused on improving special rapid-reaction forces, long-range missiles and air-defense capabilities. Kaliningrad, a militarized Russian enclave between Poland and Lithuania, is "like a giant aircraft carrier," he says.

As NATO cut budgets and sought to reassure Russia about its peaceful intentions, Mr. Putin put his new might on show. The "Zapad" ("West") biannual military exercise that began in 2009 involved tens of thousands of troops in practice attacks on Baltic countries, culminating in a faux nuclear strike on Warsaw.

The Crimean operation was the coming-out party for Russia's modernized military. Highly professional and well-equipped special forces were the core of the lighting-quick invasion. Russia used jamming technology and cyberwarfare to neutralize the Ukrainian troops' communications. Russian soldiers mixed with local militias and evaded notice by Western military intelligence until it was all over. "The change in the way that Russia does things is quite astounding," says Mr. Ilves. "The old Finnish Winter War model of a million people coming across the border and just swamping, that's long gone."

President Ilves says the EU"response is going to be economic fundamentally," and limited by concern over the cost to business, which explains the bloc's reluctance to impose stronger sanctions on Russia. Yet at NATO, "they have woken up to the new reality." He declares Estonia "quite satisfied" with the decision by its foreign ministers this week to suspend contacts with Russia and rethink eastern defenses.

The rethinking within NATO has only begun. The U.S. and the rest of the alliance stopped short of the demands from Poland and the Baltic states to forward deploy NATO troops. Estonia managed on Thursday to get NATO's blessing to turn the brand-new Amari military airfield near Tallinn into the first NATO base in the country. This small Balt tends to be proactive. While European governments axed some $50 billion from military budgets in the last five year amid fiscal belt-tightening, Estonia is only one of four NATO allies to devote at least 2% of gross domestic product to defense, supposedly the bare minimum for security needs.

"It lessens your moral clout if you have not done what you have agreed to do," Mr. Ilves says of defense budgets. His barb hits directly at neighboring Lithuania and Latvia, which both spend less than 1% of GDP on their militaries.

To Mr. Ilves, the alliance's most urgent need is "increasing deterrence in the region." He won't get drawn into discussing a wish list, but with deliberate understatement says, "boots on the ground is kind of a good idea." The Estonians have told U.S. officials that American boots are best. The presence of U.S. soldiers in the Baltic states and Poland, the other front-line state, would become the most reliable tripwire for a NATO response to any Russian encroachment. Mr. Ilves offers a different formulation: "I wouldn't say a tripwire but a sign that we're serious here."

As many officials at NATO's Brussels headquarters admit, the Russian military could today roll over Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in hours. The countries' indefensibility was an argument made against their membership. "Berlin was never defendable," Mr. Ilves shoots back, referring to the Cold War-era. "Ever. There was no concept of defending the allied sectors of Berlin. But what defended it was the idea that if you come in, there is gonna be a whole lot of smoke and ashes elsewhere."

Even though an invasion of former Soviet satellites by Russia would confront NATO members with trying to stop a nuclear power, Mr. Ilves says he has been assured that the alliance's Article 5—a pledge to regard an attack on any member as an attack on all—isn't in danger of being ignored or watered down. "In terms of Article 5 coming into force," he says, "even when we don't ask, we've reassured at the highest levels."

Europeans farther away from Russia are reluctant to confront Mr. Putin, and Barack Obama has not been interested in Europe for most of his presidency. That raises a question: What if NATO balked? Then "everyone in NATO comes under existential threat," Mr. Ilves says. "Then every country is on its own. As soon as that happens NATO no longer exists as an alliance. It's simple."

Yet there's perhaps no greater Putin fantasy than the destruction of NATO, and this would be the biggest called bluff in military history. A robust forward deployment to NATO's eastern front lines is to its proponents the best way to make the Kremlin think twice before trying.

The Estonian president refuses to read Vladimir Putin's mind. He says NATO should arm Ukraine immediately with defensive weapons to deter any further incursions. Although the aggressive rhetoric from Moscow went down a notch this week, "the directions don't look good," Mr. Ilves says. Russian propaganda and some 50,000 troops along Ukraine's eastern border are on a war footing.

"But I would say in the West 'hope springs eternal.' " Mr. Ilves invokes Alexander Pope in a subtle parting jab at his allies' blinkered view of their giant eastern neighbor.

Mr. Kaminski is a member of the Journal's editorial board.