Guests on CNN often lament what they regard as President Trump’s excessive deference to Russian President Vladimir Putin. But not always. After all, on Wednesday, I stumbled across Paul Hockenos’ article for the network, “Europe needs a clean break from America on security.” It is a made-for-Putin fantasy that makes Trump’s kind words for the dictator look mild in comparison.
Hockenos’ article exemplifies what the Russians refer to as “useful idiot” propaganda for their cause. And for that reason alone it’s worth our assessment.
Hockenos begins by advancing Putin’s underlying strategic narrative: that Europeans and Americans should be separated from each other. Defending the latest European calls for a common defense strategy outside of NATO (an absurdly bad idea), Hockenos claims that Trump sets “no store in multilateralism or diplomacy, which has underpinned the certainties of the Atlantic alliance of the postwar decades until today.”
Wrong. The underpinning “certainties of the Atlantic alliance” are the proximate and credible provision of American military power alongside NATO member state military power. Trump’s occasional equivocation on NATO’s article five mutual defense commitment and his personal deference to Putin are troubling, but they are balanced by Trump’s strengthening of NATO capability. And that capability is what matters most in deterring Russian aggression and other international challenges to the liberal order.
Of course, Hockenos sees things differently. With words that would surely make Putin shiver with deight, he argues that Europeans are too reliant on NATO and that “there is no evidence that Moscow wants to attack the [European Union].” He laments that “NATO has become a fig leaf, a relic of the East-West conflict that ended over 25 years ago. A much bolder and more realistic vision would be to scrap it and create a new security architecture for the Atlantic’s continents.”
This ignores ongoing Russian aggression from Scandinavia to Salisbury to Syria to Ukraine to the Atlantic. “The conflict” mentioned here is not yet “ended,” and thus NATO remains of critical importance.
“Europe,” Hockenos goes on, “has to sit down and fundamentally reappraise today’s security risks rather than accept those presented by the U.S. In contrast to the Cold War years, it’s not a clearly defined enemy state or bloc that poses the greatest threat, but rather the likes of climate change, resource shortages, global inequality and extremist ideologies….[T]he billions that the Europeans want to spend on weapons systems could be much better spent or climate protection, climate adaption measures in the developing world and the worldwide expansion of renewable energy.”
Alongside other nutty ideas like banning combat drones and getting the Saudis and Iran to sign up to a mutual defense alliance (L.O.L), Hockenos also says that “Ukraine could be fashioned as a bridge between Western and Eastern Europe.” This is, of course, precisely what the Russians have been trying to make it with their illegal invasion.
CNN might think it leads with skeptical coverage of Putin, but by allowing Hockenos to call for European appeasement under the veil of security strategy, it just did the opposite.
