This is Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality—my attempt to make myself, and all of you out there in SubStackLand, smarter by writing where I have Value Above Replacement and shutting up where I do not… Three Significant Military Powers on the European Continent?: Muscovy 'Rus, But Also an "Inner Europe" and the "Viking Alliance"Muscovy ‘Rus, in military affairs, punches well above its relative economic weight—plus it has nuclear weapons. And NATO is no longer a thing—The Holy One Who Is alone knows what bizarre s***show...
Muscovy ‘Rus, in military affairs, punches well above its relative economic weight—plus it has nuclear weapons. And NATO is no longer a thing—The Holy One Who Is alone knows what bizarre s***show Trump would do if some balloon were to actually go up, and no strategic posture that relies on NATO for anything is now admissible. So what to do? Well, overmighty rogue powers call forth balancing alliances. Right now we can see two in the prospect of forming: call them “Inner Europe” and the “Viking Alliance” as military powers that may well solidify over the next half decade or so…
I do seriously and sincerely hope that this is truly what is now going on:
There are also strong signs of what I have been calling the Viking Alliance—possibly Eire, the UK, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Ukraine, with ancillaries Poland (and Roumania?) which knows that if Ukraine falls Putin is coming for them next, and Germany eager to provide financial and logistical support even if not willing to move its own forces without France, Italy, and Spain. In rough terms: each of “Inner Europe” and the “Viking Alliance” would seriously outweigh Russia in conventional resources. The US right now spends about $1 trillion a year on defense, and dominates in long-range airlift, tankers, C4ISR, precision strike, and blue-water navy. Muscovy ‘Rus spends around $150 billion,, with its very large substantially legacy land forces, artillery, and a sizable (though aging) air and naval fleet. It’s army is now well-bloodied, but most of the people who have seen the elephant are dead or maimed—the attrition WWI style-assaults impose upon a force means that little of its combat experience becomes force-level learning. Inner Europe spends $300 billion a year—more than all of the ex-US ex-China world put together, with a million active-duty and a million reserve-duty soldiers. Its mature defense industries (MBDA, KNDS, Naval Group, Leonardo, etc.) are very capable of producing advanced kit and munitions, if political and budgetary spigots stay open. The Viking Alliance ex-Ukraine spends about $150 billion a year, with Ukraine currently at $70 billion. The Viking Alliance ex-Ukraine has 300 thousand active-duty soldiers, with two million reservists. Ukraine now has a million-man well-blodied army: the largest real combat-experienced land force in Europe right now, with enormous artillery, drone, and EW learning-by-doing, but heavily dependent on external ammunition and financial support. The raw balance of conventional power in Europe vis-à-vis Muscovy ‘Rus thus looks quite favorable—conditional on at least one of the coalitions being more than talking shops, and on the political will to rapidly turn budgets and industrial policy into actual deployable formations. Washington’s commitment to NATO under Trump is contingent and random rather than automatic. Right now Trump-world’s line is: decadent Europeans, freeloading on American protection, nagging us about values while refusing to pay for their own defense. That story was largely false even before Ukraine, but truthy enough to be politically usable. But the emergence of an Inner Europe and of the Viking Alliance would flip the optics completely. Trump personally wants very much to align with Putin, or at least undermine the NATO alliance. But he still operates inside a political system where the Pentagon, State, and intel community will leak and lobby relentlessly if the U.S. is visibly abandoning allies under fire, even the key Trump-enablers in Congress are highly sensitive to “America is weak / America is unreliable” narratives, and business and media elites dislike anything that makes the U.S. look like a faithless partner. Appeasing or aligning with Putin then becomes not “disengaging from NATO Brussels bureaucrats”, but siding with aggressors against democracies willingly spending blood for freedom. Isolationist rhetoric polls just OK, until it is juxtaposed with allies actually fighting and dying under a democracy-vs-autocracy frame. Inner Europe and a Viking Alliance would also shift the baseline of what “normal” allied behavior looks like: Forward deployments and joint ops (Arctic Endurance, Baltic Sentry, brigades in the Baltics/Poland) would become routine, some of them under NATO aegis with U.S. forces integrated into planning, logistics, comms. And legal and contractual commitments—bilateral security guarantees to Ukraine, industrial co-production agreements, basing and training MOUs—would multiply. Thus for Trump to “tilt to Putin” would mean actively disrupt existing cooperation, not merely fail to show up. Then domestic losers and loud critics would support the mini-lateral European formations and decisions. Put differently: Inner Europe and the Viking Alliance would not stop Trump from wanting to align with Putin. What they would is make that desire:
That narrows the corridor in which a pro‑Putin Trump can move without triggering a domestic and allied backlash that even he would find hard to ride out. If reading this gets you Value Above Replacement, then become a free subscriber to this newsletter. And forward it! And if your VAR from this newsletter is in the three digits or more each year, please become a paid subscriber! I am trying to make you readers—and myself—smarter. Please tell me if I succeed, or how I fail…##three-significant-military-powers-on-the-european-continent-muscovy-rus-but-also-an-inner-europe-and-the-viking-alliance |
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