NATO, without the US, can stand up to Russia

Some time back, my regular readers may recall, there was a report in the  Sunday Times about a Russian spy in the Dáil. It created a bit of a furore at the time and I did a bit of a pi** take around the necessity for any Russian scare. There was not, that I could see, any real danger of a Russian invasion. Given the rise in popularity of the Chinese take away, there was, it seemed to me, far more danger of a Chinese invasion 

But, as we can see when it comes to international politics it is important to have a bogeyman to put a scare up people. Even in post-Catholic Ireland, it is convenient to point the finger at the Russians. After all, they are communists and don’t espouse the same liberal views that we in our esteemed western democracy hold. 

The Western media, and included in that are the unquestioning Irish media, play a vital role in preserving the myth of the honest, moral, good, honourable and liberal western democracies- democracies that would never contemplate doing anything wrong even as it dictates and governs in the interests of the democratic system at the expense of weaker systems.

In recent years we have had a torrent of sightings of Russian submarines off the Irish coast and there has been some hyperventilating about a plot by the Russians to cut the cables that carry important communications highways (I know, something of an oxymoron considering it’s an undersea cable) between Ireland/Europe and the US and Canada. As a result of the scare, the Irish taxpayer has been duped into spending increased funding for military defence equipment to protect these cables. The paranoia about the Russian submarines extends to any sighting of a Russian trawler fishing quite openly and legally in international waters or indeed any Russian flagged vessel that might be plying the Atlantic waters between here and the US or South America.

And that’s not to mention any blockade busting vessel that might be carrying Venezuelan oil out of reach of the thieving US oil companies. The most recent sighting of an embargo busting vessel resulted in the US air force, ably assisted by the RAF, breaching Irish air space without permission, or so it would seem in the absence of any definitive comment from our Minister for Defence. Perhaps Helen McEntee will get around to answering the question in the not too distant future.

It is no harm to bear in mind that when it comes to submarine manoeuvres in Irish waters we don’t have to look to the Urals for wrongdoers. We can just look at our neighbours across the Irish Sea. British submarines have been responsible for the sinking of a number of Irish trawlers in the past decades and indeed the loss of life of a number of Irish fishermen. To their credit the Brits have owned up to some of the submarine incidents, though not all.

Now, our good friend the US President, Mr Donald Trump, is also playing the Russian bogeyman card. Although he is on friendly speaking terms with his Russian counterpart, Mr Putin, Trump is using the Russian “threat” to justify his quest to annex Greenland. Greenland, as we have come to know in recent times, has a population of less than 100,000 people and is independent of but allied constitutionally to Denmark.

Greenlanders have been living quite happily under the existing arrangements and were not posing a threat to anybody, until Mr Trump came along to take over their rare earth minerals and, no doubt, the oil that has yet to be quantified. But, not even the US President could just bulldoze Greenland into submission without some pretext. So he invented the Russian threat.

And he threw in the Chinese threat for good measure. The last four years as Russia sought to conquer Ukraine (something the Russians have never aspired to!) have shown that the Russian military machine is something less than all-powerful and is certainly not anything that the US has to fear. So the Chinese are thrown into the equation. Add to that, the fact of global warming and the Arctic melting to open up new shipping lanes across the top of the world and we have that convergence of calamities that have convinced Mr Trump that his almighty military needs the protection of a “golden dome” and thus Greenland (and Canada?) must be sacrificed.

Any person with a modicum of common sense can see through the Trump charade. But until very recently no country and nobody has had the gumption to call him out. He has been allowed by a bunch of spineless European leaders, including the Coalition of the Willing, to ride roughshod over the EU and dictate trade terms to almost every country in the world. Fair play the Chinese stood up to him and found that when the bully was checked he soon backed down.

Mr Trump has to be given credit for intervening, not before time, to prevent the genocide in Gaza. He could have and should have called off Netanyahu’s dogs of war much earlier but the Israelis are not to be messed with and he had to choose his moment carefully. When the rest of the world decided that enough was enough in terms of the loss of life and destruction in Gaza, Trump did act and told Netanyahu to take a step back. The respite for the Palestinians is welcome and while the Israeli killing has not stopped it has been reduced considerably. 

In terms of Palestine it is a case of something done but a lot to do and unfortunately Mr Trump and the EU/NATO have taken their eye off the ball to concentrate on the Russian/Chinese threat in the far north. I appreciate that sensible people (I list myself amongst them) find it difficult to have any respect for Mr Trump but, like him or loathe him, he has to be given credit for his efforts to bring Netanyahu to heel and also to stop the killing in Ukraine.

In Ukraine, Mr Trump has discovered that bringing an end to war is not a simple matter of waving his peace wand (not to mention his ridiculous shared Nobel Peace Prize). He must also have discovered that Russia’s military might is hardly something to be greatly feared and is not something that the world’s most powerful, according to Trump, US military needs to fear. The problem with that discovery is that it undermines his Russia bogeyman argument. The reality is that the US does not need to take over Greenland, except, of course, for its rare earth minerals and oil.

Now, perhaps the EU might also learn that it does not have a lot to fear from a Russia that has been unable to extract itself from the quagmire of eastern Ukraine. NATO, without the US, can stand on its own two feet and take on Russia in the highly unlikely event that Russia launches a takeover of the EU. As the EU sought to appease Mr Trump, our Taoiseach played a blinder by saying nothing to upset Mr Trump while appealing for dialogue as the way forward.

Perhaps Micheál might appeal to Russia and Ukraine to come to the table and hammer out their remaining differences. He would, of course, have to first talk to Ms von der Leyen and get her to see the value of talking rather than warring. He would have to convince France, Germany, Spain, Poland and others that it would make more sense to talk to the Russians rather than hyping up the threats, imaginary or otherwise, of Russia’s imperial ambitions.

It could be that Russia’s imperial ambitions are no more a danger to Europe or the world than Mr Trump’s.