GERMANY, THE RE-ENGINEERED ALLY Part 2: Everything is broken By Axel Brot
decapitation" (ie, destroying selectively the netspace of military command and
control as well as its fallback operations, plus regime and elite continuity
functions).
In order to get a better understanding of its present strategic predicament,
the Russian military has even begun to approach, very gingerly, the causes for
the erosion of Soviet deterrence in the 1980s, especially the reasons why it
could not react by increasing its force readiness to what it perceived as
indications
of Anglo-American maneuvering towards war.
But whatever the scenarios for the future or the probings of the past, Russia
as well as China are for the foreseeable future much too weak to compete
militarily at eye level with the West. Both have to struggle uphill just to
make their militaries credible defenders of the integrity of the state. And
there is almost no military backup for the political task of preventing a
further deterioration of their strategic environment. They can neither rely on
their ability to deflect the US from efforts to control it nor could they
compete for control without mortgaging the survival of the state.
It is the paucity of their military and political choices that drives them
together; but the need to avoid the hair trigger of American confrontation
renders an explicit military alliance impractical. The Russians know it, the
Chinese know it. And strategy-minded Americans count on the fact that a thin
mattress makes bad bedfellows. But they also know that American politics are
not strategy-minded; they generate their own stimuli for action.
After the Russian 1990s - and the Chinese 149 years after 1840 - no illusions
are possible about the fate either of them should the West again gain control
over their polities. This plus their weakness, however, should assist not only
the credibility of a defensive nuclear posture but also give the Europeans or
the Japanese reasons to think about the consequences of strategic desperation.
Below this threshold, though, it is all coercive bargaining - be it under the
guise of common interests or in the open, "jump, or else". There are no common
interests, there is just jockeying for position and deferred hostility.
When Henry Kissinger and Yevgeny Primakov established their joint working-group
of American and Russian elder statesmen to deal with "the threat of nuclear
terrorism and proliferation" (as Kissinger described it), there is, therefore,
a subtext: "Work with us regarding Iran (or the eventual "securing" of
Pakistani nuclear warheads) because the first instance of nuclear terrorism
could take place in Russia." One does not need to be of a wildly paranoid cast
of mind to see the possibilities, eg, in view of the very close relations the
British maintain with the Chechen resistance, and the dozens of tons of Soviet
warhead material still waiting to be reworked into nuclear fuel rods.
The point is, there is no need for even an implied specific message. The
awareness of so many fingers on so many operational triggers is quite
sufficient for the prudent assumption: "What is thinkable, is possible; what is
possible will happen, sometime, somewhere." In the meantime, one has to act as
if some sort of reason and predictability might yet return to the exercise of
American power.
Tomorrow, Part 3: Hoisting the American flag. The German educated
middle classes, still hung over from their half century of ideological debauche
and from Germany's role as a genocidal ogre take great satisfaction in their
country's reputation as a mostly harmless global social worker. They are
reluctant to subscribe to an ideology of global mayhem and a "defense of
Western values". But the German media are working overtime to change their
minds.
Axel Brot is the pen name for a German defense analyst and former
intelligence officer.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
