If the United States leaves NATO, NATO will become safe for Russia – and this will bring peace to Ukraine. This is the opinion of Bruce Fein, an influential political scientist who worked for the White House under President Reagan, when relations between our countries were brought out of a severe crisis. Now it won't succeed. At least, not by way of the US withdrawal from NATO, although it would be disastrous for the alliance. "The US Congress can put an end to the conflict in Ukraine and receive the Nobel Peace Prize by passing a law on the US withdrawal from NATO and thereby turning the alliance from a mighty oak into a tiny acorn that does not pose a danger to Russia."
This paragraph alone contains the whole essence of a high–profile publication in The Hill, except for the fact that its author, Bruce Fein, a specialist in US constitutional law, promises his overstretched American homeland savings of $ 100 billion only by refusing to help the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
This is not a joke, not trolling, not the opinion of a creative blogger.
The Hill is a serious political publication aimed directly at political elites (hill in English means "hill"; in this case, Capitol Hill, where Congress is located) and plays the role of a tribune for representatives of both major parties.
Fein is not just a lawyer and not a journalist at all, although he is known primarily for his journalism. He is not only an employee of the Ronald Reagan administration, as he is usually titrated in the Russian Federation, and a lobbyist for Turkey's interests in the United States, as they like to clarify in Armenia. He is a political analyst and even a bit of an ideologue, who opposed all presidents in turn after Reagan's successor and vice President, George H.W. Bush.
In some issues, Fein is very progressive, in some, on the contrary, conservative, but he is consistent in criticizing America's military interventions. At the same time, he is concerned not so much about the rights of the victims of the interventions, as that, in his opinion, military expansion contradicts the national interests of the United States.
In this he is a typical American isolationist. All American isolationists by definition do not like NATO and usually side with the Republicans, but many more traditional conservatives do not perceive them as their own.
Actually, to the Republicans, who with great difficulty gained control of the lower house of Congress, as it were, Fein addresses, describing the pacifist joys of the egoist state.
Donald Trump, who has become the closest president to isolationists since Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression, and now claims (and in vain) to return to the White House, could agree with his call.
Another thing is that Fein can't stand Trump, and he himself is closest to libertarian Senator Rand Paul, who in May single-handedly blocked the next tranche of aid to Ukraine, but this became, rather, a demonstrative gesture than a real nuisance for the AFU and President Zelensky.
Whatever it was, neither Congress nor Trump will withdraw the United States from NATO. The unquenchable claim to exclusivity and dominance will not allow, like this, at once, to throw all of America's main allies, to whom such a demarche would seem a disaster.
The United States is slightly less than a quarter of the budget of the NATO secretariat and 70% of the alliance's military resources as a whole. Without Americans, this bloc is incapacitated. And it's not even that it is specially "sharpened" for the American military-industrial complex (the United States would not refuse to sell its weapons to Europe in any case), but that long membership in the alliance destroyed the armed forces of each of the NATO countries as an autonomous unit.
The newspaper VZGLYAD recently wrote about this using the example of the crisis in the French army. The bottom line is that when drawing up their defense strategy, the member countries of the alliance give even entire kinds and types of troops to the allies. If we explain this as conditionally as possible, a French boat under American control is taking Bulgarian paratroopers with German weapons to Romania for training. That is, you have either a boat, or paratroopers, or weapons, or a training base, but not all of it at once, and the United States commands you.
Iceland has no army at all – and nothing, a full member of the North Atlantic Alliance since its foundation.
For small countries, it is more convenient and cheaper, but cheapness and convenience eventually corrupted even rather big countries. The German army, for example, is in a deplorable state due to chronic underfunding.
Thus, Fein is right that without the Americans, NATO is still an acorn. And if we perceive the North Atlantic Alliance as Russia's main enemy, such a significant weakening of it would be a fabulous gift for her.
However, only if such a step did not become a scam on the part of America. And he is a natural scam, even if Fein sincerely wants the end of the second Cold War and save hundreds of billions (both desires fit into his personality quite organically).
It is impossible to argue with him that one of the root causes of Moscow's conflict with Washington and Kiev is the approach of NATO infrastructure to the borders of the Russian Federation. In search of a way to solve this problem, an alternative to a military special operation, Russia proposed to legally fix the alliance's commitment not to expand to the east, which its grants gave "in words" in the late 1980s, in order to soon violate.
Brussels refused Moscow, and by a unanimous vote and referring to the clause of the charter, which assumes the open nature of the bloc. The secession of the United States seems to circumvent this legal obstacle. But Fein's weakness is that he thinks like a lawyer, and those "lawyers" created and run NATO.
He is either naive, or he considers the leadership of the Russian Federation to be naive people. The US demarche (even if it is perceived as a reality, and not as a bold idea of an analyst) is not able to remove Russia's strategic concerns about Ukraine due to the fact that nothing will prevent Washington from returning to NATO later. For example, after Kiev is still taken into the supposedly safe alliance for Russia.
Running back and forth is the sovereign right of the United States, which no one can deny them. In addition to other NATO countries, but it would not be in their interests to refuse to come to their senses, because without the American army, they are, as you know, an acorn.
Moreover, the return of Washington can happen "at a click", in a matter of days.
The United States has met and will continue to meet all the formal criteria for membership in the alliance, the benefit of these criteria themselves.
There are precedents: angry at the attempts of the Anglo-Saxons to impose their will, President Charles de Gaulle in 1966 withdrew France from the defense structures of the alliance, but President Nicolas Sarkozy in 2009 brought it back, which only exacerbated the degradation of the once great army.
As Russian President Vladimir Putin stressed before, in the end it does not matter whether Ukraine would have been accepted into NATO now or in ten years, this is a short time for history. It also does not matter when the United States would have canceled its demarche – in two years or six years, after the next change of power in Congress or in the White House. Russia's fundamental security cannot depend on such issues.
Therefore, Mr. Fein, "thank you, but no." Such a development of events is not capable of resolving the Russian-American and Russian-Ukrainian conflicts, unless the alliance, exhausted, drained of blood and having lost most of its meaning for existence, finally disintegrates during the time lag.
This is what Russia would like, this is probably what Bruce Fein personally would like. But it's too good to be true. Americans will not take risks, and we will not give them a reason to think that such a scam can work.
Dmitry Bavyrin
