The Unbearable Weirdness of Trumpism

At least it's entertaining, I guess.

Foreign Interference, Coercion, and Unseemly Collaborations

I’m tied up with several inquiries and appointments, as I mentioned yesterday, so I’m especially pleased to present Sean Maloney, again, in a guest post below, arising more or less from this: Donald Trump Pulling US Troops From Europe in Blow to NATO Allies: Report.

Timely, given this story, which is not out of some 1960s era television sci-fi episode, but is real-world news: France has discussed with Denmark the possibility of deploying troops to Greenland in response to the possibility of the United States annexing the island. That’s how weird the Trump Epoch is.

Not Donald Trump’s latest cabinet picks. They’re characters in a scene from the Twilight Zone.

NATO’s foundational premise involves the defence of its member states against hostile aggression from outside the alliance. Canada’s foundational defence arrangements, not least like NORAD, presumes a joint Canadian-American defence of the continent from external threats.

As anyone familiar with my work over the past 15 years or so will be aware, the greatest threat to Canadian sovereignty that I’ve had my eye on is the threat posed by the advanced operations of the United Front Work Department, run by the state-capitalist torture state in Beijing. In the matter of that threat, as often as not, the call was coming from inside the house, primarily from Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party.

And now we have to worry about whether and when the Trump administration will cripple Canada’s economy, and for what purpose, exactly, and we’ve never been in a weaker position to deal with aggravations like these.

The most entertaining thing about Trump calling Justin Trudeau the “Governor of the 51st state” is that for the past decade he’s been acting exactly like one. I can’t think of a single avant-garde sanctuary-state fad or fashionable frenzy that he hasn’t championed.

The knee-takings, the “long overdue reckonings,” the 2SLGBTQI+ification of the federal bureaucracy and its profligate granting agencies, the Defence Deparment think-pieces about the potential for “hidden violence” in Canada’s planned moon mission and its inattention to gender, race, class, ability, astrology. . .

I’m exhausted with it, I’m otherwise tied up, and besides, I’m not in the mood.

‘She was the last of them.’

It was two years ago today that my ma made her way to Tir Na Nog. My Mother The Spy, as I used to call her. Devout Catholic, Nazi Hunter, nanny to her several “Jewish children,” Avon Lady, Bletchley Girl, the matriarch of our tribe. Here’s Marsha Liederman’s tribute to her in the Globe and Mail.

I was oblivious to the imminent anniversary of her death until yesterday. For some reason I found myself humming lines from the Song of Mweenish, and I didn’t know why. Bring me west to Muínis, to the place where I will be mourned aloud; The lights will be on the dunes, and I will not be lonely there. And then I remembered.

But enough of that. Here’s my friend the professor Sean Maloney again. A military historian, Sean specializes in strategic nuclear issues and he’s the author of the forthcoming book, The Cool War: Nuclear Forces, Signaling, and the Russo-Ukrainian War, 2014-2022.

Chicken Little Runs for the Bunker. How I Learned to Start Worrying and Love The Bomb.

by Sean M. Maloney

I very briefly mulled calling this Deterrence for Dummies. That would be insulting and wrong. You are not dummies, far from it and I am a hyperspecialized commentator that works in an environment with its own language and assumptions and continuously struggles to find that middle ground where we all get it.

Last Saturday I experienced a cold sweat that I have not had since October 1983, when I realized after watching The Day After that my high school was 812 meters from the U.S. Department of Energy campus where they design nuclear weapons. Last Saturday a friend slipped me a note that laid out the proposed cuts to U.S. conventional forces in Europe. They are broad and deep.

But why should this lead to a runaway train of anxiety and fear? To be honest, I let it do so temporarily because I wanted to see what the worst case scenario could be and then walk back from there.

Forget the public output of the formal American nuclear strategists of the Eisenhower and Kennedy era. Dr. Strangelove tells us: “Deterrence is the art of producing, in the mind of the enemy, the FEAR to attack.” This is the basis of deterrence. The question is how we get there and make it credibly work over time.

As we learned during the course of the 40-year Cold War (the war hardly anybody teaches in Canada), deterrence is based on an optimal combination of conventional forces (tanks, artillery, soldiers, helicopters, airplanes), ‘theatre’ or ‘intermediate’ nuclear forces (missiles with nuclear warheads and aircraft with nuclear bombs that operate within the boundaries of Europe and cannot hit North America), and ;strategic’ nuclear forces (intercontinental ballistic missiles or ICBMs; submarines carrying the same; stealth bombers with cruise and hypersonic missiles).

Stability is dependent on the belief that these forces can be used credibly to prevail if someone starts something at any of the three levels of conflict.

Think of it as nuclear Jenga.

If you remove enough forces from one or two levels this introduces uncertainty and reduction of credibility. That allows an aggressor to have the initiative and determine what level they want to fight at. You take away Ukraine’s nuclear weapons, you dither about allowing it to join a defensive alliance that already has a credible deterrent system, you restructure and retrain the army to do UN peacekeeping, and guess what: you get the Russian invasion of 2014 and by extension, the events of 2022.

The word is that the Trump Administration is going to cut 20,000 out of 65,000 troops deployed to Europe. Other word is that the reinforcements that are kept in the United States to be deployed to Europe in the event of a crisis will also be cut. This includes ten mechanized brigades (about 45,000 troops), two attack helicopter brigades and the entire A-10 Warthog tank buster aircraft force.

So the question is: are the European and Canadian forces deployed in Europe enough of a conventional deterrent if Putin makes a play for the Baltics, or makes threats against Denmark or Poland because of their support for Ukraine? By the way: Putin has theatre nuclear forces of his own in the form of Iskander missiles. Some of these are in the Kaliningrad enclave with flight times of five minutes to targets in Western Europe, with more positioned south of St Petersburg.

Well, you say, we have theatre nuclear forces that we can use to cover off their intermediate nuclear forces and also backfill our shortage of conventional firepower on the battlefield. Surely Vlad would not escalate because of the existence of NATO’s Dual Capable Aircraft theatre nuclear weapons force.

Oh wait. Those German Luftwaffe Tornado bombers carry. . .American B61 nuclear bombs. Trump at Davos the other day came across as a champion of nuclear disarmament. What if he pulls out the B61s, just. . .because?

So the deterrent calculation potentially has a reduction in NATO conventional forces, and a reduction in NATO theatre nuclear forces, neither of which can be built back up to Cold War levels for maybe a decade.

Aha! Wait! We can coerce Vlad with the independent British and French nuclear deterrents! Each country has four submarines that each carry sixteen ballistic missiles! He won’t dare try to take on our depleted conventional and non-existent theatre forces! We’ll threaten him with Armageddon if he takes one inch of NATO territory!

Hmmm. . .

Welcome to the Twilight Zone.

The British Vanguards carry American Trident II ballistic missiles with British nuclear warheads. Well, what if, in the name of disarmament, Trump decides to sacrifice the Trident Agreement? No more “independent” British deterrent. That leaves Europe with four Triumphant-class ballistic missiles submarines. Each sub carries 16 missiles with six to ten warheads each. With four subs, one is in refit, one is preparing to enter refit, one is preparing for patrol, and one is on patrol.

So. Europe’s deterrent potential rests on one sub with 96 or 160 nukes. Is that enough nuclear weapons to coerce Vlad? Well, he has, as of yesterday, an estimated 1710 deployed warheads based in missiles, bombers, and subs.

Can France’s one sub generate enough potential damage against Russia in order to deter Vlad? That depends. Moscow has an anti-ballistic missile system called Gorgon. Paris does not. London does not. Can French nujes make it through those defences? There are 68 active Russian launchers with 16 missiles each. . . that’s 1,088 interceptors, so ten interceptors per French warhead.

Probably not enough of them. Vlad, meanwhile, is orbiting over Siberia in his Il-96-300PU Doomsday Plane, perhaps headed for his underground Austin Powers-like survival pad north of Ufa.

Vlad installs puppet regimes throughout Europe and achieves his Eurasian objectives. Worst case. I wake up from my fever dream, pour myself a Scotch and light up a cigar. I hear the Twilight Zone theme music on the TV.