Kyiv and its allies scramble to defend Ukraine from the West’s right wing
(Originally published July 5 in “What in the World“) As Democrats scramble to find a candidate who can beat Donald Trump, America’s European allies are scurrying to Trump-proof weapons flows to Ukraine.
The 32 members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization are due to hold a summit in Washington next week, where they’ll get a first-hand look at U.S. President Joe Biden since his disastrous performance in last week’s presidential campaign debate with Trump. Increasingly fearful of a victory by Trump, who has threatened to pull the U.S. out of NATO, the alliance’s members want to ensure that a Trump presidency wouldn’t spell the effective surrender of Ukraine to Russia’s 2022 invasion.
The Biden Administration is trying to funnel as many weapons to Ukraine as it can. On Wednesday, it approved the shipment of more missiles for Ukraine’s Patriot air-defense batteries, along with a host of other ammunition. Some of the weapons will come from the Pentagon’s existing arsenal; others will be bought using funds earmarked for Ukraine.
But NATO has resisted calls from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to give it immediate membership. Instead, the organization plans to station a permanent civilian employee in Kyiv, according to The Wall Street Journal. Perhaps more significantly, it will also create a 700-person team in Germany to take over much of the job of coordinating weapons supplies to Ukraine from the U.S. military, as well as training of Ukrainian troops. The new team, to be dubbed the NATO Security Assistance and Training for Ukraine, would still include American personnel.
The question now, however, is whether NATO—and its support for Ukraine—would survive the combination of a Trump victory in the U.S. and a victory by France’s far-right National Rally in parliamentary elections. Macron has been warning that Europe needed to become more independent of unreliable U.S. support. His decision to call snap election, ironically, has made put France’s own military support in jeopardy.
A win in France would give National Rally seats on the cabinet of President Emmanuel Macron, a staunch NATO supporter. National Rally has reportedly maintained close ties with the Kremlin. And while its likely appointment as prime minister, Jordan Bardella, has expressed support for France’s role in defending Ukraine, he has rejected escalating it in ways that Macron has suggested might be on the table.
Trump evaded questions in the debate about what he would do in Ukraine if elected, instead claiming that Russia would never have invaded had he still been President. But he has boasted repeatedly while campaigning that he could end the war in Ukraine in a day, offering no specifics. Trump also side-stepped questions in the debate about whether he would pull out of NATO.
Concerns of a rightward tilt in Washington and Paris are running so high that Germany and Poland have pledged to boost their military coordination to defend Ukraine and Europe’s eastern flank.
Ironically, it is Washington and Paris that are leading efforts to prevent war in the Middle East from spreading to Lebanon. Israel dispatched a drone Wednesday into southern Lebanon to kill a senior commander of the Iran-backed Hezbollah, which responded by launching a fusillade of missiles into northern Israel.
As Israel mops up its war against Iran-backed Hamas in Gaza, French and American diplomats fear Israel will turn its firepower on Hezbollah, perhaps drawing Iran into direct conflict in its support. On Wednesday, the Biden Administration sent its special presidential coordinator for global energy and infrastructure, who for some reason has become Biden’s go-to envoy on the escalating border conflict, to Paris to meet French diplomats. Fighting across the border has already forced most of the area’s Israeli residents to flee to Tel Aviv.
North Korea, meanwhile, said its two rocket launches Monday were actually tests of a new, 4.5-ton warhead on its Hwasong-11Da-4.5 ballistic missile. It had initially said the missiles were fired to protest military exercises over the weekend between the United States, Japan, and South Korea. Like Pyongyang’s claim last week to have successfully tested a MIRV—or multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicle—South Korea’s military said the latest tests were unsuccessful.