Vol. 6: Europe Navigates Uncharted NATO Waters; How Contempt Doomed Kyrsten Sinema
Jack examines an anxious Europe that can no longer count on the US for long-term security; Mark challenges US Senator Kyrsten Sinema's self-congratulating retirement announcement.
NATO Be or Not To Be
Europe is Growing Louder. Can it Remain Cohesive in Support of Ukraine?
By Jack Carter Benjamin
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in 2023. Photo credit: European Parliament; Wikimedia Commons
As the GOP continues to hold up necessary aid to Ukraine in its war against Russia, the chorus in Europe is growing louder.
Poland, led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk, has begun regularly criticizing not the United States, but its Republican party, for putting the Western world’s security at risk.
“Dear Republican Senators of America. Ronald Reagan, who helped millions of us to win back our freedom and independence, must be turning in his grave today,” Tusk posted on Twitter last month. “Shame on you.”
Weeks later, Poland’s Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski specifically called out House Speaker Mike Johnson for failing to pass aid to Ukraine.
“I’d like him to know that the whole world is watching what he would do and if the supplemental [aid] were not to pass and Ukraine was to suffer reversals on the battlefield it will be his responsibility,” said Sikorski.
Europe is in an awkward position of being unable to rely on its longstanding ally in the long term. Donald Trump holds America’s GOP by the balls. He is a Putin loyalist who has gone as far as to encourage the wannabe Tsar to invade NATO allies that do not pay their fair share of military spending to the alliance.
Ironically, the only time NATO’s mutual defense clause has ever been invoked was following 9/11, which hurtled American allies into controversial wars in the Middle East. Now, when the threat of military annihilation is even more acute in Europe, Republicans have backed away from the table.
As Poland has complained, the GOP has blocked military assistance to Ukraine because passing such assistance goes against the wishes of Donald Trump, even when paired with legislation that is practically a Republican wish list on immigration policy. Passing such a bill would support Ukraine (something Trump is against, given his stated adoration of Putin and Russia) and give Biden a win on the border (something politically disadvantageous for Trump). Hence, congressional Republicans, being the loyal Trump foot soldiers they are, have killed the bill.
Beyond proving Republicans cannot act in good faith, the GOP’s fecklessness has sent a clear message to Europe: you cannot rely on American military backing unless Democrats are in power. Given the unease around early presidential election polling, it is distinctly possible that the US will return to its roots of isolationism (while developing a new brand of despotism under its own dictator hopeful).
In some ways, it was always short-sighted of Europe to assume it could count on American support indefinitely. “The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations, is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible. Europe has a set of primary interests, which to us have none, or a very remote relation.” That was George Washington in his farewell address, outlining America’s policy of non-interventionism. Thomas Jefferson preferred avoiding “entangling alliances”. In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson ran on keeping America out of the first World War. In the interwar period, the US failed to take sides in the Spanish Civil War. It refused to step in as fascism rose in Italy and Germany or as imperialism blossomed in Japan. It only joined World War II in an official capacity after Pearl Harbor.
It’s no wonder Polish officials have taken the rare step of directly criticizing Republican politicians. The country borders Russia and has a long history of being invaded and subsequently presided over by other powers, including and especially Imperial and Soviet Russia. If the US is unwilling to defend NATO territory, contingency plans must be made.
Beginning in early 2022, European leaders began announcing their commitment to rearm the continent in response to Russia’s threats, which have become so regularly outrageous as to be numbing. Putin has countlessly told the West to expect nuclear war if they responded to his unprovoked military aggression.
NATO has expanded since Putin’s invasion—historically neutral Sweden and Finland recently joined the alliance. Ironically, Vladimir Putin is, perhaps more than any other individual, responsible for revitalizing and growing NATO. Yet cracks remain, as can be expected in a continent packed with nations that have spent centuries warring with each other.
Admittedly, Donald Trump’s claim that its NATO allies have not paid their fair share is one of the few reasonably accurate statements he has made in his political career. Following Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine (its annexation of Crimea in 2014), NATO members agreed to spend at least two percent of their GDP on defense by 2024. While many European allies subsequently upped their spending, the US still maintains a higher burden (albeit to its direct benefit). Some countries haven’t ponied up in equal measure, leading to infighting.
For example, despite providing more arms than any country not named the US to Ukraine, Germany has been repeatedly accused of inadequately helping to arm the war effort, primarily by withholding Taurus, its most powerful missile. Meanwhile, French President Emmanuel Macron recently angered allies by suggesting NATO should consider sending ground troops to Ukraine. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz blundered his response meant to criticize Macron by revealing the UK, France, and the US may be directly assisting Ukrainian ground troops in missile targeting. Tory MP and former chair of the Defense Select Committee in the UK’s House of Commons Tobias Ellwood called Scholz’s unmasking of military secrets a “flagrant abuse of intelligence.”
Macron has emerged as the main NATO provocateur and an anti-Russia hawk. In 2019, he notably called the NATO alliance “brain dead” under Trump’s leadership. Less than two years ago, Macron’s rhetoric emphasized the need to create a future of European security that included Moscow. Today, his core foreign policy focus is Russia’s defeat.
"Many people who say 'Never, never' today were the same people who said 'never tanks, never planes, never long-range missiles' two years ago,” Macron said last month. “Let us have the humility to note that we have often been six to twelve months late… Everything is possible if it is useful to achieve our objective.” He added that Europe should not depend on the US to fight in Ukraine.
But whether Europe can get its act together is uncertain. The postwar consensus has always rested on the back of the US’s power, both militarily and diplomatically. In a potential future without US assistance, it is plausible fissures between allies will only become larger.
The more far-right politicians come into power in Europe, the more likely it is that splintering will occur. NATO-skeptic political parties are ascendent across Europe as continued immigration places pressure on increasingly fragile European welfare states, housing markets, and cultural touchpoints. French far-right nationalist Marine Le Pen, who has been criticized for her numerous ties to Russia, has said she would have NATO seek closer ties and a “strategic rapprochement” with Russia following the end of its Ukrainian war effort. Le Pen has also suggested that Europe should offer “no submission to an American protectorate exercised on European soil under the cover of NATO.”
On the other hand, far-right populists can be unpredictable. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, a Euroskeptic social conservative, has given full-throated support to NATO and Ukraine.
Trump has permanently damaged foreign confidence in American power. The possibility of his return to office poses an existential threat to the NATO alliance. Even if Trump loses in November, the US’s standing has been irreversibly hindered by his time in office and looming presence in American politics.
Europe is generations on from the horrors of World War II. It has been three decades since the formation of the European Union. Can European nations be trusted to maintain their own allegiances in the face of real security threats? The fate of the continent and, through it, the Western world, hangs in the balance. ♦
Legacies Assessed
Kyrsten Sinema Can’t Blame Polarization for Her Political Demise
By Mark McKibbin
Kyrsten Sinema in 2018. Photo credit: US House Office of Photography; Wikimedia Commons
Kyrsten Sinema came to the United States Senate in 2018 with a remarkable, if not peculiar, background. She was the first person from the bisexual community elected to the Senate, the first member of Congress to compete in a triathlon, claimed to have experienced homelessness during childhood, and sported bold fashion choices in the halls of power. Her candidacy was seen as a significant pickup for Democrats—Arizona had not elected a Democratic senator in thirty years.
Sinema ran for Senate as a moderate dealmaker. She shunned her past as a progressive firebrand who supported Ralph Nader’s 2000 presidential campaign, lampooned Republicans while serving in the Arizona state legislature, protested centrist Connecticut US Senator Joe Lieberman’s campaign for president in 2004, and chastised Lieberman’s efforts to weaken the Affordable Care Act in a 2010 town hall.
Given Sinema’s extensive criticism of Joe Lieberman, the irony of Sinema largely following Lieberman’s lead in being a perpetual political headache for Democrats during her tenure in the Senate has not been lost on many who have written about her.
In 2009, Lieberman threatened to filibuster the Affordable Care Act if it included a public option. Sinema refused to gut the filibuster to protect voting rights and reproductive freedom. Lieberman and Sinema both fought against raising taxes on the wealthy. Sinema’s announcement in late 2022 that she would leave the Democratic Party and become an independent prompted comparisons to Lieberman’s decision to run for re-election to the US Senate as an independent following his loss to Ned Lamont in the 2006 Connecticut US Senate Democratic primary.
When Lieberman lost the Democratic primary to Lamont, he made the calculation that he would have enough cross-partisan appeal to triumph over Lamont and Republican Alan Schlesinger in a three-way race. Lieberman’s instincts served him well—he won the race by double digits, winning seventy percent of Republicans and fifty-four percent of independents who cast a ballot in the race, despite only winning a third of Democrats. A year later, Lieberman endorsed Republican John McCain over Barack Obama for president, calling on Democrats to put country over party in 2008 (which, as we all remember, worked out well for Lieberman).
Last week, Sinema confirmed that she would not try to pull a Lieberman in 2024. After surveying Arizona’s landscape, Sinema correctly determined that she had no feasible path to re-election. In a video announcing that she would not seek another term, Sinema acknowledged the steep political climb she was facing, stating that “I believe in my approach, but it’s not what America wants right now.”
Predictably, Sinema’s announcement prompted a flurry of articles from the national press assessing her time in the Senate and her legacy. Much of what has been written over the past week can be placed into one of four categories: “Horse-Race” analyses that discuss what her exit means for the US Senate race and the presidential race in Arizona, “Legislative Nerd” pieces that discuss what Sinema’s exit could mean for the future of the filibuster, “Good Riddance” articles pillorying her record of blocking key Democratic priorities in the Senate, and “Don’t Go” pieces lamenting Sinema’s exit as a loss for bipartisan cooperation in Congress.
The final category of articles, “Don’t Go” pieces, have largely echoed the points Sinema made in her video announcing her retirement. Sinema bemoaned that “compromise is a dirty word” in what she portrayed as an increasingly hyper-partisan political era. Sinema touted her record of successfully working across the aisle during her tenure on infrastructure, semiconductor chips, and marriage equality legislation (which, admittedly, is extremely impressive). She portrayed her choice to leave the Senate as the decision of someone who refused to sacrifice “civility, understanding, listening, and working together to get stuff done” to court an electorate more interested in rewarding partisan bickering than legislators with a track record of getting results.
Many of the articles published about Sinema’s departure in the Arizona press could also be grouped into these four categories. However, a notable difference stood out: in comparison to the national press, Arizona writers focused much more extensively on Sinema’s abhorrent record of engaging with Arizona’s constituents during her time in the Senate. Notoriously, Sinema never held even one in-person town hall with constituents, but made ample time in her schedule for high-dollar fundraisers. Sinema’s office was unreachable by phone or email. Sinema gave the silent treatment to a DACA recipient trying to speak to her on an outbound flight from Arizona.
Arizona writers acknowledged that Sinema’s centrist voting record made her few friends among Arizona Democrats. But several of them have argued that it was the compound effect of Sinema’s centrism and the flagrant disdain she showed for her constituents that sealed Sinema’s demise.
I find this argument highly persuasive.
Let’s imagine an alternative reality. In this reality, Sinema had the exact same voting record she did and still left the Democratic Party at the end of 2022, but had engaged with her constituents, held regular town halls, met with stakeholders and activist groups that helped get her elected, and had a working and receptive phone and email system. In this alternate reality, Sinema probably would have still attracted an initial primary challenger and had a steep path to re-election. But Sinema may have removed enough obstacles in her path to conclude that a third-party run was politically doable.
Sinema has called Arizona’s longtime senator, John McCain, her hero. But, unlike Sinema, McCain readily engaged with the press and was highly accessible to constituents, including at raucous town halls. McCain’s candor and accessibility contributed to his image as a maverick with a “straight talk” style of politics. McCain’s political “brand” helped him fend off a fierce Republican primary challenge in 2016. It is uncertain whether following the same playbook could have secured Sinema’s re-election, but it is likely it would have made her political prospects far less dim than they were.
From a consequentialist perspective, I am relieved that Sinema’s contempt for her constituents sealed her fate in Arizona. I have long believed that we need to do away with the filibuster (a subject for another article); Sinema’s exit brings our country one step closer to fulfilling that objective.
For those who support the filibuster and think we need more centrist politicians in Washington, Sinema is a bad case study for why centrism is no longer electorally viable in American politics.
Sinema’s willingness to work across the aisle was not what doomed her politically, as she suggested in the video announcing her retirement. After all, New Hampshire’s Democratic Senator Maggie Hassan, who is ranked by the Lugar Center as having a stronger record of bipartisanship than Sinema, faced no significant primary challenge and won re-election by nine points in 2022.
Nor can Sinema’s record of blocking key Democratic priorities be convincingly portrayed as the nail in Sinema’s political coffin.
Flagrant contempt was a necessary ingredient to poison the pill.
Sinema was different from incumbents such as Jeff Flake of Arizona, Bob Corker of Tennessee, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, and even Joe Manchin of West Virginia. All of these individuals, regardless of what I think about their politics, were highly accessible to their constituents. Thus, it is more believable to claim that their moderate stances or bipartisan record of legislating went out of style in their state, and this was decisive in making their re-election politically untenable. No similar case can be made for Sinema, who was undone by combining a centrist voting record with six years of building a taller and taller wall between herself and her constituents.
Those lamenting the loss of bipartisan-minded politicians in Washington should save their tears for someone far more deserving than Kyrsten Sinema. ♦