Signal: Why NATO? – The Living Dead – A Pivotal Brexit Pivot

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WHAT TRUMP IS REALLY ASKING NATO

Tomorrow, US President Donald Trump heads to the annual NATO summit in Brussels, and his counterparts are bracing for a storm. Trump, breaking with seven decades of US policy, has questioned the value of an alliance that is overwhelmingly supported by American cash and troops. What exactly, he wonders, is the US getting by paying for all of this?

Leaving aside Trump’s impetuous style – the question isn’t really a new one. After all, what is the continuing relevance of an alliance that was born more less when Trump was? For 42 years after its founding in 1949, NATO had a clear and singular mission: to defend Western Europe from Soviet expansionism. Full stop.

Then the USSR collapsed, and the alliance struggled to refashion itself, variously as

A Western security umbrella for former Soviet bloc countries eager to escape Moscow’s sphere of influence for good (this, of course, greatly annoyed Russia)

A counter-terrorism alliance (9/11 was the only event that has ever triggered NATO’s collective defense clause)

A vehicle for US-led multilateral military action in places such as the Balkans in the 1990s (clearly successful) and, later, Libya during the Arab Spring (perhaps less so).

Each of those missions had its merits and drawbacks, but neither individually nor collectively did they constitute a coherent vision for NATO’s continued existence. Instead, US belief in the alliance’s worthiness as an instrument of US power carried it along. Trump’s break with that assumption has thrown the question of the alliance’s purpose into sharper relief than ever before. 

What are some possible ways to revive NATO’s purpose? Perhaps there is a (back to the) future option for NATO as a bulwark against fresh Kremlin efforts to assert Russian influence along the former Soviet fringes. Perhaps NATO could be refashioned as a cyber-power alliance that can focus on the coming conflicts of the 21st century. Or is it enough that NATO, along with other institutions like the EU, has kept an unprecedented peace at the heart of a continent that, until 1945, had seen centuries of nationalistic and sectarian bloodletting?

As Trump arrives in Brussels, his NATO counterparts will not only need to have good answers about what they are prepared to pay – but also what they, as members, are prepared to do to make the alliance worthwhile and relevant in the 21st century.

A PIVOTAL BREXIT PIVOT

It took just 24 hours for two key members of British Prime Minister Theresa May’s cabinet to call it quits. But as Gabe is here to explain, the resignations of Brexit Secretary David Davis, the UK’s head Brexit negotiator, and Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, have forced an important confrontation over the UK’s future that’s been years in the making.

How we got here. Last week, Prime Minister May took a decisive step—securing the approval of her preferred Brexit plan, which aims to maintain fairly close trading relations with the EU (at least when it comes to goods), at an emergency cabinet summit. Davis and Johnson, who view the plan as a direct repudiation of their preferred hardline Brexit policy, tenured their resignations in short order.

What comes next? Disgruntled members of May’s Tory Party will likely present a motion of no confidence against her government in parliament sometime in the coming days. The real test is whether these rebels can amass the 159 votes needed to pass such a motion and topple the prime minister. 

Path one: If the vote fails, May will have succeeded in fending off the hardliners within her own party and be well positioned to deliver her preferred Brexit policy. Rebellious Tories would then be forced to either accept May’s position or risk forming an unnatural alliance with pro-Brexit members of the opposition Labor Party.

Path two: If the motion succeeds, it would trigger an internal race within the Tory Party to succeed May that could last for months. Any successor to May would almost certainly support a Brexit policy that places the UK much further from the EU than May would like—raising serious questions about the country’s economic future.

Why it matters: The coming days represent a fork in the road for Prime Minister Theresa May—one that will determine the future of both Brexit and Britain. By the end of the week, we will have a much clearer picture of where all three are heading.  

GRAPHIC TRUTH: NATO’S EASTWARD EXPANSION

When NATO was formed in 1949, it had just 12 members. In the years since, its ranks have grown to 29, with 4 more waiting in the wings. The expansions since the Soviet collapse in 1991 have stoked tensions with Moscow, which views the alliance’s eastward drift as a threat. Here’s how, and when, NATO has grown over the past seven decades.

THREE STORIES IN THE KEY OF: THE LIVING DEAD

People can’t always choose where they die, but where they lie afterwards can have huge political significance across borders and generations.

First, to North Korea, where the United States has long pressed Pyongyang to return the bodies of American service members killed in the Korean War. The issue is at the center of Trump’s overtures to North Korea – after the Singapore summit he announced that the remains of hundreds of US soldiers were to be returned as a gesture of North Korean goodwill. But after a rocky follow-up meeting in Pyongyang last weekend, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said more talks were needed to hash out the details. If the dead can’t be returned, the living will surely have a much harder time negotiating any tenable nuclear deal.

Next, to Israel, where the government still wants to find the body of Eli Cohen, perhaps the most famous spy in the country’s history. As an Arab Jew who impersonated a playboy Syrian businessman in Damascus in the 1960s, Cohen was an invaluable asset to Israeli intelligence. In 1965, his cover blown, the Syrians publicly hanged him in Damascus, but his work helped Israel to avoid defeat in the Six-Day War two years later. Last week, it emerged that Mossad had spirited Cohen's watch out of Syria earlier this year, but his body remains (somewhere) there. Here’s a thought: if Bashar al-Assad wants some accommodation with Israel as part of a settlement to the waning Syrian civil war, returning Cohen’s body could be low-cost goodwill gesture. One catch: the body has been moved so many times that apparently not even Syrian intelligence is sure where it is.

Lastly, to Spain where the country’s new socialist government has stoked controversy by reviving a proposal to move the body of former dictator Francisco Franco from an elaborate cliffside shrine outside of Madrid (pictured above) to a more modest location. Franco, who ruled Spain with an iron fist for some forty years until his death in 1975, remains a divisive figure in the country. Many conservative Spaniards feel nostalgia for his strongly centralized, Spanish nationalist rule, and about 35 percent of those polled saythey oppose the plan to move his bones. Just under half of Spaniards, meanwhile, said it should happen. The stigma of Franco’s regime – the last of Southern Europe’s right-wing dictatorships to fall – has made it harder for far-right parties to take root in Spain than elsewhere. But with Spain now facing a surge of migrants – a challenge that has stoked right-wing groups elsewhere in Europe – could efforts by the government to suppress Franco’s memory backfire?

A BRIDGE OF LOVE: ETHIOPIA AND ERITREA

On Sunday, the leaders of Ethiopia and Eritrea built a bridge of love across a long-disputed border. That’s not us getting mushy in the mid-summer heat – that’s a direct quote from Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who has agreed with his Eritrean counterpart Isaias Afwerki to finally settle a late-1990s conflict that killed 80,000 people, displaced half a million more, and fueled destabilizing proxy fights between the countries elsewhere in East Africa ever since.

The peace is largely the initiative of the youthful Mr. Abiy – a former intelligence officer who, since taking power earlier this spring, has made waves by relaxing political controls, pledging economic reforms, and promising a more inclusive government. Peace with Eritrea would free up economic resources and open up greater avenues for development, not least by enabling landlocked Ethiopia to regain access to the Red Sea via Eritrean ports.

For Eritrea, peace offers a chance to emerge from the ruthless militarization and economic isolation that have made it one of the world’s most repressive regimes, driving hundreds of thousands of its people northward to Europe in search of better opportunities in recent years.

To be sure, plenty of challenges remain – for one thing, Ethiopian troops still need to leave border areas that they have occupied in contravention of UN findings, and thorny questions of territorial and population exchanges also remain. It’s also unclear whether Eritrea’s Afwerki can ease tensions without losing control over a system that has been shaped by more than two decades of war-footing.

But in a world where borders and walls are the thing these days, a bridge of love isn’t a bridge too far, is it?

HARD NUMBERS

300 million: Chinese president, Xi Jinping, has launched a major initiative to bolster the country’s domestic surveillance capabilities, which analysts estimate will include the installation of almost 300 million surveillance cameras by 2020.

18,000: Turkey’s government dismissed 18,000 public sector employees just in time for the start of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s new five-year term as president on Monday. The latest purge included the firing of nine thousand police officers and hundreds of soldiers and academics.

1/2 x 282: More than half of the world’s 282 mobile-money platforms are in sub-Saharan Africa, according to research from McKinsey & Co. Mobile money is another way Africa is “leapfrogging” traditional stages of development through the adoption of new technologies.

9: Warring factions in South Sudan have agreed to a total of 9 ceasefires since the start of a brutal internal conflict there in 2013. Only one has lasted longer than a month. The latest, brokered on June 30th, is already showing signs of breaking down. 

 3: Since the beginning of 2017, the number of NATO members on track to spend 2 percent of GDP on defense by 2024, as outlined by the alliance as a goal in 2014, more than tripled from 5 to 16.

This edition of Signal was written by Alex Kliment (@saosasha) and prepared with editorial support from Kevin Allison (@KevinAllison), Gabe Lipton (@gflipton) and Leon Levy (@leonmlevy). Spiritual counsel from Willis Sparks.

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