NATO needs to find its balls

Before Putin and Trump cut them off

Maybe NATO needs to wake up to the reality that the U.S. is now politically dysfunctional and the GOP is not going to green light enough support to Ukraine to hold its defence. 

To avoid a catastrophic defeat for Ukraine and the West/EU/NATO, we need to think quickly and outside the box. Necessities now should be:

1. Extend a NATO missile defence to Ukraine, as currently being offered to Israel by the West. This can be provided externally to Ukraine from systems operated by NATO border states. NATO is not becoming party to a direct conflict with Russia as neither the U.S., U.K. or Jordan have by shooting down Iranian missiles heading for Israel. NATO just needs to find its balls before Putin cuts them off.

2. Allocate the full $330 billion in immobilised Russian assets to Ukraine’s defence. If the West is unable to provide adequate funds for Ukraine’s defence let Putin provide the funds to allow Ukraine to buy its own arms/munitions. If Zelensky had $330 billion to buy arms, even Trump and the GOP could not say no.

3. Adopt a zero tolerance on Russia approach to sanctions. Massively ramp up secondary sanctions on third country sanctions busters. Change the default setting on sanctions to zero trade with Russia being permitted except where special licences are approved - we could set the implementation date sufficiently far in the future (3-5 years hence) to limit the near term disruption to global markets. But the signalling impact to global markets would be immense - get out of Russia. 

And if the West is not willing to do these, then it should start to think thru what a Russian victory in Ukraine means - and begin to plan for that. It means a huge economic hit to Europe in defence spending (hundreds of billions more a year), tens of millions of Ukrainian migrants moving West, socio-economic, political and security crisis (wars) in Europe and the collapse of the Euro.