The Tribune

With CHARLIE HARPER

The just-concluded NATO summit meeting in Vilnius, Lithuania, was at the same time somewhat anticlimactic and newsworthy. Membership issues dominated on both sides of this. And these are really important as the West drifts ever closer to an open shooting war with Russia.

On the plus side, Turkey dropped its opposition to admitting Sweden. This is not insignificant. Geopolitically, Sweden’s accession to the Western alliance completes Russia’s Baltic Sea isolation. A glance at a map of Europe shows that the Russian fleet now is practically limited to its extensive Black Sea collection of port cities and the often ice-bound northern ports of Murmansk and Arkhangelsk.

The Turks still control the “narrow seas” of the Bosporus Strait and the Dardanelles which constitute the exit point for the Russian fleet into the Mediterranean Sea and beyond. Turkey is of course a NATO member. And Arkhangelsk is on an arm of the White Sea in the Russian north, which is ice-covered during half of most years. Murmansk is even farther north, situated on the shore of part of the Arctic Ocean.

It is likely that as seas – including the Arctic Ocean – continue to get warmer in coming decades, naval strategy will evolve. That will impact Russia significantly. But for now, there’s still a lot of ice up north for at least six months each year.

NATO and winter ice now have the potential to completely bottle up the Russian European fleet for over half the year.

On the other side of the NATO membership question, there is the matter of Ukraine’s membership. This is a tricky question, and there may be room for plenty of skepticism about how NATO in general and the US in particular has handled it over the past decade.

Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, without much of a response from either the US in particular or NATO. The Crimea looks and is strategically significant on the northern Black Sea coast. But Crimea is also historically more a part of Russia than of Ukraine, and there is some basis for the Russian lust to recover it for the motherland.

Nevertheless, since the 1960s Crimea has been part either of the Ukrainian republic within the Soviet Union or a component of an independent Ukraine for the past 30-plus years. The lame, insipid response to Russia’s seizure of Crimea from the Obama administration looks especially lamentable in the rearview mirror.

After Obama, we all experienced four years of startling deference by the American president Donald Trump in his relationship with Russian president Vladimir Putin, including encouragement of Putin and Russia to interfere in the American presidential elections in 2016 and 2020.

History will likely conclude that both Obama and Trump were clearly guilty of fostering and reinforcing a tone in US-Russian relations that convinced Putin that making a territorial grab for Ukraine would meet little resistance from the West and NATO.

The Ukrainians changed that narrative with their stout defense of their homeland. Ukrainian admission to the NATO alliance has now risen to urgent status. And Ukraine’s amazing president Volodymyr Zelensky has been especially outspoken in his advocacy for immediate admission to NATO in the days leading up to this week’s NATO summit.

NATO membership has been an aspiration enshrined in Ukraine’s Constitution since 2019. At the just-concluded NATO summit in Vilnius, all 31 NATO leaders agreed to offer an invitation – at some point.

But this would only be “when allies agree and conditions are met”. Many of these conditions involve political and economic reform within Ukraine, a nation whose internal politics were hardly free of corruption and anti-democratic tendencies prior to the Russian invasion. There is speculation that it might be a very long time before Ukraine is allowed to join.

As if to underscore the point about the need for Ukraine to do better internally, the Group of Seven (the US, UK, France, Japan, Germany, Canada and Italy) just yesterday issued a statement spelling out some of the prerequisites for greater Ukrainian integration into the Western economic and political alliances. The G-7 nations urged Ukraine to continue “implementation of the law enforcement, judiciary, anti-corruption, corporate governance, economic, security sector, and state management reforms that underscore its commitments to democracy, the rule of law, respect for human rights and media freedoms, and put its economy on a sustainable path”.

Zelensky railed against NATO reluctance to admit Ukraine now. He called NATO’s lack of greater specifics in setting admission criteria “absurd”, but he did soften his words after he arrived as a “special guest” in Vilnius.

Still, Zelensky may have a point. Analysts believe the principal reason for denying Ukraine membership at this time is because of the ongoing war with Russia. A commentator in the New York Times wrote that if Ukraine were to join NATO now, “NATO’s collective defense promise, in the form of its treaty’s Article Five, would mean that every NATO member is obligated to fight for Ukraine. And nobody wants to do that.”

Why, since so much support is already flowing to Kyiv? It’s because directly defending Ukraine, in this sense, would mean overt commitment of air, naval and ground power – and troops. That would in turn inevitably lead to unwelcome headlines back home in NATO capitals as casualties mounted and ships, aircraft and tanks were destroyed by Russian forces.

Plus, there is the unsettling prospect that an overt war might trigger deployment of Russia’s nuclear weapons arsenal. Thankfully, that eventuality remains unthinkable in Western capitals, if perhaps not so much in the Kremlin.

Thus, there is a big difference between the war-creep now adopted and followed by US president Joe Biden and NATO and full-scale war with Russia. Zelensky and Biden both clearly understand this. But only one of them accepts it.

The Supreme Court has become the ultimate political prize

The US Supreme Court has been in the headlines too much recently. Ever since the Democrats killed the nomination of conservative judge Robert Bork to the American high court 35 years ago, America’s top tribunal has become gradually but increasingly politicised.

And it’s not just the highest court that has been infected with political influence. Down through the extensive American federal court system, through the 12 circuit courts of appeal and the 94 lower district courts, more and more judges of dubious legal credentials have been named to influential positions mostly on the basis of their allegiance to controversial political positions on issues like abortion, federal oversight and guns.

At the level of the US Supreme Court, this has worked principally to the advantage of the Republican Party, due mostly to the coincidence of several deaths and retirements occurring during periods when the GOP controlled the White House and the Senate. One of these events occurred during the second George W Bush administration in September 2005.

Former chief justice William Rehnquist passed away that month, and as a result, John Roberts became Bush’s choice to succeed Rehnquist as the chief justice. An analysis of Roberts’ tenure was offered recently by long-time Supreme Court correspondent Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times. She is regarded as one of America’s foremost commentators on the Supreme Court.

Here is what she said about the Roberts tenure: “Suppose a modern Rip Van Winkle went to sleep in September 2005 and didn’t wake up until last week. Such a person would awaken in a profoundly different constitutional world, a world transformed, term by term and case by case, at the Supreme Court’s hand.

“To appreciate that transformation’s full dimension, consider the robust conservative wish list that greeted the new chief justice (Roberts) 18 years ago: Overturn Roe v. Wade. Reinterpret the Second Amendment to make private gun ownership a constitutional right. Eliminate race-based affirmative action in university admissions. Elevate the place of religion across the legal landscape. Curb the regulatory power of federal agencies.”

Today, Greenhouse continues, Roberts has led the high court to conservative “victories” in each of these areas. She posits that Roberts and his fellow conservative justices have fulfilled conservative dreams to a degree unimaginable less than two decades ago.

Greenhouse offers a sober concluding assessment: “The Supreme Court now is this country’s ultimate political prize. That may not be apparent on a day-to-day or even a term-by-term basis. But from the perspective of 18 years, that conclusion is as unavoidable as it is frightening.”