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Fareed Zakaria GPS
Campus Chaos as Anti-War Protesters Arrest; Interview With Former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Admiral James Stavridis; Interview With Former CIA Chief Of Disguise Jonna Mendez. Aired 10-11a ET
Aired May 05, 2024 - 10:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
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FAREED ZAKARIA, CNN ANCHOR: This is GPS, the GLOBAL PUBLIC SQUARE. Welcome to all of you in the United States and around the world. I'm Fareed Zakaria coming to you live from New York.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
ZAKARIA: Today on the program protests on college campuses reach a breaking point as police make arrests and shut down encampments. Is this impinging on students' free speech or have protesters gone too far?
I will be joined by an Egyptian and an Israeli scholar who teach together at Dartmouth to discuss that and much more.
Then swarms of armed drones powered by artificial intelligence may indelibly alter the balance of power. Former NATO Supreme Allied commander James Stavridis tells me about this potentially frightening future.
And since its birth, the CIA was a quintessential all boys' club. But all that changed thanks to women like my guest, Joanna Mendez, the agency's former chief of disguise. Hear from her about breaking the glass ceiling while winning the spy game.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
ZAKARIA: But first, here's my take.
The world is a tense place these days with Europe consumed by its biggest land war since 1945 and conflict continuing to convulse the Middle East. These tensions would pale into insignificance, however, if a third arena were to erupt. In Asia, involving the United States and China. Those tensions have in fact calmed down in recent months as both Washington and Beijing have sought to stabilize their relationship.
But there are now cries in Washington to change all that. In an essay in "Foreign Affairs" Matt Pottinger and Mike Gallagher argued that the United States should adopt a Cold War-style containment policy toward China, whose goal should be victory that could encourage the Chinese people to, quote, "explore new models of development and governance," unquote. Pottinger acknowledged on this show last week that an effective U.S. strategy might naturally lead to some form of regime collapse.
Pottinger was Donald Trump's senior most aide on China policy and Gallagher, an outgoing congressman, chairs the House Select Committee on China. Their views will likely shape the next Republican administration. Pottinger and Gallagher argued that Biden's strategy, managing competition with China, does not go nearly far enough. The authors accused the Biden team of pursuing a 1970s style detente policy toward China when it should be pursuing a 1980s style Reaganite policy designed to push Beijing to the brink. According to them, we should welcome more friction and tension with China.
This is an important essay because it lays out clearly the alternative strategy being proposed by some on the right. By putting their cards on the table, Pottinger and Gallagher help us understand the reckless, dangerous, and utterly impractical nature of their own preferred policy.
China today bears little resemblance to the Soviet Union of the 1970s and 1980s. The Soviet Union was an unnatural empire cobbled together after World War II with a decrepit economic model that had started to fail by the mid-1970s. China is the world's second largest economy and largest trading nation. Unlike the Soviet Union's totally state-owned economy, China has a mixture of private and public sector.
Ninety-two percent of China's exports come from a vibrant private sector, including 42 percent from firms with foreign investors. Despite its recent troubles, it is still growing at around 5 percent and because of its size is likely to stay the world's second most important economy for decades.
The Soviet Union was an isolated economy, whereas China is deeply integrated into the global system. Trade between America and the USSR peaked at several billion dollars in a year.
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China and the U.S. do that much trade every few days. The USSR's GDP was around $3.2 trillion at its peak, roughly 7.5 percent of world GDP. Today, China's GDP is about 20 percent of global GDP. Most fundamentally, the Soviet Union was largely a natural resource economy, a Siberian-Saudi Arabia, deriving much of its growth from extractive industries like oil, gas, coal, nickel, and aluminum.
China is a diversified manufacturing powerhouse with an increasingly sophisticated information technology industry that is second only to the United States. In fact, looking back, it's clear that in the 1970s, the USSR's economy had stalled. But got a last lifeline when global oil prices quadrupled. By the 1980s oil prices collapsed and then so did the Soviet Union.
Were the United States to embark on a policy of containment, it would likely find itself alone. China is the largest trading partner of over 120 countries around the world, far more than the U.S. And most of these countries are eager to maintain good ties with Beijing. 82 percent of Nigerians, for example, say Chinese investment has been a boon to their economy. Even European nations, America's closest allies, have made clear that they view China as much as a partner as they do a rival.
Emmanuel Macron noted last year that even in the worst-case scenario of a conflict over Taiwan Europe should be careful not to mimic America's hostility to Beijing. And while he got criticized for those remarks as one German businessman noted to me, we all privately believe what Macron said publicly.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was in China last month hoping to deepen economic ties between the two countries.
American strategies of regime change have rarely worked. Think of Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, Iraq, and Afghanistan. And they are unlikely to work this time, especially in a country like China, where the regime is broadly credited with bringing major economic progress for its people. After decades of poverty and misery, average incomes in China grew nine-fold from 1978 to 2015.
The current bellicosity on the right reminds me of the growing demands for regime change against Iraq two decades ago. But this would be even worse. Because of China's size and engagement with the world, a strategy of containment and overthrow would take the U.S. down a hair- raising path. Sustained confrontation would unravel the global economy, risk isolating America, and raise the odds of a world war over Taiwan. It is worth some sober reflection before embarking down this road.
Go to CNN.com/Fareed for a link to my "Washington Post" column this week, and let's get started.
On Wednesday 90 people were arrested at a pro-Palestinian protests at Dartmouth College. They are some of the more than 2,000 protesters who have been arrested on college campuses in the U.S. over the last few weeks.
Is free speech being squelched or are the protesters out of line?
Joining me are two Dartmouth professors who co-teach a class called the "Politics of Israel and Palestine." Bernard Avishai is an Israeli- American scholar who is a visiting professor at Dartmouth and is in Jerusalem right now. Ezzedine Fishere is a former Egyptian diplomat who worked on the U.N. Middle East peace process in the early 2000s. He is now a senior lecturer at Dartmouth and is in Hanover, New Hampshire.
Welcome both of you.
Bernard, let me start with you. I noticed in your biography, in 1968, when you were a student, you occupied the building in McGill University. I'm wondering whether you now continue to believe that students should have the right to occupy buildings and do all that kind of disruption that you did all those years ago. BERNARD AVISHAI, VISITING PROFESSOR, DARTMOUTH COLLEGE: Yes, it's
true. I was part of a group of students who occupied the Political Science Department at McGill. And I have to say, I learned a lot in that experience. But I've learned a lot since. And one of the things I learned is that universities are not these supercilious, impregnable fortresses against which you batter, you know, with your ideas. But actually a web of relationships and norms and fragile, just like democracy is.
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And we all have a responsibility to maintain these norms. The norms are for debate, not for coercion, and what Ezzedine and I tried to do was model what that kind of debate would look like. I believe that if you are going to set up an encampment on the green at Dartmouth, which is really not just some marginal place, it's really the main thoroughfare of the campus, where they're planning commencement, and if you set up an encampment on the green, you're basically saying, I believe in a conception of justice. That's so fundamental to me that I'm going to coerce you to accept it or you're not going to be able to have something that's valuable to you.
That's not debate. That's coercion. And if institutions that teach coercion prepare you maybe to be a commissar or a priest, but not to be a citizen of the United States.
ZAKARIA: Ezzedine, let me ask you about that. Isn't Bernard's point fair? That, I mean, you know, I will guess 90 percent of students are not part of these demonstrations. They feel like they need to get to their classes. They need to do what they're doing. Is this not coercion rather than education?
EZZEDINE FISHERE, SENIOR LECTURER, DARTMOUTH COLLEGE: Well, it could be. It's -- we have to remember students have a right to express themselves. They have a right to organize protests if so they wish, and they have to be able to do this freely without fear, without intimidation. And also, it is pretty radical and shocking for students to suddenly be confronted with, you know, state troopers and police on campus.
Having said this, universities also have a right to protect free speech, to make sure that it happens peacefully, that it doesn't include incitement, that it doesn't intimidate other groups on campus, and that whatever disruption it causes and every protester to cause some kind of disruption that this disruption doesn't derail the main role of the university, which is education and learning.
Now, there are cases where things are very clear as if you, I don't know, occupy a building and prevent people from accessing it for days on. But there are other situations where it's a fine line between, you know, are you annoying some students or are you intimidating them? Are you making them feel unsafe? Now those decisions have to be made by college leadership, and those are difficult decisions by definition.
It is not that there is, you know, a laser line separating those things. But ultimately, the responsibility of the leadership is to make sure the university is open and that there is access for everybody to do what they are mainly there to do, which is learning.
ZAKARIA: Bernard, let me ask you, is this highlighting a fissure? Peter Beinart wrote an essay in which he said what all this is highlighting the philosophical issue is that there is now a crisis, a tension between liberalism and Zionism that has opened up, that, you know, I think he was implying that Zionism being, you know, about a kind of ethno-nationalist state is at odds fundamentally with liberalism, which says universal rights for all.
AVISHAI: Yes. Well, see, I think the word Zionism here has become pretty mushy. You know, when I hear Peter talking about Zionism, sometimes I -- it's like Lindsey Graham talking about socialism. I mean, I admire Peter. I've known him for years and think of him a very fine person. But I think the word Zionism here is getting a bum rap. And anyway, it's not really relevant.
Israel is a country. It's a home. It's not a cause in the minds of American Jews. It's a place, it's a Hebrew-speaking country with a politics, and there are liberals in this country who need the support of liberals around the world and there are people who are illiberal in this country who I've been fighting for 50 years, and, you know, we saw the robustness of this culture war for the last 18 months with hundreds of thousands of people taking the streets.
So the idea that somehow Israel, i.e. some vague conception of Zionism, is at odds with liberalism just seems to me a tremendous distraction.
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The reality of Israel is that there are liberals here who need the support of people like Peter Beinart and others.
ZAKARIA: We're going to have to take a break. When I come back, we will continue this conversation and get to the actual situation in the middle when we return.
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ZAKARIA: And we are back with Bernard Avishai and Ezzedine Fishere who teach a course together at Dartmouth.
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Ezzedine, let me ask you. You're a former Egyptian diplomat. What is the price Israel is paying, you know, in conducting this extraordinary operation in Gaza? Because while you hear a lot of noise about the Arab Street, Arab governments, for example Sisi's government in Egypt, hate Hamas. In fact, they view Hamas as akin to the Muslim Brotherhood and Sisi has jailed thousands and thousands of members of the Muslim brotherhood.
So is there a real price Israel as paying, or is it, as I suspect, a lot of people in the Israeli war cabinet think, you know, they'll make a lot of noise, but the Arabs actually are happy. We're taking care of Hamas. FISHERE: Yes and no. They're happy that Israel -- if Israel can weaken
Hamas, they will be happy. But the problem is they understand that that goal is unattainable. And then the question practically becomes whether they like Hamas or hate it, the question becomes, how do we deal with an organization that is there, that has capability and that affects Palestinian decisions. And that governs their approach to Hamas. They understand that this military operation will cause more damage to the Palestinian civilians than it's going to cost to Hamas. And therefore, they would like to bring it to an end and find a path towards a Palestinian state.
Now, a credible path to a Palestinian state if they're ticket to resolving this conflict and to both and to deal with the question of Hamas but obviously to do this, they also have to pay a price which is to be able to give Israel security guarantees. And so far they have been reluctant to do this. If you manage to get those two things together, a credible path to our Palestinian state and then Arab role in which day, according to which, they take responsibility for Palestinian security with Israel.
Then we have a path towards resolving this conflict. If we can't have one of the two, then I'm afraid we will go back to the status quo ante before October 7th with the same dynamics that were there, which means we will be looking for another round of conflict at some time in the future.
ZAKARIA: Bernard, you and Ezzedine published -- co-authored an op-ed where you argue, you know, maybe out of this can come a broader regional peace. All of that seems premised on the idea that Israel will be willing to allow a Palestinian state to come into being, and it seems that from the polling I've seen, that seems further away than it's ever been in the last three or four decades, Israeli got really not happy, happy to do that.
And, you know, that gets to this issue of the crisis between Zionism and liberalism, which is Israel is a country, but it is a country that has been occupying these lands, with five million Palestinians, for 56 years now. Is there hope that you can imagine a Palestinian State?
AVISHAI: Well, the polling is a little misleading because it doesn't really offer a choice that is other than yes-no. If you ask Israelis, do you want to Palestinian state on your border, they think, oh, the attack will come from Qalqilya on next time so no, we don't. But if the choice is a regional deal, normalization with the Saudis, economic growth, the opportunity to resolve the problem in the north the sense that America is with you as they were two weeks ago, the night that Iran fired these missiles.
So that alliance no longer feels merely hypothetical. If that's the choice then, you know, forget the polling. There's a new opportunity here. And I think Blinken is trying very hard to emphasize this. That it's not -- do you want a Palestinian state or not? It's do you want this package that offers this kind of opportunity or do you want to go back to the status quo ante as Ezzedine said, and have to deal with all the blowback in the world for maintaining the occupation.
It's going to be a culture war here as it has been in the past. And, you know, I'd like to think that reason will prevail.
ZAKARIA: On that wonderfully, hopeful note, Bernard Avishai Ezzedine Fishere, thank you so much. Pleasure to talk about to both of you.
FISHERE: Thank you for having us.
AVISHAI: Thank you.
ZAKARIA: Next on GPS retired Admiral James Stavridis about something that will change the battlefield forever. Artificial intelligence powered warfare, when we come back.
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ZAKARIA: We humans have a lot to worry about these days, climate change and other pandemic, even the threat of World War Three. But the unregulated development of artificial intelligence might be as potent a threat as any, according to my next guest.
Retired Admiral James Stavridis. He was NATO's allied commander Eirope. And he's now vice chair of global affairs at the Carlisle Group. His fascinating new book "2054 Novel," which he co-wrote with Elliot Ackerman, very talented, is centered on the existential treat AI poses for the future of the world."
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Jim, pleasure to have you on. Fascinating how you're writing these series of books. And this one is really about the A.I. race in military affairs. So first, I want to ask you, explain to us the power of A.I.
So, you're a -- you're a naval commander, what would A.I. allow you to do as a naval commander that you weren't able to do when you were actually commanding ships?
ADM. JAMES STAVRIDIS (RET.), FORMER NATO SUPREME ALLIED COMMANDER: Let me give you three very practical things. Number one -- and it doesn't sound sexy, but it's logistics and maintenance. Artificial Intelligence has a capability to predict when a particular set of maintenance functions are needed, make sure that the spare parts are in train, all of that done in a way that is much more efficient, much more capable.
ZAKARIA: But that's huge because it keeps the ships in permanent readiness.
STAVRIDIS: Absolutely. We always say in the military, the amateurs are the ones talking about strategy. The professionals are focused on logistics. That's what wins wars.
But number two, artificial intelligence will allow a commander -- say I was the captain of a destroyer, which I was. If I had an A.I. advising me, plugged into my decision process, that A.I. will have access to every naval battle ever fought. It would be capable of scanning the horizon of history and whispering into the commander, you really ought to think about this.
And then third and finally, and we're seeing the edges of this in Ukraine, drone, swarms, bringing them together in very lethal ways. We currently can't quite do that. Artificial intelligence will make swarming drones the greatest threat by mid-century.
ZAKARIA: You talk a lot about the A.I. race and it's really U.S. versus China.
STAVRIDIS: Yes.
ZAKARIA: Who's ahead?
STAVRIDIS: U.S. marginally ahead. Our mutual friend, Eric Schmidt, did a marvelous set of research on this a couple of years ago, and he would have said then, we're about a year ahead of China.
My sense from my sources, China is closing that gap. This is the foot race that will determine geopolitical superiority by mid-century.
ZAKARIA: Are we building the right kind of military for that kind of world?
STAVRIDIS: Absolutely. And let me add another example in terms of drones versus naval. Look what's happening in the Black Sea. The Russian Black Sea fleet a third of it is on the bottom of the Black Sea, drinking seawater as we would say in the business.
Why? Not because Ukraine has a Navy, they don't. It's because the Ukrainians have used both air and surface drones. So, to your question --
ZAKARIA: Drones are amazing. The minister showed them to me. They looked like toy boats --
STAVRIDIS: Yes.
ZAKARIA: -- and they are really highly lethal drones that can sink these hundred -- hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of warships.
STAVRIDIS: Correct. And so, the question then becomes, are the carriers still viable? I think they are for the moment, for the tenure future, 15-year future. Boy, you get much beyond that. And the capacity of massive swarms of drones accompanied by cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, all linked together by artificial intelligence, it will make those crown jewels of the fleet, our aircraft carriers vulnerable.
ZAKARIA: So, you've -- you've held very, very high military office. And you know that there are some people who worry that Donald Trump, where he to be elected again, would politicize the military. Do you worry about that?
STAVRIDIS: I do. And I think that the greatest aspect of our national security isn't a political military. And we would edge in to politics into that force at great peril to the republic. At the moment, all of my contacts in the active-duty military reassure me that the military continues to regard itself as apolitical, followers of the constitution. Let's hope it stays that way.
ZAKARIA: And when you look at NATO, you were the former supreme allied commander, great, great title, by the way, there are people in Europe who worry a lot about Trump and NATO. And what I've heard people say is it's -- he doesn't have to pull out of NATO. He just has to say, I'm not going to defend Latvia, Lithuania --
STAVRIDIS: Estonia.
ZAKARIA: Right. Because it's a sort of -- in some ways the whole -- NATO is basically -- it's a psychological game. It's the thread is psychological that the U.S. will get involved. That's what Putin has to be calculating. And if the president says something like that -- the NATO -- the building can continue, the meetings can continue, but the heart of it is lost.
STAVRIDIS: We always say deterrence is the combination of capability and credibility.
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NATO is incredibly capable. The defense budget of the United States and the Europeans together is well over 10 times that of Russia. The population is well over five times the size of Russia.
So, the capability is not the problem. You've put your finger on it, it's the credibility. And yes, I would be very concerned about a Trump presidency that did not actively support and, indeed, lead within NATO. That's a real concern.
ZAKARIA: From the former supreme allied commander of NATO.
STAVRIDIS: My pleasure, Fareed.
ZAKARIA: Thank you, sir.
STAVRIDIS: Thank you.
ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, we delve into the world of espionage with the CIA's former chief of disguise Jonna Mendez. I'll ask her about her adventures in the spy trade when we come back.
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ZAKARIA: In 2018, Gina Haspel became the first ever female director of the CIA. When she quickly named women to run the top three directorates of the agency, it was a watershed moment for an organization that had long been a notorious old boys club. Women like my next guest helped break that glass ceiling at headquarters in Langley and its stations around the world.
Jonna Mendez got her start at the CIA because her then-fiance worked there. The only job she was offered was in the typing pool. The agency's outdated rules and customs tried to keep her there. But 20 some years later, after a series of extraordinary adventures in the spy trade overseas, Jonna was named the agency's chief of disguise.
She tells her extraordinary story in a new book, "In True Face: A Woman's Life in the CIA, Unmasked." Jonna, welcome.
You were once tasked with figuring out how to get a would-be Soviet defector out of the embassy. And you decided that the answer was water bottles. Explain. We have a wonderful photograph of it which illustrates what you did.
JONNA MENDEZ, FORMER CIA CHIEF OF DISGUISE: You know, the office that I was in -- while I was chief of disguise, we represented so many different skills. Audio, if you needed a bug, if you needed a concealment, if you needed a microdata, if you needed secret writing, whatever. The idea of what you do with the Soviet who might be defecting and coming to your embassy that fell in a special category of work we did with some magic builders out in Hollywood.
Their job is to build deceptions and illusions. That's -- that's how they get us hooked and sitting there afterwards saying, you can't do that. We told them our problem and they came up with this universal, we called it a human transport device, a way that you could take a person anywhere in the world and walk them by a security service or whatever was there, load them into a truck and drive off. And it -- what we came up with was a dolly. The transporting device looked like it was loaded with cases of water.
ZAKARIA: With three crates of water. And I have to say looking at the photograph, it doesn't look like it's big enough to conceal a human being.
MENDEZ: Exactly that is the point.
ZAKARIA: That is.
MENDEZ: Yes. You would dismiss it.
ZAKARIA: Yes. Now, this one great photograph in the book. You're in the Oval Office. You're briefing then President George H.W. Bush. Explain what's happening because you've got -- you've got a head in your hand.
MENDEZ: It had taken us 10 years, maybe a little more, to create an animated mask. A mask that I could sit here with you right now with one on. We could have this interview. You --
ZAKARIA: And the lips would be moving. Everything would be --
MENDEZ: Everything would be moving. You would not know I was wearing a mask. So that's what I did with the president of the United States. My office director -- I never intended.
ZAKARIA: You went in wearing the mask.
MENDEZ: I did.
ZAKARIA: In the middle of the presentation, you take it off.
MENDEZ: I went through security at the White House. I went through the secret service in the White House. I went into the office, told him I had something new to show him, gave him some pictures of himself in disguise, the president, when he ran the CIA. He really liked those pictures.
I said, well, now I'm wearing something. The best we've got. I'm going to take it off and show it to you. And I reached to do the Tom Cruise peel, which is misnamed, by the way. And he said, hold on. And he got up and came and just walked around and was just -- he didn't know what he was looking for. He sat down and he said, OK. I took it off, and that's the picture.
ZAKARIA: The picture. Now, you begin your book with the famous quote from Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
I asked no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks. Was that what it felt like at the CIA?
MENDEZ: I thought she said it so well. Just, you know, back off and let us go about our work. It felt that way. Not every man -- I had -- I had some good bosses who accommodated my desire to do more, to increase my responsibilities.
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But a couple of them really just obstacles in your way, trying to shorten your career or, you know, move you out of their way.
ZAKARIA: Do you think -- I mean, now -- there was a point at which after Gina Haspel came in that the five top jobs at the CIA were all held by women. Has it completely changed?
MENDEZ: I loved your introduction. I don't -- there's a piece of the CIA, the piece that I was in, the operational, the overseas, feet on the ground, meeting with foreigners who are risking their lives in a lot of countries. In Russia, they are really risking their lives.
The men thought, no one is going to pay any attention to us. And then in the sandbox, in the Middle East, they said, you can't work there because you have no -- women have no value in that part of the world.
You think they're going to think that you can protect them while they're working for us? Those men were wrong. Women can bring a different set of skills to working with these assets, these foreign assets. I think we've proven again and again that we can do that job as well as the men can, sometimes better.
ZAKARIA: This is such an extraordinary career. I should thank you for it and for sharing it with us.
MENDEZ: Well, thank you for having this conversation.
ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, Europe's power is shifting east away from Britain, France, and Germany. I'll explain all that when we come back.
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ZAKARIA: And now for the last look. More than 20 years ago, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld poised to helm the American invasion of Iraq over vociferous French and German objections dismissed the outcry is coming from old Europe. He said, if you look at the entire NATO Europe today, the center of gravity is shifting to the east.
Rumsfeld was wrong about Iraq but right about Europe. More than ever before political power and energy is shifting eastward towards new Europe. As historian Timothy Garton Ash told the "New York Times," "The voices of Central and Eastern Europeans are being listened to more and taken more seriously in the councils of Europe."
NATO is growing and deploying resources eastward. The catalyst is, of course, eastern Europe's belligerent neighbor, Russia. Look at Poland. It has beefed up its own defenses, pledging far more than the NATO target of 2 percent of GDP. In fact, its president proposes a new 3 percent target for all NATO members.
This year, Poland will spend around 4 percent of its GDP on the military. It also plans to nearly double its land forces to 300,000 soldiers. It has spent billions of dollars on state-of-the-art weapons.
As "The Economist" noted, Poland intends to field more tanks than are operated by the armies of Germany, France, Britain, and Italy put together. And Poland's leadership goes beyond defense spending. Most arms that reach Ukraine from the west come through Poland. It has granted temporary protection status to nearly 1 million Ukrainians since the invasion, more than any country in Europe, except Germany.
For eastern Europe, the conflict with Russia is existential. But as the ft nodes, because of the shift in the continent's attention, eastern Europe has never been more safe. Last week, Poland and Lithuania conducted joint military drills around the Suwalki Gap. That's a 60-mile strip of land between Belarus, essentially Russia's vassal state, and Kaliningrad, a Russian territory off the mainland, sandwiched between Lithuania and Poland.
The gap has historically been the greatest weakness of the Baltic states, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. If Russia captured the Suwalki Gap, it would cut off those three former Soviet states from the rest of NATO. But the danger posed by a Russian occupation of the Suwalki Gap diminished when NATO expanded to include two northern neighbors Sweden and Finland.
Now, as Ingrida Simonyte, Lithuania's prime minister, told the FT, the Baltic Sea has become a NATO lake. The three Baltic states have a maritime border with NATO members. The Suwalki Gap is no longer a fatal weakness. In fact, the Baltic states, traditionally the most vulnerable in the alliance, appeared newly energized by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania agreed in January to build hundreds of concrete bunkers on their borders with Russia and Belarus.
According to the FT, historically NATO's plan for the Baltic countries, should Russia have invaded them, was to allow it to happen before fighting Russia off some months later. Now, the strategy is to defend these countries from the first meter, deterring Russia from attacking in the first place.
In 2017, NATO sent battalions of troops to three countries. Each battalion comprised of about 1,000 soldiers. It is now increasing those numbers three to five-fold.
And take a look at this map from "Politico" of NATO defense spending last year. The countries nearer to Russia, devote more of their GDP to defense.
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Old Europe, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain have chronically underfunded armies by comparison. Perhaps no country is more emblematic of the way the Russian invasion is shifting focus in Europe than Sweden. Russia's invasion prompted the country to give up its 200 years of neutrality and join NATO. In September, in advance of the acceptance of the NATO bid, it announced a 28 percent increase in military expenditure for 2024 adding that the country is facing the most serious security situation since the end of the second World War.
Old Europe nurtured trade and diplomatic ties to Russia and saw them come to nothing when Russia invaded Ukraine. New Europe could never afford that optimism. Now, the most vulnerable countries in NATO, all those closest to Russia, have begun to take a leadership role in the block. This could change the nature of European defense and foreign policy for decades.
Thanks to all of you for being part of my program this week. I will see you next week.
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