One-Way Ticket to Tyranny

Regarding 'Put Not Your Trust in Recep Tayyip Erdogan' (Letters, April 16): Elliott Abrams could have referenced what King Abdullah of Jordan recalls Mr. Erdogan saying: 'Democracy is a bus ride—once I get to my stop, I'm getting off.' It appears that he feels he's at his stop, ready not only to dissolve democracy in Turkey but to work against the interests of fellow NATO member countries in service of his agenda to position Turkey at the head of a Muslim Brotherhood-led Mideast.
Stuart Creque

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Armenian prime minister to meet Erdogan in rare visit to Turkey aimed at mending ties

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Washington Post

40 minutes ago

• Washington Post

NATO's call to arms: Time to muscle up ‘at the speed of fear'

LONDON — NATO chief Mark Rutte visited Britain this month and had a bracing message for his hosts, along with other nations in the alliance: Start bulking up militarily, he said, or 'you had better learn to speak Russian.' Vladimir Putin isn't about to invade England. But don't forget that, shortly before invading Ukraine in 2022, he did casually threaten then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson with a missile strike that 'would only take a minute.' Europe, a top British defense strategist told me, needs to re-arm 'at the speed of fear.' With a handful of exceptions, most of NATO's European leaders have gotten the memo that Russia, far from being depleted by the bloodbath in Ukraine, is now a country remade, reoriented and revved up for a state of permanent warfare. A much greater share of overall Russian economic activity, more than 7 percent of gross domestic product, is now earmarked for defense than in any of the alliance's 32 member states. That is likely to continue even if the guns fall silent in Ukraine, which they probably won't any time soon. 'As the army eats through Soviet legacy equipment, Putin is determined to replenish stockpiles — and equip his military with the most modern [equipment] informed by wartime innovation,' Alexandra Prokopenko of Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin wrote recently in the Financial Times. 'This will take several years, keeping the performance-enhancing drug of high military expenditure in the Russian economic system.' The growing dread in Europe arising from Moscow's threat has been compounded by the parallel fear inspired by President Donald Trump's contempt for Washington's NATO allies, and his apparent indifference to their security. That is the backdrop as NATO prepares for its annual summit next week at The Hague, where it is expected to adopt an annual spending goal of 5 percent of GDP on defense and related infrastructure — a target most of member states will struggle over years to meet. About one-third of the alliance's members don't even hit the current minimum of 2 percent; some that do, including France and Britain, are grappling with severely squeezed public finances. Rutte's prescription is that the alliance should be prepared to defend its own territory from Russian aggression within five years, including by boosting its air and missile defense by 400 percent. Others across the continent think the timeline is even shorter. Don't imagine that Putin would launch a massive invasion of a European NATO state like the unsuccessful one of Ukraine three years ago. To achieve his aim — unmasking the alliance as a paper tiger — he wouldn't need to. It would be enough to take a bite out of one of the three tiny Balts — Lithuania, Latvia or Estonia — and bet that Washington wouldn't respond with boots on the ground or a sustained missile air assault. With Trump in the White House, that's a bet Putin might be willing to make. For the Russian leader, the West is an implacable forever-foe obstructing his neoimperial dream. He's not giving up or backing down; to the contrary, he sees opportunity in Trump's disregard for Europe. The intensifying peril for Europe is not only to fortify its own defenses but simultaneously to bear the burden of keeping Ukraine in the fight for its sovereignty and survival as Washington disengages. In Ukraine, my British strategist source told me, Europe must seek 'escalation dominance,' meaning arming Kyiv at a pace that might double Russian casualties, forcing Putin to reassess the war's cost-benefit calculus. That's an ambitious goal given Russia's resilience. One measure of Putin's callousness is that he is untroubled by his forces' average daily toll of at least 1,200 deaths and injuries in Ukraine over the past year, for territorial gains the size of Rhode Island. The question is whether the continent's major powers — their economies anemic, their leaders facing ascendant right-wing parties, their aging populations frustrated by ineffectual governments — can rise to the occasion. Amid that haze of challenges, will Europe's main leaders leverage the crisis they face in Russia's threat, and fundamentally reorder their nations' priorities? Doing so would require asking voters to sacrifice some of their comforts — and real political courage. 'That this threat is now clear gives Europeans the chance to go beyond meetings in gilded palaces, and to convince people they face an existential choice,' Gerald Knaus, founding chairman of the European Stability Initiative, a think tank, told me. 'We need a clear narrative to make the case for a modern arsenal of democracy.' That is the concern that prompted Rutte's call to arms. Britons, like other Europeans, can maintain their generous public health care and other social services, he said, and ignore his recommendation that alliance members devote 5 percent of their economies to defense. But in that case, start studying the Cyrillic alphabet.

an hour ago

Success of key NATO summit in doubt after Spain rejects big hike in defense spending

BRUSSELS -- The success of a key NATO summit hung in the balance on Friday, after Spain announced that it cannot raise the billions of dollars needed to meet a new defense investment pledge demanded by U.S. President Donald Trump. Trump and his NATO counterparts are meeting for two days in the Netherlands from next Tuesday. He insists that U.S. allies should commit to spending at least 5% of gross domestic product, but that requires investment at an unprecedented scale. Trump has cast doubt over whether the U.S. would defend allies that spend too little. Setting the spending goal would be a historic decision. It would see all 32 countries invest the same amount in defense for the first time. Only last week, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte expressed confidence that they would endorse it. But in a letter to Rutte on Thursday, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez wrote that 'committing to a 5% target would not only be unreasonable, but also counterproductive.' 'It would move Spain away from optimal spending and it would hinder the (European Union's) ongoing efforts to strengthen its security and defense ecosystem,' Sánchez wrote in the letter, seen by The Associated Press. Belgium, Canada, France and Italy would also struggle to hike security spending by billions of dollars, but Spain is the only country to officially announce its intentions, making it hard to row back from such a public decision. Beyond his economic challenges, Sánchez has other problems. He relies on small parties to govern, and corruption scandals have ensnared his inner circle and family members. He's under growing pressure to call an early election. In response to the letter, Rutte's office said only that 'discussions among allies on a new defense investment plan are ongoing.' NATO's top civilian official had been due to table a new proposal on Friday to try to break the deadlock. The U.S. and French envoys had also been due to update reporters about the latest developments ahead of the summit but postponed their briefings. Rutte and many European allies are desperate to resolve the problem by Tuesday so that Trump does not derail the summit, as he did during his first term at NATO headquarters in 2018. After Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, NATO allies agreed that 2% of GDP should be the minimum they spend on their military budgets. But NATO's new plans for defending its own territory against outside attack require investment of at least 3%. Spain agreed to those plans in 2023. The 5% goal is made up of two parts. The allies would agree to hike pure defense spending to 3.5% of GDP. A further 1.5% would go to upgrade roads, bridges, ports and airfields so that armies can better deploy, and to prepare societies for future attacks. Mathematically, 3.5 plus 1.5 equals Trump's 5%. But a lot is hiding behind the figures and details of what kinds of things can be included remain cloudy. Countries closest to Russia, Belarus and Ukraine have all agreed to the target, as well as nearby Germany, Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands, which is hosting the June 24-25 summit. The Netherlands estimates that NATO's defense plans would force it to dedicate at least 3.5% to core defense spending. That means finding an additional 16 billion to 19 billion euros ($18 billion to $22 billion). Supplying arms and ammunition to Ukraine, which Spain does, will also be included as core defense spending. NATO estimates that the U.S. spent around 3.2% of GDP on defense last year. The additional 1.5% spending basket is murkier. Rutte and many members argue that infrastructure used to deploy armies to the front must be included, as well as building up defense industries and preparing citizens for possible attacks. 'If a tank is not able to cross a bridge. If our societies are not prepared in case war breaks out for a whole of society approach. If we are not able to really develop the defense industrial base, then the 3.5% is great but you cannot really defend yourselves,' Rutte said this month. Spain wanted climate change spending included, but that proposal was rejected. Cyber-security and counter-hybrid warfare investment should also make the cut. Yet with all the conjecture about what might be included, it's difficult to see how Rutte arrived at this 1.5% figure. It's not enough to agree to spend more money. Many allies haven't yet hit the 2% target, although most will this year, and they had a decade to get there. So an incentive is required. The date of 2032 has been floated as a deadline. That's far shorter than previous NATO targets, but military planners estimate that Russian forces could be capable of launching an attack on an ally within 5-10 years. The U.S. insists that it cannot be an open-ended pledge, and that a decade is too long. Still, Italy says it wants 10 years to hit the 5% target. Another issue is how fast spending should be ramped up. 'I have a cunning plan for that,' Rutte said. He wants the allies to submit annual plans that lay out how much they intend to increase spending by. For Europe, Russia's war on Ukraine poses an existential threat. A major rise in sabotage, cyberattacks and GPS jamming incidents is blamed on Moscow. European leaders are girding their citizens for the possibility of more. The United States also insists that China poses a threat. But for European people to back a hike in national defense spending, their governments require acknowledgement that the Kremlin remains NATO's biggest security challenge. The billions required for security will be raised by taxes, going into debt, or shuffling money from other budgets. But it won't be easy for many, as Spain has shown. On top of that, Trump has made things economically tougher by launching a global tariff war — ostensibly for U.S. national security reasons — something America's allies find hard to fathom.