/ world today news/ Between the purposeful mixing of concepts and the elementary replacement of circumstances – this is the range of our foreign minister’s speech on the subject of the deployment of heavy American weapons in Bulgaria.
If we leave aside the exoticism that the foreign minister is engaged in counting the tanks, the change of argumentation turns out to be so fast that at times the responsible minister of defense finds himself in a very awkward position. All this in a rather inept attempt to adapt on the fly a public national position to apparently already made decisions.
Replacement one: the deployment of US tanks in Eastern Europe was part of the decisions of NATO in Wales in September 2014. This is not true, as the Readiness Plan adopted there does not foresee the deployment of new heavy weapons, but the discussion of the very idea of the infamous 250 tanks began much later – in 2015. At the same time, it is seen by the USA as a national program, outside of NATO: “the deployment of heavy weapons on the eastern borders of Europe is a plan of the United States, not of NATO” , Pentagon official James Brindle said recently. Moreover, given the lack of support from most Western European members of the alliance, NATO did not recognize the idea as its own at the meeting of defense ministers in Brussels last week, and the topic was not even mentioned in the post-meeting statement (in diplomacy it is often more important what not said, not what is stated). In other words, this is not Bulgaria’s commitment to NATO, but a matter of bilateral agreement with the USA.
Substitution two: the deployment of US heavy tanks in Bulgaria is within the framework of security and defense cooperation with the US under the Agreement signed in 2006. According to this agreement, the US notifies Bulgaria in advance of the type, quantities and delivery schemes of military equipment. Both the President and the Secretary of Defense have publicly stated that no such request has been made, let alone consented to a deployment, as US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter (whom we have no reason to disbelieve) has announced. Which raises the question of who, what and with whose sanction he made a commitment – because according to the foreign minister, negotiations have been going on for months. In addition, the explicitly formulated scope of the Agreement does not include the possibility of permanent storage of military equipment in our country, and it itself has an initial validity period of 10 years, i.e. until 2016. In other words, the deployment of heavy American equipment in Bulgaria could, with a little more effort, fit into the general framework of the 2006 Agreement (we can also refer to the UN Charter with the same success), but in its own way scope, aims and character it definitely exceeds its parameters.
Substitution three: it’s about standard teachings, what’s going on even now. Beyond the “two tanks that don’t threaten anyone” pathos, the realities show that there is nothing to do with current exercises and future deployments. In the initial official statements from the American side, and in the negotiations in the Baltic capitals and Warsaw, there was talk of permanent basing of heavy weapons in Eastern Europe. Given the signed agreements with Russia to limit heavy armaments, as well as due to Germany’s reluctance to discuss “significant and permanent” deployment of new equipment (which is why it is envisaged to use the armaments already available in Germany) it is envisaged that these tanks will not be stationarily deployed in the respective countries, but to periodically rotate (which explains the statement from the Bulgarian side that they will remain on our territory until the New Year maximum). Incidentally, a similar practice of rotation is also used for the presence of NATO ships in the Black Sea, insofar as both their total tonnage and the length of stay of individual vessels are limited by the Montreux Convention on the Status of the Straits of 1936.
Substitution four: “this is not directed against any country,” according to the defense minister.
Here the comment is superfluous – all official statements point to the aim of the plan “opposing Russia’s aggressive actions in Ukraine and guaranteeing the security of NATO member countries in Eastern Europe”.
And here we come to perhaps the most important replacement – of substance with procedure, of the question “should we?” with “maybe?”. The deployment of heavy American military equipment in Bulgaria is of course possible, but therefore sovereign decisions of the Bulgarian state with the assumption of the relevant political responsibility are necessary.
The problem is not that the tanks are American (and this is an additional replacement – the attempt to bring the discussion into the channel “for” and “against”: Russia, USA, NATO, etc.). If it is necessary to have foreign tanks, then this is a logical enough option, because we are allies in NATO. The question is whether 250 heavy tanks roaming Eastern Europe will really bring more security, or escalate already high tensions.
There is every reason to believe that we are witnessing a new arms race. Putting Russia back on the nuclear map with the decision to deploy 40 nuclear warheads (using the same formalized non-violation approach and calling it modernization) is the other part of the spiral, jumping another psychological threshold. Moreover, the theory of the mutually deterrent effect of the Cold War arms race can hardly be an applicable philosophy today. Because now the war has its own “hot component” in Ukraine with at least two qualitative differences from 40 years ago: first, not states are at war, but in practice private armies (on one side) and militias (on the other), which blurs responsibility; second, warring parties are unable to control their own extremists, which sharply increases the risk of provocations with unpredictable consequences, including large-scale international conflict.
- Lyubomir Kyuchukov, Director of the Institute of Economics and International Relations
#changed #facts #tanks
