Odd that you don't discuss the trajectory of Tom Hayden, another Chicago 7 defendant in your piece . Perhaps chronicling the many twists and turns of his post 1968 career would have taken up Too much space....

Those twists and turns were indeed dizzying. Within the space of slightly more than a year, Hayden went from campaigning for Bobby Kennedy to giving a keynote speech at the founding convention of the Weatherman.

By the early 1970s, Hayden had established himself in the Westside of Los Angeles, from which he tried very hard to get elected to the highest level office possible - running for the U.S. Senate and the Mayoralty of Los Angeles. Eventually he got elected to the lower house of the California State Legislature, where he served six years before being termed out, fading into obscurity thereafter. During one of those state legislative elections, he and his wife Jane Fonda went to Israel for a "fact finding tour" where they embraced Ariel Sharon. Years later, after she had divorced Hayden, Fonda apologized for that. As far as I know, Hayden never did.

Hayden's last political act was to publish an article on Robert Scheer's website in 2015 in which he both endorsed Hillary Clinton's Presidential Candidacy while at the same time critiquing Bernie Sanders foreign policy from the left. Even at the very end, Hayden retained his hostility to the old left.

SR

WHY THEY LOVED HIM
By Farah Stockman
NYT Op-Ed, Oct. 16, 2020

Kathleen Kingsbury, acting editorial page editor, wrote about the editorial board’s verdict on Donald Trump’s presidency in a special edition of our Opinion Today newsletter. You can read it here.

The Trump presidency has been such a five-alarm fire that many people are understandably consumed with trying to put out the flames or simply survive it. But there will come a day, hopefully in the not too distant future, when people have the breathing room to investigate how the fire got started.

It’s tempting to heap scorn and blame on President Trump’s millions of enthusiastic supporters. Without their adoration, he wouldn’t have been able to do the damage he has done. But there are good reasons to refrain. Calling large swaths of the American electorate deplorable turns out to be an ineffective way to gain their backing.

Another reason: The mess the nation faces is bigger than Donald Trump. If he is voted out in November, the people who cast ballots for him will remain, pining for the policies he promoted. About 40 percent of American voters want tariffs and a border wall. More than half say it’s important to deport more undocumented immigrants.

Much ink has been spilled about whether Trump supporters voted for him out of economic anxiety or racial anxiety, with plenty of studies concluding the latter. But spend time at a dying factory and you might see how difficult it can be to disentangle the two.

For the past four years, I’ve followed a group of steelworkers in Indiana — men and women, Black and white — who had worked at a factory that moved to Mexico. I watched them agonize about whether to train their Mexican replacements, or stand with their union and refuse. I watched them grieve the plant like a parent. I followed them as they applied for new jobs, some of which paid half as much as they made before.

A machinist named Tim carried his steelworker union card in his wallet for years after the factory closed, just to remind himself who he was. Tim grew up in a union household. His dad had been an autoworker; his grandfather, a coal miner.

“We always voted Democrat because they looked after the little man,” Tim told me. “My father went to his grave and I can guarantee you he never voted for a Republican.”

Tim had such faith in Democrats that he didn’t worry when President Bill Clinton pushed the North American Free Trade Agreement over the finish line in 1993. Nor did he worry when Mr. Clinton normalized trade with China in 2000. But then the factory where Tim worked moved to Shanghai. And the next one moved to Mexico.

By the time I met Tim, he loathed the Clintons and the Democratic Party. Democrats had gotten in bed with the corporations, while no one was looking. Tim felt betrayed, and politically abandoned — until Mr. Trump came along.

College-educated people scoffed at Mr. Trump’s promises to bring back the factories. The factories are never coming back, they insisted. But even false hope is a form of hope, perhaps the most ubiquitous kind.

There is little doubt that Mr. Trump is president today because of blue-collar people like Tim who were once a reliable pillar of the Democratic Party. About 55 percent of voters who expected to support Mr. Trump during the 2016 primaries identified as working class, according to a 2015 study by the Public Religion Research Institute. Fewer than a third who backed other Republican candidates identified as such.

In Mahoning County, Ohio, more than a quarter of people who voted in the Republican primary were ex-Democrats, according to The Washington Post. Eighteen members of the county’s Democratic central committee crossed over to cast ballots for Mr. Trump, the county’s Democratic chairman told The Post.

Those defections stemmed in part from anger over millions of factory jobs that went to China in the 2000s. Workers who made instrument panels for G.M. trucks in Michigan, stitched shirts in Pennsylvania and sanded wooden dressers in North Carolina saw alarming increases in child poverty, single motherhood, deaths from alcohol and drugs and reliance on public assistance.

Exposure to trade with China led to “sizable increases in the likelihood of G.O.P. victory in majority-white non-Hispanic congressional districts from 2002-2010,” said a study co-written by David Autor, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Hillary Clinton would have won Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — and thus the presidency — in 2016 had the economic blow of imports from China been half as big, the report concluded.

It is worth noting that many of those same counties that hemorrhaged factory jobs also saw large increases in undocumented immigrants competing for the unskilled jobs that remained — cleaning hotel rooms, slaughtering chickens and mowing lawns. Their arrival fueled still more resentment of the world beyond America’s borders.

Anger about globalization is not confined to the right. It fueled the rise of Bernie Sanders, who won the endorsement of the steelworkers I followed. The same week I met Tim, I interviewed an anarchist facing criminal charges for his role in the disruption of Mr. Trump’s inauguration when windows were smashed and a limousine was set on fire. Why had he became an anarchist? NAFTA and the tyranny of global capitalism, he said.

To many, that anger can seem silly or misplaced. Free trade and globalization have undoubtedly made the country richer. But those riches have flowed disproportionately to the few with capital and education, while globalization’s downsides have piled on the shoulders of the most vulnerable Americans.

NAFTA has come to symbolize a world order crafted by elites, for elites. The deal traded away blue-collar factory jobs in exchange for white-collar opportunities to invest in Mexico’s banking and insurance sectors. Today, even its biggest supporters admit that it resulted in a net loss of American jobs.

In hindsight, it seems inevitable that globalization would cause a backlash. During the height of euphoria about free trade in the 1990s, the philosopher Richard Rorty predicted that workers “will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported.” At that point, he wrote, parts of the electorate “will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots.”

In countries from Britain to Brazil, voters have elected leaders who promised to reverse decades of international economic integration. Most of those populist movements are right wing. The rebellion against free trade and globalization has largely taken the left by surprise. Dani Rodrik, an economics professor at Harvard who is perhaps the country’s most prominent skeptic of unfettered globalization, lamented in an article a few months before Mr. Trump’s election that left-wing parties around the world had failed to present viable alternatives to protectionism and walls.

Since then, the landscape has changed. Joe Biden, who once whole-heartedly embraced free trade, acknowledges the harm it’s inflicted on the working class. Mr. Biden’s economic plan includes a 10 percent tax on businesses that send manufacturing offshore, and a 10 percent tax credit for companies that bolster job growth inside the United States. He has also put forth a plan to spend $2 trillion over four years on green energy infrastructure.

“Biden, the nominally centrist candidate, has a platform that is far more progressive than Hillary Clinton’s on economics,” Mr. Rodrik told me in an email. “But the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and we will see whether Biden will deliver real change if elected.”

Many Americans who longed for a strongman will vote for Mr. Trump again. They revere him for tearing up NAFTA (even if the new version looks an awful lot like the old one) and slapping tariffs on Chinese imports and Korean washing machines (even if his unpredictable trade war forced the deepest contraction in the manufacturing sector in a decade).

Yet, working-class voters who look a little deeper will notice something strange about their perceived champion: He is against unions. His first Supreme Court pick, Neil Gorsuch, helped erode the ability of unions to collect dues and fees in a landmark case. Another strange thing: The Trump administration’s interim trade deal with China focuses far more on opening up the Chinese banking and insurance sectors than on creating blue-collar jobs.

Also, Mr. Trump’s 2017 tax cut favored corporations and shareholders — including those who aren’t American citizens. Money that would have flowed into the U.S. Treasury went instead into their pockets and deep bank accounts. The companies used much of it to buy back their own stock, making their owners richer, instead of hiring and training new workers or increasing pay. The buybacks were so shameless that even Mr. Trump couldn’t defend them.

“We thought they would have known better,” he told reporters.

President Trump is the one who should have known better. He’s either incompetent or he’s a Trojan horse who used blue-collar workers to get into the White House, only to hand over the keys to the one percent. Now that the Trump administration is trying to kill the Affordable Care Act, which millions of people depend on in the middle of a pandemic, it could not be more clear whose side he is on.

Health care is one of the things that sent Shannon, a steelworker I followed in Indiana, back to the Democrats, even though most people in her family still support Mr. Trump.

“He’s bragging that he’s saving all these jobs,” she told me. “But he’s not.”

New York Post Published Hunter Biden Report Amid Newsroom Doubts
By Katie Robertson
NYT, Oct. 18, 2020

The New York Post’s front-page article about Hunter Biden on Wednesday was written mostly by a staff reporter who refused to put his name on it, two Post employees said.

Bruce Golding, a reporter at the Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid since 2007, did not allow his byline to be used because he had concerns over the article’s credibility, the two Post employees said, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation.

Coming late in a heated presidential campaign, the article suggested that Joseph R. Biden Jr. had used his position to enrich his son Hunter when he was vice president. The Post based the story on photos and documents the paper said it had taken from the hard drive of a laptop purportedly belonging to Hunter Biden.

Many Post staff members questioned whether the paper had done enough to verify the authenticity of the hard drive’s contents, said five people with knowledge of the tabloid’s inner workings. Staff members also had concerns about the reliability of its sources and its timing, the people said.

The article named two sources: Stephen K. Bannon, the former adviser to President Trump now facing federal fraud charges, who was said to have made the paper aware of the hard drive last month; and Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, who was said to have given the paper “a copy” of the hard drive on Oct. 11.

Mr. Giuliani said he chose The Post because “either nobody else would take it, or if they took it, they would spend all the time they could to try to contradict it before they put it out.”

Top editors met on Oct. 11 to discuss how to use the material provided by Mr. Giuliani. The group included the tabloid veteran Colin Allan, known as Col; Stephen Lynch, The Post’s editor in chief; and Michelle Gotthelf, the digital editor in chief, according to a person with knowledge of the meeting. Mr. Allan, who was The Post’s editor in chief from 2001 to 2016 and returned last year as an adviser, urged his colleagues to move quickly, the person said.

As deadline approached, editors pressed staff members to add their bylines to the story — and at least one aside from Mr. Golding refused, two Post journalists said. A Post spokeswoman had no comment on how the article was written or edited.

Headlined “BIDEN SECRET E-MAILS,” the article appeared Wednesday with two bylines: Emma-Jo Morris, a deputy politics editor who joined the paper after four years at the Murdoch-owned Fox News, and Gabrielle Fonrouge, a Post reporter since 2014.

Ms. Morris did not have a bylined article in The Post before Wednesday, a search of its website showed. She arrived at the tabloid in April after working as an associate producer on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show, according to her LinkedIn profile. Her Instagram account, which was set to private on Wednesday, included photos of her posing with the former Trump administration members Mr. Bannon and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, as well as Roger J. Stone Jr., a friend and former campaign adviser to Mr. Trump. (In July, the president commuted the sentence of Mr. Stone on seven felonies.)

Ms. Fonrouge had little to do with the reporting or writing of the article, said three people with knowledge of how it was prepared. She learned that her byline was on the story only after it was published, the people said.

Senator John Cornyn says getting Trump to mend his ways is like someone trying to ‘change their spouse.’
Biden talks a lot about Scranton. Some locals don’t like what they hear.
In public, Team Trump projects confidence. In private, it’s a different story.
The article relied on documents purportedly taken from the hard drive to suggest that the elder Mr. Biden, as vice president, had directed American foreign policy in Ukraine to benefit his son, a former board member of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company.

The article also suggested that the elder Mr. Biden had met with a Burisma adviser, Vadym Pozharskyi. On Wednesday, a Biden campaign spokesman said that Mr. Biden’s official schedules showed no meeting between the former vice president and the adviser. Last month, two Republican-led Senate committees investigating the matter said they had found no evidence of wrongdoing by the former vice president.

“The senior editors at The Post made the decision to publish the Biden files after several days’ hard work established its merit,” Mr. Allan said in an email.

The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal have reported that they could not independently verify the data in the Post article, which included hedging language, referring at one point to an email “allegedly sent” to Hunter Biden.

“The story was vetted and The Post stands by its reporting,” a Post spokeswoman said in a statement.

Kenneth P. Vogel contributed reporting.

(Gina Bellafante, the best reporter at the NYT, describes the New School's financial problems as closely tied to the school's idealist roots. It's endowment is low because graduates become trade union organizers or liberal think-tank employees rather than hedge fund managers or lawyers. I got an MA in philosophy in 1967, mostly as a result of dodging the draft. I also have a BA from Bard College that has the same financial problems as the New School and for the same reason. That's capitalist education for you.)

This School Was Built for Idealists. It Could Use Some Rich Alumni.
By Ginia Bellafante
NYT, Oct. 16, 2020

In 1918, as another pandemic roared through the country, now entering its second year at war, a group of prominent intellectuals drafted a proposal for a new kind of university in Manhattan, one that would break with hundreds of years of tradition in higher learning. What became the New School for Social Research only a year later would not emphasize degrees or Latin or pander to youth or privilege. Instead, it would concentrate on meeting the demands of an increasingly turbulent and urban world.

The moment was perfectly tuned for this sort of innovation. The growth of cities, the rise of labor, the stirring movement of the suffragists all required an evolved understanding of the country’s power structures and political arrangements.

The Ivy League, steeped in the values of the ruling class and plagued by a chauvinistic uniformity of thought, was unlikely to supply it. Those schools would not produce a talent pipeline of union chiefs, reformers, housing advocates, social critics — antagonists of an unjust existing order. The New School would generate leaders who prioritized the needs of the common citizen.

Over the course of the next century, the university grew to include five distinct colleges and claim faculty members (Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida, Erich Fromm) who were among the most distinguished thinkers of the 20th century. But like so many institutions rooted in progressive purpose, the university would learn all too painfully that idealism is expensive.

ImageAmong the intellectual giants associated with the New School: Hannah Arendt, in a 1969 seminar.
Among the intellectual giants associated with the New School: Hannah Arendt, in a 1969 seminar.Credit...Neal Boenzi/The New York Times
By the time the coronavirus arrived to darken the fortunes of so many universities around the country, the New School had already been dealing with longstanding financial difficulties. It would soon face a budget shortfall of $130 million and was set to draw down its endowment by an astonishing $80 million, nearly a quarter of its total value.

To put that figure in perspective, the president of Princeton said in May that spending anywhere above 6 percent of the university’s $26 billion endowment — roughly $1.5 billion — was “not sustainable.” The New School had reached the point of existential crisis long before Princeton ever would.

Given the New School’s history, the handling of these challenges has produced a mountain of ironies. Founders of the university had envisioned an institution where faculty was largely self-governing — a model that eliminated “the usual administration retinue’’ to keep overhead expenses to a bare minimum. Now the university was confronting a staff and student body outraged over what they viewed as a bloated and top-heavy bureaucracy amid sudden and desperate cost-cutting.

How was it possible that an institution marketing its progressive credentials to prospective students around the world could remain blind to its own inequities? Why were there now budget cuts to libraries, for instance, when so many executives at the university were making so much money?

In recent weeks, faculty and staff have been in revolt over the implementation of cuts that seem to distribute the burdens of austerity unevenly. When Sanjay Reddy, an economics professor at the university, analyzed compensation data, he found that management salaries had increased by 45 percent between 2014 and 2019. During that same period, revenue increased only 17 percent.

In fact, Mr. Reddy’s data also show that as a proportion of endowment, in 2017 the president at the New School made far more than the president of Harvard. (The university counters that the compensation for its highest-paid employees — as a percentage of total salaries — has decreased over the last seven years.)

In April, the university announced that it was cutting the salaries of the leadership team by 12 percent — and the salary of the new president, Dwight McBride, who had the strange fate of beginning just that month, by 15 percent. But even with furloughs and slashes to retirement plans, this was not going to be enough to shore things up. So on Oct. 2, the New School laid off 122 employees — most of them low-level administrators and clerical workers in what struck faculty and staff as the deepest betrayal of the school’s principles.

A recent letter to the administration from students in the economics department pointed out, that the value of the president’s residence, a townhouse owned by the university for many years now worth roughly $15 million, would cover the salary of the recently terminated assistant in their division for 340 years.

In a video teach-in organized to convey the collective anger around staff reductions, Emerson Brathwaite, an assistant in the drama department, spoke about feeling discarded. “I am the only person of color in the administration at drama for the last 15 years,’’ he said as one of those who was laid off. “How do you guys preach EDI” — meaning equity, diversity and inclusion — “and you release the only person of color you have on your staff?”

A consistent source of grievance among faculty members has been the administration’s reluctance to mine their expertise to manage the current upheaval. This, too, has been perceived as an insult in light of the school’s conception as an engine of modern problem-solving. Instead, administrators hired a corporate consultancy called Huron, an outfit founded by former partners at Arthur Andersen, the accounting firm that collapsed in connection with the Enron scandal.

“The McKinsey-fication of everything is not helpful,’’ Rachel Sherman, the chair of the sociology department, told me. “We have departments full of economists and social scientists. I’m not saying let the theater department do this, or that we can dance our way to solvency.”

When I asked a spokeswoman for the university about these ongoing conflicts she said, “The New School remains strong and resilient," adding that the university’s decision making “was guided by values of equity, inclusion, and social justice, and with input from faculty, staff, and student leaders across our campus.”

Several days ago, Mr. McBride took questions from faculty members in a conference call. They wanted to know about Huron. Mr. McBride answered, in part, that the consultants were able to provide “quantitative analytic capacity.”

This sounded like the vague and suspicious vernacular of management advisers, not the spoken language of a university president and humanities scholar — Mr. McBride has a doctorate in English — who wrote a book called “Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality.”

Mr. McBride went on to explain that anyone you talk to in higher education would acknowledge the profound pressures of the current moment. “They manifest themselves in different ways,’’ he said, “depending on — just to be candid and crude — how rich you are as an institution.”

Here, he had landed on the crux of things. The New School, like Hampshire College, for example, another avant-garde citadel pushed to the brink of closure last year, was not in the practice of graduating students to private equity and venture capital and Citibank.

It would never be rich because its alumni weren’t. The New School’s financial model is almost entirely tuition-dependent; the pandemic simply laid bare its unusual vulnerability. Crushing mistakes had been made long before the new president’s appointment. Chief among them, the decision, a decade ago, to build a university center on Fifth Avenue.

Cultural institutions do not expand their real-estate footprint like home buyers turning to mortgage brokers. They fund huge capital projects by finding billionaires to pay for them, typically in turn for name placement. Instead, the university borrowed the money — more than $300 million of the total $400 million cost.

The New School was born in a moment of tumult; 100 years later it finds itself in an equally chaotic time. At a moment of historic social reckoning it could play a vital role in reshaping the world; instead it has been left in a position of falling down on values it can no longer seem to afford. Here it has company. Increasingly, we are seeing that the upkeep of progressive principles too often costs money progressive institutions don’t have.

Late in the summer, when teachers at Brooklyn Friends, a Quaker private school founded in 1867, sought to unionize, the head of school immediately challenged the move by petitioning the National Labor Relations Board (eventually, after a strike, the teachers prevailed). Brooklyn Friends has one of the smallest endowments in the independent school universe of New York.

To survive, the New School will have to think inventively about new ways to make money: It will surely have to consider selling off real estate and refinancing its debts. Julia Ott, a historian at the university who advances critiques of capitalism, had her own great idea, of the kind impossible to imagine coming from high-priced consultants.

What if the university leveraged its bohemian cachet to raise money from those who socially benefit from proximity to it? Ms. Ott was talking about the uncountable number of hedge fund managers who occupy the West Village to demonstrate that they are cooler than hedge fund managers who occupy the Upper East Side. The cultivation of your self-image should cost at least as much as the price of your townhouse. Wasn’t it time to pony up?

The same white sports reporter who took up Adolph Reed Jr.'s cause now goes after Reed's favorite targets (Kendi and Coates.) Maybe he should stick to sports

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/17/us/white-supremacy.html

I find this fundraising appeal somewhat perplexing. I do not mean to suggest that people should refrain from making donations.

The first five paragraphs seem to be calling for donations to a legal defense fund, e.g.:

The Providence Protesters Relief Mutual Aid Fund is looking to fund raise 20,000 to cover the legal fees associated with the arrests and wrongful charges of our local Providence organizers while they were enacting their first amendment rights.
Please donate so our organizers can continue to fight for systemic change in our community.

However, the appeal concludes:
The Providence Protesters Mutual  Aid Fund is looking to fund raise 10,000 dollars to cover the rest of Damon’s legal fees and secure housing for him so that he can have his own bedroom.

I am not comfortable with appeals that commingle legal defense fundraising and housing expenses, especially when no indication is given as to what percentages will be used for which purposes.

Maybe I'm just an old fuddyduddy who is unduly formalistic, and fearful of downsides of commingling legal defense  fundraising with other expenditures. I hope that the organizers of the defense campaign at the very least become more transparent as to how the funds will be spent.



"

First, I accept Alan G.’s point that the May 29 issue of WV was rather sparse.

For sheer honesty in fessing-up to their inability to recruit, it's hard to beat the statement put up by their English group earlier this year . . .

https://www.icl-fi.org/english/wh/246/frequency.html

Matt K

Color me unsurprised.This would fit right in with the Democrat's rehabilitaion of both Ronald Reagan,and Dubya,and his merry band of war criminals.The two wings of the corporate party have really begun to coalesce under Trump.

Scott Atlas, the Hoover Institution, herd immunity jackass.

https://www.newsweek.com/twitter-removes-mask-tweet-white-house-adviser-1540081

What’s the value of a whale? If you guessed approximately $2m over its lifetime based on the combined value of contributions to ecotourism and carbon sequestration, you’d be spot on, according to the IMF. In their view, our failure to protect whales and the services they provide is a textbook “tragedy of the commons”, which can be solved by establishing whales’ appropriate monetary worth. Increasing the population of great whales, they contend, can be marketed as a fail-safe, “‘no-tech’ strategy to capture more carbon”, with each animal taking a remarkable 33 tons of embodied carbon dioxide with them in their post-mortem descent to the sea floor.

https://novaramedia.com/2020/10/16/whats-the-value-of-a-whale/

In German:
 
Die Nato trainiert den Atomkrieg

    17 Oct 2020
    Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
    Von Thomas Gutschker, Brüssel

Warum die Übung dieses Jahr nicht mehr so geheim ist

Jahrzehntelang ist keine Nato-Übung so geheim gewesen wie diese: „Steadfast Noon“. Einmal im Jahr, immer im Oktober, trainieren die transatlantischen Verbündeten den Einsatz amerikanischer Atombomben. Doch in diesem Jahr geht das Bündnis kommunikativ in die Offensive. Am Freitag besuchte Nato-Generalsekretär Jens Stoltenberg die niederländische Luftwaffenbasis Volkel. Sie ist einer der Orte, wo die amerikanischen Atombomben für den Fall des Falles lagern. „Diese Übung ist ein wichtiger Test für die nukleare Abschreckung der Allianz“, sagte Stoltenberg. Die Übung sei defensiv und nicht gegen ein Land gerichtet. Die Nato suche nicht den Konflikt, sondern wolle den Frieden bewahren. Doch er fügte hinzu: „In einer immer ungewisseren Welt spielen unsere Nuklearkräfte weiterhin eine wichtige Rolle in unserer gemeinsamen Verteidigung.“

Eigentlich hätte er sagen müssen: eine immer wichtigere Rolle. Denn die Allianz reagiert darauf, dass Russland sein nukleares Arsenal stark ausbaut. Mehrfach haben sich Stoltenberg und auch die Verteidigungsminister besorgt geäußert. Das betrifft die neuen Hyperschallwaffen ebenso wie das Mittelstreckensystem SSC-8, mit dem Moskau gegen den INF-Vertrag verstoßen hat. Diese landgestützten Marschflugkörper können mit Atomsprengköpfen bestückt werden, was die strategische Lage in Europa entscheidend verändert: Die Nato muss damit rechnen, dass Moskau einen Konflikt nuklear eskaliert und die gesamte Allianz bedroht. Sie muss deshalb die Stützpunkte verteidigen können, wo die weniger als 200 taktischen Atomwaffen in Europa lagern. Das sind neben Volkel die Flugplätze Kleine-Brogel in Belgien, Aviano und Ghedi in Italien und Büchel in der Eifel. Auch Incirlik in der Türkei ist dafür vorgesehen, doch dürften dort inzwischen keine Bomben mehr sein.

Offiziell bestätigt die Nato keinen der Standorte. Aber an mehreren dieser Orte wird in diesem Jahr geübt – nicht, wie üblich, nur an einem Ort. Die Allianz begründet das mit der Pandemie, sie will große Zusammenkünfte vermeiden. So ist das Einsatzszenario auch realistischer. Mehr als fünfzig militärische Flugzeuge nehmen an der Übung teil, die insgesamt zwei Wochen dauert. Die Amerikaner haben zwei B-52-Langstreckenbomber entsandt, die Bundeswehr nimmt mit ihren in die Jahre gekommenen TornadoKampfflugzeugen teil. Die fünf Staaten mit Atomwaffenlagern verfügen über eigene Trägerflugzeuge. Darüber hinaus beteiligen sich an der Übung die sieben Staaten des „Snowcat“-Verbundes, sie stellen den nuklearen Jagdbombern Geleitschutz.

Die Bundeswehr übt derweil in Büchel, wie sie den Flugplatz gegen Angriffe verteidigen kann. Auch das geschieht ungewohnt transparent. Bei der Übung „Resilient Guard“beansprucht ein „Nachbarstaat deutsches Gebiet“, teilte Generalinspekteur Eberhard Zorn am Mittwoch auf Twitter mit. Für das Flugabwehrraketengeschwader 1 gehe es darum, „die kritische Infrastruktur in einem Raum von fünf bis zehn Quadratkilometern zu schützen“. Die Nato müsse solche Szenarien üben, heißt es in der Allianz, um „widerstandfähiger“zu werden. Das sei wichtiges Element der strategischen Neuausrichtung.