U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters in Mumbai, India, last Tues. with regard to Donald Trump's diesel deal with Vladimir Putin that you can travel to any country in the world and that they'll tell you they’re having a diesel problem. For multiple countries, he said, it's a very dangerous situation. "So of course we’re concerned about what they [Ukraine] strike," he said. A few minutes later Rubio added that, "Economies collapse over a lack of energy." Nothing substantive was revealed about what he and U.S. Amb. Nicholas Merrick discussed at the airport when he made a refueling stop in Prague two days later, but this didn't prevent Czechs from telling the embassy on its Facebook page what they thought of Rubio and his boss. Many of the comments related to Andrej Babiš's statement that Trump was pulling a dirty trick on Europe with the diesel deal. One commenter invoked the Munich Betrayal, another spoke of a new Chamberlain. Even by Facebook standards, the comments were harsh. Most alarming to the State Dept. should be the degree to which comments by the once-Trumpist Babiš, who has his own diesel problem, are now influencing Czech opinion of the United States.
Josef Janning, a senior associate fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations, wrote last week that Friedrich Merz’s government is in an existential crisis and will devote its full attention to domestic policy. There is neither the time nor energy left for international affairs or Europe, Janning said. Chancellor Merz nevertheless found time yesterday afternoon for Czech Pres. Petr Pavel, and they spoke mainly about speeding up the highway and high-speed-rail connections between the two countries and extending this collaboration to include defense and security issues. Pavel had attended a meeting on Tues. of the BRS National Security Council in Prague, but he didn't say whether his conversation with Merz related at all to a topic that has been on the mind of Czech PM Andrej Babiš. After the cabinet meeting on Mon., Babiš said that "we’ll need our military primarily at home. We’ll have to see how things turn out with that migration situation in Western Europe. Let's hope we won’t ever need our military to defend ourselves." Babiš is worried about uncontrolled mass migration from Germany. Let's hope Merz took time out of his busy domestic schedule to speak with Pavel about ways to prevent it.
Karel Řehka's second-round Senate victory on Sat. was as important for STAN as Jan Grolich's first-round victory was for KDU-ČSL a week earlier. STAN is gaining not only a prominent voice in the Senate for challenging the government of Andrej Babiš on security and defense issues, but also potentially a future presidential candidate for running to succeed Petr Pavel. Babiš had the chance earlier this year to dismiss Řehka as army chief of staff for repeated insubordination under two defense ministers, Jana Černochová (ODS) and Jaromír Zůna (SPD), but he didn't act. It seemed at the time that Babiš didn't want to give Řehka's political ambitions a boost by making him a martyr for the opposition. That made political sense, esp. given that Pavel probably would have refused to remove Řehka. But then Babiš did little to try to prevent Řehka from winning his Senate race against Lucie Kantorová of ANO, which didn't make political sense. Unless of course Babiš knew from a friendly ally that Řehka wasn't to be messed with. In fact, ever since Babiš's first government appointed Řehka to head the NÚKIB cybersecurity office in 2020, Řehka has acted as though he knew he had an Uncle Sam watching over him.
The Fiala government decided on Sept. 27, 2023, to acquire 24 F-35 fighters from the United States for Kč 106bn, but the official record shows that the deciding voice was that of Army Chief of Staff Karel Řehka. PM Petr Fiala said in announcing the purchase that the decision was "based on the recommendation of the army." Řehka then thanked the cabinet for its "very brave decision." In the army's 2035 development plan, which was approved by the cabinet three months later, Řehka said that defense spending of at least 2% of GDP as of 2024 provided a "predictable funding model" for meeting the military's objectives. Yet now as a newly elected STAN senator, Řehka told TV Nova that if someone says, as the Babiš government does, that we’ll be reliable allies and will meet our commitments while limiting defense spending to just 2% of GDP, they're either not aware of what they’re saying, or they’re lying. Řehka will have his international debut as a senator on Fri. at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. He'll be able to take credit for buying the F-35s and to explain to his American hosts that although the payments for them consume a lot of the defense budget, that has nothing to do with why the Czechs risk becoming unreliable allies.
Ex-Army Chief of Staff Karel Řehka told the Hudson Institute in his international debut as a senator last Fri. that the last thing we want Russia to believe is that the United States is leaving Europe and that Europe is weak and not united. The tragedy with regard to the Pentagon's ongoing Europe force posture review, he said, isn't that a brigade or two are being pulled out, but rather how it's done and communicated. When the Russians and Chinese want to weaken our societies and our alliances, he said, they usually find a real problem or some real friction somewhere and attack it, and that's why the bigger problem with regard to the posture review is the strategic communication. In his own speech last night, Pres. Petr Pavel didn't specifically mention Russia, China, Ukraine or the U.S. but said that Czechs are failing to notice or refusing to see clear signs of crises that may arise. "The more obvious and dangerous these crises are," he said, "the more we seem afraid to believe they're real." The tragedy of Pavel's speech, to borrow from Řehka, was the strategic-communication aspect. Instead of explaining to Czechs that they need to forgo expensive foreign vacations and prepare for hard times ahead, Pavel left the impression that his main interest in speaking of crisis is to get Andrej Babiš to spend more on weapons.
