Putin's NATO: Reshaping the Political Space
11 Jun 2015
By Jordan Clifford for World Policy Institute
This article was external pageoriginally published by theexternal pageWorld Policy Institute on 29 May 2015.
Earlier [last] month in Moscow, Russian troops, along with modernized nuclear weapons and the new Armata T-14 external pagebattle tank, paraded through Red Square to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Soviet victory over Germany in World War II. Yet less than a historic celebration of liberation, this show of force was more directed at external pageNATO amid increasing tensions over the situation in Ukraine. To Russia’s great advantage, the Ukrainian crisis exacerbates the cleavages within NATO and serves as a precedent-setting case, which will ultimately determine the future of the alliance.
Many in the West point to Putin’s vision of a restored Soviet Union as the impetus for Russian aggression in Georgia in 2008 and, more recently, in Ukraine. Despite the years of peace and prosperity since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the West’s external pagepromise to not expand NATO eastward, the alliance has continually welcomed former Warsaw Pact members, ignoring Russian protests writ large against encroachment upon their interests and influence.
Therefore in Putin’s eyes, NATO expansion is the root cause of Russian aggression, not his aspirations to reestablish the old Soviet sphere of influence (though that would be a plus too). Simultaneously, Putin is keenly aware that the establishment of NATO greatly tipped advantageous military capabilities away from Moscow, and would never launch an offensive, at least not outright. Recent actions taken by Moscow, however, along with the dangers of a deteriorating NATO, increasingly convey a Russian strategy aimed distinctly at breaking the alliance. As in Georgia and now Ukraine, Putin is merely testing the waters.
Both crises have widened a growing policy gap between NATO partners that increases with everyday that the alliance fails to agree upon a unified response. On one side, the Warsaw Pact partners who have more recently been inducted into the alliance (The Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland joined in 1999; Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia five years later; and finally, Albania and Croatia in 2009) make up a “new NATO” block that is more sensitive to the threat posed by Russia, as each were invaded once before.
In contrast, the “old NATO” countries, which sit far to the West in the European Union, have long enjoyed a more secure area of influence void of Soviet and Russian interference. According to the European Union Institute for Security Studies index, EU defense spending has consequently decreased 13.6 percent since 2007. Furthermore, only four countries meet the NATO recommended expenditure of 2 percent of GDP on defense—the U.S., U.K., Greece, and Estonia. The financial crises currently crippling EU member states do not help either.
The Baltic states, which face the most direct threat from a revanchist Russia, “have served as inspiration for the maintenance of a healthy military relationship among NATO allies and have led to commitments of NATO ground forces and air forces (on a rotating basis) in the Baltic States and Poland,” says retired U.S. Army Colonel, Peter Mansoor. However, they have been warning NATO of a looming threat since well before the Crimea crisis.
The 2008 Georgian war alone should have served as a more urgent call to arms. As external pageDouglas Lovelace, Jr., director of the Strategic Studies Institute suggests, “the [Georgian] war highlighted weaknesses of the NATO and EU security system as it pertains to Eastern Europe and specifically to the countries of the former Soviet Union.”
The move, directed against Georgia’s planned NATO induction, also gives credibility to the trepidation felt by the new NATO camp. Recognizing the threat, Baltic countries have continually stepped up their capabilities and spending, especially in wake of Russia’s annexation of Crimea. In further response to Russian aggression, Lithuania restarted its conscription program and increased its defense spending by 50 percent, along with Latvia by 15 percent, Estonia by 7.5 percent, and Poland by 20 percent. Yet the old NATO powers have not made such drastic moves, illustrating an increasingly disoriented cohesiveness in strategy.
Putin is thus using this wedge, along with age-old Russian deception, to drive a foreign policy strategy aimed at further divorcing the thinking of new NATO from the old. Crimea, therefore, becomes a provocative and precedent-setting case. Though Ukraine may not be a de facto member of NATO, Russian tactics on the ground are alarming to its neighbors who are.
Moscow continues to deny the presence of Russian troops and aid in the East of the country, though the presence of unidentified “little green men” and advanced weapons systems wielded by insurgents suggest otherwise. Moreover, a recent external pagemove by Putin to keep any Russian troop deaths secret during peacetime operations adds further evidence that Russia is involved in Ukraine. This strategy of misperception has been used by Russia since World War II and has proved invaluable.
As Article Five of the NATO Charter declares, “The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them” will prompt a reaction. There are three main requirements to meet the threshold of NATO reaction: a NATO member, another state, and an armed attack. By operating along grey, opaque semantics, Putin can institutionally defeat the alliance. Russia’s constant denial of any involvement in the region and the use of unidentified soldiers makes classifying the crisis as an ”armed attack” even more difficult, especially when it must be decided unanimously by NATO members.
Such deception and uncertainty have led many to fear that the alliance’s timidity over Ukraine will set an even more upsetting precedent for other new NATO countries. Putin may use the same tactics to foment unrest in the Baltic, where one million ethnic Russians live under the auspices of NATO. And the questions would remain: is this Russia’s doing, and is it in fact an armed attack? It is becoming more plausible to imagine the old NATO countries handling the situation as an incident of intrastate turmoil—saying no, while new NATO members will undoubtedly say yes, referring back to Georgia and Ukraine.
The Ukraine situation also affords Putin the opportunity to test the response times of NATO forces, seeing how far he can push them—as he did in the case in Georgia. In 2014, NATO jets scrambled more than 400 external pagetimes to intercept Russian fighters and bombers flying near member air space. Russian jets have also made dangerous maneuvers, nearly colliding with NATO fighters and commercial airliners. This fifty percent increase in air activity has also made null and void all normative safety behavior: Russia neither files flights nor communicates with air traffic control entities. Moreover, Russia has conducted four undeniably significant military exercises within the last four months, which have prompted similar drills by NATO countries. Increased activity also increases the possibility of accidental collision or mistake resulting in unilateral action, and ultimately conflict.
Russia’s use of unidentified soldiers, the increase in military exercises, and the heightened tensions over Crimea show Moscow’s capacity for meaningful, even if opaque, action. The institutional shortcomings of Article Five and the “armed attack” criteria are proving useful for Russia’s tactics to circumvent any official NATO response and undermine the alliance’s integrity. By virtue of being a political body, the lacking unanimity over NATO’s decisions also hampers its efficacy.
If such divergence continues, it will also strain the relationship between new and old NATO members. Putin’s actions thus far well articulate the lopsided capability ratio between the two sides. He can adjust his foreign policy accordingly into the future, thus allowing Russia to overcome challenges wrought by the alliance with greater facility. Under the current circumstances, the Crimea precedent is playing right into Putin’s hands, which means that NATO powers must stop bickering and start developing a unified strategy.