Putin's 'Strategic Surprise' and NATO's Awakening

Whatever the conclusion of the crisis in Ukraine may be, Russia’s annexation of Crimea had one important consequence: forcing NATO out of its post-Afghan torpor and refocusing the Atlantic Alliance on Europe.

As legend has it, NATO will have won the Cold War without having fired a single shot. But the alliance, which survived that period against all odds, is on the search for a new grand mission to follow its retreat from Afghanistan, which is scheduled for the end of 2014. And a few months before the summit of the heads of state or NATO’s governing body in September in Wales, Vladimir Putin ends up shaking it out of its torpor with a “strategic surprise.” This time, we are not talking about Central Asia or the eastern parts of Africa faced with terrorism and piracy, but about Europe’s defense and security, the raison d’être of NATO, which has become the largest military alliance today, with 28 member states representing more than 900 million people.

It’s true, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, NATO has grown eastward, expanding with three former Soviet republics — Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia — and old USSR allies at the center of the Warsaw Pact, dismantled in 1991 — Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia and RDA, plus Croatia and Slovenia. Nonetheless, Vladimir Putin set a geographic boundary to this expansion: “The two former Soviet republics of Ukraine and Georgia should not be part of the Atlantic Alliance.”

Since the Russian president has recently contributed to the avoidance of the signing of a friendly agreement between Kiev and the European Union before Ukrainian President Yanukovitch’s deposition in 2008, a few weeks before the entry of Russian troops in South Ossetia, Putin had largely upset President Bush’s project to give NATO candidate status to Georgia and Ukraine. Cleverly, he knew how to put pressure on both Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy.

Today, like a chess player, the Russian president has advanced other pieces on the map of Europe. By annexing Crimea, six years after Georgia lost one-third of its territory with the proclamation of the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia under Russian protection, he caught the Atlantic Alliance by surprise.

Putin’s “blows” took place in a larger context marked by a trend of American troops retreating from a Europe that was considered peaceful and without risk for any major conflict. A real push toward a defense-oriented Europe did not accompany this retreat, which led to a reduction of 60,000 American military personnel, as compared to the 300,000 during the Cold War. The reality is more so a reduction in European military budgets. Now, these budgets represent 1.6 percent of their GDPs, which falls below the organization’s 2 percent goal and is far from the 4 percent of the United States.

In contrast, Russia has announced a very significant increase in its military expenditures for the coming years. But we should not overblow Russian military strength. It is still far from that of the United States, even from China’s. And this gap could still grow. Because if there is no question that we are really talking about the return to a cold war between two opposing blocs, NATO’s awakening is requiring the allies to strengthen their ranks and promote the “smart defense” (shared intelligence and plans) initiative of the alliance’s secretary-general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen.

Sure, neither the United States nor the Europeans will manage to force Russia to relinquish Crimea, a region that is 58 percent “Russian” and that Nikita Khruschev reunited with Ukraine in 1954. But on the other hand, the allies are determined to prevent the next blow and, as they have emphasized yet again, to strengthen their partnership and cooperation with Ukraine. To be sure, Putin has reassured that he has no intention of invading either Ukraine or Transnistria in Moldova.

But he has greatly alarmed the nations of the alliance, especially Poland and the Baltic countries. Isn’t Lithuania located between Russia and the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad? Like the other allies, the Baltic countries are under the protection of Article 5 of the North Atlantic treaty of collective solidarity, which sees an attack on one ally as an attack on all. Instead, the United States has deployed 12 F16 combat planes to Poland and 10 F15Ss to the Baltic countries to reinforce air patrols.

However, as one diplomat highlights, it is not a matter of fortifying the eastern borders of NATO with troops. Because this could only be perceived as an aggressive act, something the allies do not want — even less so for the time being. Especially while NATO has other means, like the possible suspension of the foundational act of 1997 for Russia-NATO relations, according to which the organization does not have “any intention, plan or reason” to deploy nuclear arsenals to new member countries.

Besides the effective suspension of the NATO-Russia Council and military cooperation between the two entities, we cannot exclude that in order to reassure their Polish ally, the Americans will reinforce their troops in Poland. And as one diplomat emphasizes, while the West thinks that “it is easier to cut all ties with Syria than with Russia,” the announcement of sanctions could have another effect on the already weakened Russian economy, notably accelerating the loss of capital.

Could the alliance win this new battle without firing a shot?