The elephant in the room at this week’s NATO summit will be Russia. Deterrence options on the table in Warsaw, including the presence of NATO forces in Eastern Europe, are attempts to respond to the Alliance’s biggest, most unpredictable neighbor. But when NATO leaders sit down to discuss relations with Russia, don’t expect any change to the status quo.
The Alliance faces a near-impossible dilemma: A European security system is hardly conceivable without Russian cooperation, but neither is cooperation with Vladimir Putin as long as he maintains his current stance on Europe. The illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the Russian-led war in the Donbas region have revealed the extent of this dilemma all to clearly.
The West was ill-prepared for Russia’s systematic show of force in and around Europe. It has multiplied provocative flights and aggressive exercises near allied territories, built up military infrastructure in Kaliningrad, occupied Crimea, and continued the pace of military modernization despite debilitating sanctions imposed by the EU and the U.S.
NATO’s response has been firm but measured, not to say modest — ramping up exercises and training and beefing up the Alliance’s quick reaction forces. It should soon deploy a multinational battalion of around 800 troops in each Baltic country and in Poland.
Leaders in Berlin, Washington and Paris have sought to strike the right balance between showing enough resolve and avoiding escalation. Yet despite careful language about balancing strength and dialogue at the Warsaw summit, the Alliance risks delivering too little of both.
Four battalions are unlikely to fundamentally change the Baltic region’s power balance, which remains largely in Russia’s favor. The battalions are, of course, backed by strong Allied forces, including the United States, but Russia holds a joker card: the so-called Anti-Access Area Denial systems that stretch from the Barents to the Baltic and Black Seas. These layers of radar and air defense systems combined with cruise missiles and submarines can seriously complicate allied access to critical regions like the Baltic.
For lack of agreement, Allies have left the thorny question of how to deal with these Russian systems until after the summit. But the lack of a credible strategy could turn NATO’s much talked about “tripwires” into sitting ducks.
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Paradoxically, the deterrence decisions made in Warsaw will still be enough to feed into Moscow’s deep paranoia of NATO’s encirclement. Of course, this is a gross overestimation of Western might. But truth is a relative notion nowadays in Moscow, where the regime is focused exclusively on political self-preservation.
That is why NATO leaders must develop a full-fledged Russia strategy that combines more hard-headed deterrence with more substantial dialogue.
The Alliance cannot afford to dodge important issues like the role of nuclear forces, a strategy to counter Russia’s Anti Access Area Denial systems, and a more robust collective cyber-defense policy. Only then will Moscow begin to realize that it has more to gain by engaging in a substantial dialogue on European security than it does by increasing its unpredictability.
This dialogue should start with NATO and Russia discussing their respective conventional force postures in Europe. They should, for example, agree on new, ad-hoc rules for transparency and warning systems for military exercises. The NATO secretary-general should get a clear mandate from the Allies to take this forward. With more confidence, both sides should then address more contentious issues, such as Russian troop mobilization around Kaliningrad and medium-range missile systems in Europe.
The new U.S. president will also need to sit down with their Russian counterpart and try to cool down Russia’s nuclear saber-rattling, and possibly consider further reciprocal cuts in nuclear arsenals. These steps should help bring back some strategic stability to Europe, which has been seriously shaken since 2014.
Politics in a number of key NATO capitals does not bode well for such an approach, especially when it comes to deterrence. The four main security providers — the U.S., the U.K., France and Germany — are either about to change leadership or enter difficult election seasons. But the risk of turning NATO into a Potemkin alliance — with all the appearance and language of deterrence but little to back it up — is real. This would be a fatal blow to what is left of the European security system.
Fabrice Pothier is former head of policy planning at the office of NATO’s secretary-general and non-resident senior fellow at the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security at the Atlantic Council, Washington, D.C. He tweets at @FabricePothier.