Ukraine, NATO, and Germany

By Andrew Stuttaford

Monday, January 31, 2022

 

I don’t agree with everything that Aris Roussinos, writing in Unherd, has to say in his latest article, not least when it comes to his view that “with every day, it becomes more likely that a great hammer blow is about to descend on Ukraine.” Cold comfort it may be, but I still think that a “minor incursion” (in President Biden’s unfortunate phrase) is more probable, but what do I know? Roussinos is also careful to say that “no-one can predict with certainty what will happen next,” adding (and it wouldn’t surprise me if the second half of his sentence tells the true story) that “what happens next will be Putin’s choice, and perhaps he has not yet decided.” Click on the link that Roussinos provides, which is to Michael Kofman’s take on Russia’s next move. It is not reassuring reading.

 

Note this from Kofman:

 

If Putin backs down with nothing, the domestic and international perception will be that he was either bluffing or, even worse, was successfully deterred. Putin will end up with the worst of both worlds, seen as simultaneously aggressive and resistible. Also, while an authoritarian state may care less about domestic audience perceptions, the elites, or the so-called “selectorate,” are another matter. Authoritarian leaders like Putin can find their ability to manage political coalitions diminished if elites perceive them as reckless, incompetent, and increasingly unfit to rule. Putin certainly has options, but this is not a contest in which he can afford to back down cost-free.

 

Both Kofman and Roussinos emphasize the inability of Europe to deter Putin by itself, but it is worth noting, in particular, Roussinos’s focus on the paradox at the heart of Europe’s defense strategy — such as it is:

 

Europe has had since at least 2014 to wean itself off its dependence on Russia, and chose not to, with Germany instead deepening its energy dependency by shuttering its nuclear power plants and constructing the Nordstream 2 pipeline despite American pressure to cancel it.

 

Instead, it is France, energy secure through its network of nuclear power stations, that is playing the greatest EU role in defending Nato’s eastern borders, pushing for a forward presence in Romania and sending warships to the Black Sea. There is a great irony here: the scepticism of Poland and the Baltic states over French proposals for greater European capacity to defend itself from external threats was used by the German security establishment to dampen any enthusiasm for strategic autonomy, with German politicians and analysts making great rhetorical play of the sacred Nato bond. But now that Nato’s integrity is threatened by Russia’s demands that the alliance “pull back” from Romania and Bulgaria, which joined in 1997, Germany recuses itself from involvement. Through its dependency on Putin’s goodwill, it is ironically Germany that has distanced itself from Nato, a negative form of strategic autonomy from the US, if not from Russia. That great weakness at the heart of Europe, Merkel’s parting shot, now threatens the security of the continent’s eastern fringes.

 

One way or another, Nato’s newer Eastern members will now learn the value of America’s security guarantee compared to that of a strong Europe capable of defending itself.

 

But the idea of a “strong Europe capable of defending itself” was, as the Balts and the Poles realized, a dangerous illusion so long as the vehicle for that defense was, to a greater or lesser extent, to be the EU. Even if it could be structured in a way that avoided the difficulty that some EU members are ‘neutrals,’ there’s also the certainty that, in the event of crisis, the EU’s military decision-making would advance at the pace of the slowest, Germany, say or Italy, not exactly what is needed if it seemed as if tanks were about to roll. And NATO states on the Eastern frontline were also well aware that if the EU were to establish, militarily speaking, ‘strategic autonomy,’ that could easily gut NATO. Moreover, it’s not difficult to see how such an arrangement could easily accelerate American disengagement from a continent seemingly intent on going its own way, a development that would be reviewed as profoundly alarming in Warsaw, Vilnius, Riga, and Tallinn, and with good reason.

 

If Europe is serious about doing more about its defense, the best answer (apart from, in many countries, boosting defense spending to the NATO target of 2 percent) is to involve a patchwork of coalitions of the willing (including the U.K. and, from outside NATO, countries such as Sweden and Finland: something like this already happens, alongside U.S. forces, in the Baltic region) aimed at dealing with the challenges in a particular geographic region and, if necessary, beyond.