By Rich Lowry
Friday, February 04, 2022
Bad ideas never truly go away. So it is that an old
left-wing trope from the Cold War has currency again, both on the
populist right and among progressives.
The argument is that Vladimir Putin is so afraid of NATO that
he has no choice but to menace neighboring countries and occasionally invade
them, as he is threatening to do once again in Ukraine.
The root cause of this conflict isn’t NATO, though; it’s
Putin. He’s the aggressor. He is the one who has created an international
emergency from out of nowhere by moving 130,000 troops to the border of a
country that represents no conceivable physical threat to Russia.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is a defensive
alliance. No one sincerely believes, not even the Kremlin, that it is going to
wage a war of aggression against Russia. Think about it. Since when does Russia
have more to fear from, say, Estonia or Poland — countries on the eastern flank
of NATO — than they have to fear from Russia?
If Germany won’t even provide Ukraine with weapons to
resist a potential invasion by Moscow, how is it going to sign up to roll into
the heartland of Russia? And who’s going to provide all the requisite troops
and tanks? The U.S. has a lot of them, but no one else does.
In this respect, Putin could be justified in dismissing
the collective forces of the most important European countries — the U.K.,
France, and Germany — with a version of Otto von Bismarck’s supposed quip, “If
Lord Palmerston sends the British army to Germany, I shall have the police
arrest them.”
Surely, what worries Putin most isn’t any military
threat, but the Western model of free, accountable government that puts his
kleptocratic authoritarianism in a particularly bad light, especially the
closer it gets to Mother Russia.
Even if NATO completely collapsed and Putin swept to
control of all of continental Europe, it’s not clear that his head would rest
easy on his pillow at night, knowing that his government lacks democratic
legitimacy and is being outstripped by countries reaping the benefits of
self-government, the rule of law, independent judiciaries, and constitutional
rights.
The Soviet Union occupied half of Europe and didn’t feel
secure for similar reasons — it wasn’t a normal country. Nor is Putin’s Russia.
NATO isn’t as vital as it was during the Cold War —
institutions inevitably change over time — but it still matters. Maintaining
the alliance and the current European order are clearly in the
national-security interests of the United States. It’s an enormous strategic
benefit to us to have a vast zone in Europe of allied countries that are
prosperous, free, and at peace, and that look to us for leadership.
It speaks to the alliance’s continued deterrent effect
that Putin is, notably, not threatening a NATO country. The alliance has
provided military support in Afghanistan and for post-9/11 counterterrorism
missions. It is a force-multiplier for us to train with and to be interoperable
with European forces. Finally, NATO provides a political cohesion that is going
to be increasingly useful in resisting Chinese efforts to exploit divisions in
Europe.
If Russia resorts to naked aggression in Ukraine and gets
away with it, it will be a blow to the post–Cold War order in Europe. And if
the U.S. ever gives up on NATO, it will undermine all our other commitments
around the world and pave the way for China to supplant the U.S. as the world’s
predominant power.
All this counsels being firm and clear-eyed with Russia
before we get anywhere close to that point. This needn’t preclude an eventual
diplomatic deal, perhaps involving an agreement for Ukrainian neutrality on the
model of Austria or Finland during the Cold War. But we shouldn’t negotiate
with a gun to our head and shouldn’t have any illusions about the man whose
cynicism and power hunger are driving this crisis.
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