Europe | Jolting back to life
NATO holds its most important summit in generations
The alliance is fortifying its eastern borders. But it is divided over how far to go in Ukraine
Jun 26th 2022
The Economist
When nato published its “strategic concept”—a sort of vision statement—in 2010, things were looking good. “Today the Euro-Atlantic area is at peace and the threat of a conventional attack against nato territory is low,” it declared. “We want to see a true strategic partnership between nato and Russia.” That hope now seems outlandish; Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has just entered its fifth month.
On June 28th nato leaders will gather in Madrid to prepare the alliance for darker days ahead. “This summit will be a transformative summit,” says Jens Stoltenberg, nato’s secretary-general, in an interview with The Economist.
A new strategic concept, which will be approved in Madrid, is the clearest sign of changing priorities. It identifies Russia, unsurprisingly, as “the most immediate threat to our security”. There remain differences among allies over how far to go, though, and other parts of the text are still being negotiated. Those in the hawkish camp—Britain, Poland and other eastern European countries—are keen to underscore Russia’s pariah status. In contrast,
during a visit to Kyiv on June 16th, Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, reiterated his warning that Europe would eventually have to engage with Russia again: “We, Europeans, we share a continent, and geography is stubborn: it turns out that at the end of it, Russia is still there.”
In Madrid the leaders will also sign off on big changes in the alliance’s military posture. Before 2014 nato’s eastern members had no foreign troops based on their soil. After Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea that year, nato deployed multinational battlegroups to Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, the countries where the threat was deemed to be most serious. Although these battalion-sized formations, 5,000 troops in all, are too small to halt a Russian invasion, the idea was that their involvement in a war would trigger a wider international response, including reinforcements from America, to push the invaders out.
Four further battlegroups are now being established in Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia, reflecting the growing threat further south, around Ukraine’s borders and near the Black Sea. But nato’s members also agree that they need to be more than a mere tripwire.
“You don’t have 60 days to get your tanks to Estonia,” Ben Wallace, Britain’s defence secretary, told the Financial Times earlier this month, “because by that stage there will be no Estonia given what the Russians have done in Ukraine.” What is now taking shape is a strategy of forward defence, sometimes known as deterrence by denial: deploying sufficient firepower far enough east to stop Russian tanks breaking through in the first place.
To that end, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania want the battalions in their countries, most of which are slightly larger than 1,000 troops, to grow into brigades, which tend to have several thousand troops and a lot more firepower. They have also pressed for more munitions and heavy weaponry to be pre-positioned on their soil, and for nato to put a divisional headquarters in each country. Such headquarters bring with them heftier capabilities, including surveillance aircraft, longer-range rockets and air-defence systems. Britain, which leads the battlegroup in Estonia, and Germany, in charge of the one in Lithuania, favour the idea, though neither country is likely to place a full brigade’s worth of troops abroad; some will be kept at home at high readiness to deploy in a crisis.
“There is an understanding that perhaps not everything is achievable, at least not right away,” says Tomas Jermalavicius, a former Lithuanian defence official now at icds, a think-tank in Estonia. But he says it would be seen as a “major let-down” if nato does not agree to beef up air and missile defences in the Baltic region, where tensions have grown in recent days.
On June 21st an Estonian defence official said that Russian helicopters had violated the border for a second time in less than two weeks. Russia seems to be flexing its muscles amid a row with Lithuania about access to Kaliningrad, a Russian exclave sandwiched between Lithuania and Poland.
The Lithuanian authorities, prompted by eu sanctions, have been restricting the passage of rail freight from the Russian mainland to the exclave, prompting Russia to threaten “consequences [with] a seriously negative impact on the population of Lithuania”. On June 25th Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, suggested in a meeting with Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus’ leader, that he might give Belarus nuclear-capable missiles and help its planes carry Russian nuclear weapons.
nato is also limbering up in other ways. Previously, countries offered a portion of their armed forces on rotation for a high-readiness nato Response Force of 40,000 or so troops, of whom a quarter were supposed to be deployable within eight days. Under a new “force model”, at least six times as many troops at high levels of readiness will be put at nato’s potential disposal. Under normal circumstances, most of these will remain under national command, but nato’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe (saceur), an American general, will have a better sense of what resources he can muster quickly. If he wants warships to head to the Baltic Sea to send a message to Russia, for example, he will know which members have vessels at the ready. Perhaps most important, particular units will be earmarked for particular regions, giving nato members on the front line confidence that sufficient forces will show up in a crisis.
In some ways, all this adds up to a remarkable revival for nato—a far cry from the “brain death” which Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, diagnosed in
an interview with this newspaper in 2019 amid Donald Trump’s alliance-baiting and Turkey’s invasion of Syria. Mr Stoltenberg boasts of an “unprecedented” increase in defence spending. Three days after Russia attacked Ukraine on February 24th, Germany promised to raise its defence spending to more than 2% of gdp, the nato target. Other countries that have already exceeded that level, such as Poland, are now headed for 3%. This is not a uniform trend—one Estonian official complains that more than half of nato members have not increased their defence budgets at all during the crisis—but, in aggregate, spending is certainly rising.
A new survey, the Munich Security Index, underscores how public opinion has lined up behind these positions. In the g7, a bloc which includes nato’s six biggest spenders, and which will meet in the Bavarian Alps immediately before the nato summit, more than half the people in each country believe that the West faces a new cold war with Russia. Indeed Italians today are more eager to confront Russia than the generally more hawkish Britons were in November, a sign of how drastically things have changed.
The common front has some notable gaps, though.
On May 15th Finland and Sweden, abandoning the last vestiges of military neutrality, both put in bids to join nato. Many officials expected that the Madrid summit would be a celebratory occasion at which their membership would be approved. Instead
Turkey continues to block both applications,
demanding concessions from the two countries on their links to Kurdish separatists and—officials in Helsinki and Stockholm suspect—sweeteners from America. nato officials are seeking to resolve the dispute, so far to no avail.
Another sticking point is China. In recent years, the alliance has grappled with the ways in which China increasingly affects the security of Europe, both through its
deepening partnership with Russia and its influence over such technology as 5g mobile networks. The strategic concept will nod to this, for the first time. The prime ministers of Australia, Japan and New Zealand and the president of South Korea will attend the Madrid summit as guests. To the surprise of many, Japan and South Korea have both imposed sanctions on Russia, partly in the expectation of European solidarity against China and other threats in Asia. Their attendance also reflects the intermingling of European and Asian security in areas that transcend geography: the strategic concept will discuss climate change, cyber-security and the militarisation of space, among other global challenges.
Yet some allies, France and Germany foremost among them, are wary of too hawkish a tone. On June 21st Jens Plötner, foreign policy advisor to Olaf Scholz, Germany’s chancellor, warned that lumping China and Russia together would be a “self-fulfilling prophecy” and a mistake: “I believe our goal must be to try to reduce systemic rivalry [with China] as far as possible.” Others argue that a tougher approach to China is vital to ensuring that nato remains relevant to a future American administration. The spectre of Mr Trump or a comparable populist returning to the White House in 2024 hangs over both the g7 and nato meetings. At the previous G7 meeting Mr Biden told his fellow leaders, “America is back”, prompting another to reply, “Yes, but for how long?”
Perhaps the biggest challenge of all is working out the alliance’s proper role in Ukraine, whose capital, Kyiv, was struck once more by Russian missiles in the early hours of June 26th nato’s members have, individually, provided Ukraine with the
largest transfer of weapons to any country in such a short period since the second world war. The alliance’s commitment to mutual defence has protected them from Russian retaliation. But nato, as an organisation, has provided only non-lethal aid, like helmets and blankets. The curiosity is that the European Union, an ingénue in military matters, is currently providing more weapons to Ukraine than nato, the bedrock of collective defence in Europe.
Though all of its members agree that the alliance should not intervene directly in Ukraine, Britain and like-minded countries want nato to step up its support. Not only France and Germany but also, perhaps surprisingly, America, oppose this on the grounds that it would allow Russia to claim it was fighting nato, rather than just Ukraine, and would increase the risk of escalation.
Mr Stoltenberg says that the alliance will unveil a comprehensive assistance package in Madrid to help Ukraine “with the fundamental transition from Soviet-era equipment to nato equipment”. It will also help Ukraine move further towards a decentralised command structure, he says, rather than the top-down Soviet model it inherited, and which has hamstrung Russia’s army in recent months. That nato is committing to this path is in itself a blow to Mr Putin, who launched this war in part to halt and reverse Ukraine’s political and military integration with the West. But transforming Ukraine’s armed forces will be the work of years. That is scant consolation to the soldiers holding the line in the shell-pocked towns of Donbas in the coming weeks and months
NATO holds its most important summit in generations | The Economist
