Anatol Lieven
When NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte says that “We [NATO] are Russia’s next target. And we are already in harm’s way”, does he actually believe it? If he does not, then he is deliberately lying to Western democratic electorates, and poisoning the Western public debate. If he does, then this is even more dangerous; for it would be evidence that European security elites themselves have fallen into a condition of paranoid hysteria that is impervious to evidence and rationality.
On the whole, I would prefer to hope that he does not believe it. For while the method of inspiring this may be illegitimate, European states do need to strengthen their defences; and a case can be made that given European economic stagnation and acute budgetary pressures, the only way to get European electorates to spend more on the military is to convince them that otherwise the Russian bear will come to eat their children.
Even when it comes to rearmament however, there are dangers in exaggerating the imminent Russian threat. For this encourages a rush to spend money quickly; and as the tragicomic history of British military procurement over the past generation demonstrates, the reasons for our problems with manufacturing arms go well beyond lack of money.
Leaving aside staggering levels of carelessness and incompetence (and the seeming inability of our systems to hold even one senior officer or official responsible), the UK and most European countries have let our wider industrial bases shrink to the point where they cannot support efficient military sectors. To rebuild our industries will take many years. In the meantime, to throw huge amounts of money at weapons will mean huge amounts of waste and delay, or simply buying them from the US.
And this is unnecessary. For the idea of a deliberate, premeditated Russian attack on NATO “within five years” is simply nonsense. President Putin has repeatedly denied any desire or motive to attack NATO – unless NATO attacks Russia - and on this at least we can believe him.
Russian officials and experts have emphasized to me that Russia’s threats against NATO were intended to deter NATO from going to war with Russia over Ukraine, since that would have faced Russia with a choice between defeat and nuclear escalation: “Look, the whole point of all these warnings to NATO has been to stop NATO from joining the fight against us in Ukraine, because of the horrible dangers involved. Why in the name of God would we ourselves attack NATO and bring these dangers on ourselves? What could we hope to gain? That’s absurd!”
And where is Russia supposed to get an additional army from? Unless Ukraine collapses completely, the size of the peacetime Ukrainian army being proposed by Moscow is 600,000 men, presumably backed by numerous reservists. If Russia attacks NATO, then Ukraine will certainly take the opportunity to try to recover its lost territory, and Russia would have to guard against this.
Moreover, any such attack by Russia would completely contradict Russia’s political strategy towards the West, which is to encourage further the growing divisions both between the US and Europe, and between European establishments and the populist oppositions of Right and Left. Any direct Russian attack on NATO would wreck this strategy by reuniting the West in opposition. Why would Moscow have spent such efforts wooing Trump only to face him or his successor with a choice between war or humiliating retreat? Why would Moscow throw away the chance of future reconciliation with a French government under Le Pen and a British one under Farage?
And what could Russia hope to gain compared to the huge risks involved? Apart from the danger of escalation to nuclear war, the Ukraine War has demonstrated the immense contemporary superiority of the defensive. Russia has developed new weapons and tactics, but not ones that produce a breakthrough, but only help Russia in a war of attrition – and Moscow cannot possibly hope to win a war of attrition with NATO countries whose combined GDP is more than twenty times that of Russia.
One of the key reasons for Russia’s failures in Ukraine is that Putin has never dared to demand the public sacrifices required for mass conscription and mobilisation, even in a war whose outcome he regards as a truly vital Russian interest. Why would he dare this for the sake of a probably doomed war of choice with NATO? Rutte has warned that “we must be prepared for the scale of war our grandparents or great-grandparents endured” but it is obvious that Putin does not think that the Russian people are prepared for this.
It is thus entirely within the capability of NATO – without hugely increased military spending – to build defensive lines in the Baltic States and eastern Poland that would deter Russia by demonstrating that any attack would make very limited progress at immense cost. Do our military analysts really think that the Russian establishment has learned nothing from the bitter experience of the Ukraine War?
All that said, there is of course a real risk that clashes or accidents could lead to an unintended spiral towards direct war between NATO and Russia. This could for example begin with European seizure of Russian cargoes on the high seas, leading to naval clashes and a NATO blockade of the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. But that is an argument for prudence, not paranoia.
The wild exaggerations uttered by Rutte and his like act against such prudence. By suggesting that a few incursions by Russian (unarmed) drones and aircraft flying over the sea (not, as Rutte claims “over Estonia”) mean that “we are already at war with Russia”, Western security and officials perilously blur the critical distinction between real war and the sort of limited, non-lethal “hybrid” actions that Western countries too have frequently employed (we should remember in this context that by far the greatest act of sabotage in recent European history, the destruction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, was carried out against Russia). If, God forbid, people like Rutte ever do lead us into real war with Russia, we will all come to understand that difference very well indeed.