NATO Should Mend Its Rift With Russia — With Conditions
By James Stavridis, Dean Emeritus of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University
For many Americans, the news that Russia was severing relations with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization may have been a surprise only in the sense that few would have suspected such relations ever existed.
Yet since 2002 there has been a NATO-Russia Council to help avoid conflict and address shared concerns. Restoring that partnership would be in the interests of both the Western alliance and the Kremlin, but should not happen until Russia shows it is willing to play by the longstanding rules.
When I was military commander of NATO in the early 2010s, I dined often with Russia’s ambassador to the alliance, Dmitry Rogozin, a big bear of a man who now heads Russia’s space program. We had blunt but informative (and vodka-fueled) conversations about everything from the Russian invasion of northern Georgia — a strong NATO partner, but not a member — to our shared interest in a stable Afghanistan.
Similarly, the head of Russia’s armed forces at the time, General Nikolai Makarov, visited my headquarters outside Brussels, where we discussed avoiding conflict in the Arctic and how we could improve counterpiracy operations in the Indian Ocean. I met with him and the Russian defense minister in Moscow and at NATO headquarters in Brussels several times. Again, we disagreed on a variety of topics, notably the U.S. missile-defense systems in Eastern Europe, but the NATO-Russia Council was a good venue to discuss differences, and I was hopeful that over time things would improve.
It hasn’t turned out that way. Relations between NATO and the Kremlin are at the worst point since the end of the Cold War. What has happened, and what can the Western partners do to deal with a more assertive Russia?
The invasion of Crimea in 2014, just as I left, was the beginning of a sharp downturn, and the resulting Western sanctions have continued to rankle (and politically damage) Russian President Vladimir Putin. Moscow’s support for the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria further damaged cooperation. More recently, there have been a series of cyberattacks against the U.S. and Europe linked to the Kremlin, while a nerve-agent attack on Putin’s principal political opponent, Alexey Navalny, was followed by his jailing.
Things came to a head earlier this month, when eight military officers were accused of spying and expelled from the Russian delegation to NATO. Russia then withdrew all its personnel, shut the doors of the mission and forced the closure of the NATO office in Moscow. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, at one time a big supporter of Russia-NATO cooperation, said rather tartly that if alliance officials had any further business with the Russian Federation, they could take it up with the Russian embassy in Belgium.
To understand the big picture here, it helps to look at things from the Russian perspective. Moscow feels overlooked and perhaps freer to create mischief as the West focuses on the Pacific. At the NATO ministerial meeting in Brussels last week, officials seemed to spend far more time discussing China than Russia. The approach to Moscow seems to be two-track: offering limited cooperation on a handful of issues while confronting behavior that is unacceptable, such as aggressive military flights near NATO members’ airspace.
But the alliance doesn’t have the luxury of simply looking past Russia. Putin’s refusal to increase gas supplies as prices skyrocketed may give the European democracies a case of buyer’s remorse about the just-completed Nord Stream 2 pipeline that runs under the Baltic Sea to Germany. Russian forces don’t seem likely to leave Syria anytime soon, let alone Georgia and Ukraine. Putin canceled appearances at both this week’s G-20 meeting and the environmental confab in Scotland, COP-26.
Nor is it possible to look at the China threat without factoring in a Russian role. Putin and President Xi Jinping of China are ratcheting up cooperation, including joint naval exercises in not only the northern Pacific (a Russo-Chinese flotilla just circumnavigated Japan) but also in the Atlantic and the Baltic Sea. Despite its declining population and non-diversified economy, Russia is still has a world-ending nuclear arsenal, and Putin is a clever tactician with a high appetite for risk.
As NATO develops its new strategic concept for an age of great-power rivalry — long overdue, as the last one was rolled out in 2010 — a continued emphasis on Russia is crucial. Yes, there must be future focus on climate change, cybersecurity and, of course, China; those are the big changes of the past decade. But “beware the bear,” the reason NATO was formed after World War II, must keep primacy.
This means increasing NATO vigilance in the Arctic, which will be an increasingly contested region; continuing to sanction Russia for its occupations of Georgia and Ukraine; strengthening cyber defense for all member nations through the Cybersecurity Center of Excellence in Estonia; conducting military training in Georgia and Ukraine, and moving ahead with the “action plans” for their eventual membership; and standing up to Russian provocations at sea and in the air around the Baltic and Black Seas.
As for the NATO-Russia Council and the now-shuttered delegations in Brussels and Moscow, the alliance should be willing to reinstitute them under the right conditions. But that will require a strong and united front, and keeping Moscow at the center of NATO’s strategic focus.