Having invaded Ukraine and deployed its troops in a
compliant Belarus, Russia has suddenly extended its military power to the
borders of several NATO countries, including the Baltic nations. If Russia succeeds in taking over Ukraine and keeping bases
in Belarus, as many experts now expect, its forces will extend from the borders
of the Baltics and Poland to Slovakia, Hungary and northern Romania, making it
significantly harder for NATO to defend its eastern flank. And only a thin corridor some 60 miles long between
Lithuania and Poland separates Russian forces in Belarus from Kaliningrad, the
Russian territory on the Baltic Sea that is stuffed with missiles easily
capable of flinging conventional or nuclear warheads into the heart of Europe. “The level of risk for NATO has simply and suddenly
increased enormously,” said Ian Lesser, a former American official who heads
the Brussels office of the German Marshall Fund. “The possibility of conflict
with Russian forces in Europe or elsewhere, like the Black Sea, the Sahel,
Libya or Syria, could be dangerous and will be an issue for years to come.” “This changes everything for NATO,” said Ian Bond, a former
British diplomat who heads foreign policy at the Centre for European Reform.
“Russia’s aim is to extinguish Ukraine as a sovereign country in Europe. Now we
need to worry about everything, and we need to get serious again.” NATO has already responded in a small way to the Russian buildup,
sending some extra troops and aircraft into member states closest to Russia. On
Thursday, NATO decided on further, unspecified deployments, and there are
serious discussions about finally scrapping the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act,
which put limits on NATO deployments in the eastern members and which Russia
violated eight years ago when it invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea. “Russia’s actions pose a serious threat to Euro-Atlantic
security, and they will have geostrategic consequences,” said NATO Secretary-General
Jens Stoltenberg. “We are deploying additional defensive land and air forces to
the eastern part of the alliance, as well as additional maritime assets.” Any discussions with Moscow about redrawing Europe’s
security architecture take on a different cast with Russian troops deployed on
NATO’s eastern flank. Even if military spending goes up considerably in response
to the new Russian invasion, as it did modestly after Russia took Crimea, new
and permanent deployments of forces, equipment, planes and even missiles will
be a major blow to the past 30 years of relative peace, prosperity and
complacency in the alliance. “NATO had been focused on all these important and
fashionable things with little to do with its core responsibility, like climate
and cyber,” Lesser said. “But we forgot that there are ruthless people out
there, and for them, foreign policy is a blood sport.” NATO was already rewriting its 12-year-old strategic concept
and debating a replacement for Stoltenberg, who leaves office Oct 1. Now those
tasks become ever more pressing. “NATO is already in a mode to think more
broadly about its purpose,” Lesser said. But a serious effort to deter a newly aggressive Russia will
not be so simple, said Benjamin Hodges, the former commander of US forces in
Europe, now with the Centre for European Policy Analysis. Just moving troops
and equipment around in a post-Cold War Europe has become far more cumbersome,
with some bridges and railways no longer able to handle heavy armour. “Political leaders will be surprised at how long it takes to
move stuff given EU road regulations and without special priority” on the
German rail system, Hodges said. NATO also lacks significant air and missile defences for a
modern air war that, as in Ukraine, starts by hitting significant
infrastructure like airports, roads and rail, he said. Just to protect the
large US air base at Ramstein, in southwestern Germany, would take an entire
battalion of Patriot missiles, he said, “and we have only one Patriot battalion
in Europe that’s ours.” Once, the Fulda Gap in Germany was a worry of Cold War
strategists, heavily defended by US troops to prevent the Warsaw Pact from
rushing tanks from East Germany to the Rhine River. Now the concern is the
Suwalki Corridor, a narrow gap that connects Poland to Lithuania that, if
captured, would cut off the three Baltic nations from the rest of NATO. The corridor separates Belarus from Kaliningrad,
headquarters of the Russian Baltic Fleet and isolated from Russia when the
Soviet Union imploded. An emboldened Putin might very well demand direct access
from Belarus to Kaliningrad, suggested Robert Kagan of the Brookings
Institution in a column for The Washington Post. “But even that would be just one piece of what is sure to be
a new Russian strategy to delink the Baltics from NATO by demonstrating that
the alliance can no longer hope to protect these countries,” he wrote. “The threat now to Poland becomes acute,” said Bond,
recommending that the United States quickly put two heavy battalions in Poland
“for a start.”  The deployments in the three Baltic states also need to be
beefed up, he said. In 2016, NATO agreed to put battalions in Poland and the
Baltic nations for the first time. Known as an “enhanced forward presence,”
they consist of about 1,100 soldiers each, combat-ready but small, more like
tripwires than anything that could slow down a Russian advance for very long. In 2014, NATO also established a “very high readiness joint
task force,” currently under the command of Turkey, that is supposed to deploy
at short notice against threats to NATO sovereignty. It consists of a land
brigade numbering around 5,000 troops, supported by air, sea and special
forces, with more reinforcements able to be deployed within 30 days. But the smaller force is essentially untested, and the
larger Response Force of which it is the spearhead is only one-quarter the size
of the Russian invasion force into Ukraine. The larger force was created in
2002 and was meant to be rapidly deployable, but its 40,000 members are based
in their home countries, and gathering them can be a slow exercise. There are also questions about the vow of NATO members to
send weapons to Ukraine as it fights the Russians or to help mount an
insurgency. Efforts to supply arms to Ukraine by air, rail or road could be
intercepted or obstructed by the Russian military, Hodges said, even if the
shipments are delivered by contractors and not NATO soldiers. And what country is going to dare support an insurgency
knowing that the Russian military is on the other side of the border? In general, the chance of accidental confrontations leading
to escalation cannot be ruled out in such a tense atmosphere. Analysts point to
the way Turkey shot down a Russian fighter plane near the Syria-Turkey border
in 2015. “It didn’t escalate then, but today it very well could,” Lesser said. At the same time, the arms control agreements that tried to
keep the Cold War cold are nearly all defunct, raising new threats about
deployments of conventional forces and medium-range missiles. Russia has also
been extremely active in cyberwarfare, hacking the German Parliament,
interfering in the last French election and issuing mounds of local-language
disinformation on social media. Altogether, the new threats should reinforce the logic of
stronger European Union and NATO cooperation on defense, Lesser said, “and
should knock a lot of the politics and theology out of that relationship.”
Coordinating with the EU over its areas of strength — like economic sanctions,
cyber resilience, energy security and information warfare — can only help both
organisations, he said, given that 21 of the EU’s 27 members already belong to
NATO, and others, like Sweden and Finland, are closely allied. “We need the Americans,” Bond said. “But we should not drop
the idea of European autonomy and more self-reliance.” There are doubts in
Europe about whether President Joe Biden will run or win again in 2024 and
worries that former President Donald Trump or a Republican more in tune with
his isolationist, America-first credo will take office. “Europe will be very exposed, so it must increase military
spending and efficiency, filling real capability needs,” Bond said. “All this
becomes vital now, and not just a bunch of nice ideas.” © 2022 The New York Times Company