The Alliance is groping for a line of conduct in the fog of strategic uncertainty
In an environment of catastrophic degradation of global security caused by the actions of the United States and NATO to promote and support Kiev's Russophobic policy, plans for further expansion of the alliance and an unrestrained build-up of military preparations, Washington and Brussels are trying to find ways to adapt the alliance to the realities of modernity. At the emergency meetings of the NATO summit on February 25, the NATO Council at the level of Foreign Ministers (March 4), in an atmosphere of haste, nervousness, confusion and strategic uncertainty, the key factors that have a decisive influence on Western policy were considered. The Ottawa Conference on Security and Defense, organized by the Conference of Defense Associations on March 9-11 in Canada, at which NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg delivered a keynote speech, took an important place in the development of ways to adapt the alliance to the challenges and threats of our time.
Strengthening the NATO-EU bond
An obvious anti-Russian bias was also adopted by the informal meeting of the EU on defense and economy on March 10-11, which demonstrated the growing bond between the EU and NATO on an anti-Russian basis. In this context, it was stated that a turning point has come for Russia's relations with the EU, since Russia is the largest supplier for the union, providing 40 percent of gas, more than a quarter of oil imports and almost half of all coal supplies. The dependence on Russian energy resources varies in the member states, so the EU leaders decided not to set a deadline for refusing Russian supplies. Germany, Italy, Hungary and Austria depend the most on energy resources from Russia. The European Commission considers it possible to reduce gas consumption by two-thirds this year and completely abandon supplies from Russia "long before 2030." According to the European REPowerEU plan, it is planned to diversify gas supplies by increasing the volume of imports of liquefied natural gas, pipelines from suppliers not from Russia, increasing the volume of production and imports of renewable hydrogen and biomethane.
The new norm of the Alliance
In accordance with the policy of double standards adopted in the United States and NATO, attempts are continuing to hold Russia responsible for the aggravation of the military-political situation in the world. NATO members are trying to find the key areas of adaptation of the alliance and identify the fundamental factors affecting the international situation. Such factors include the alliance:
"Russian military planners skillfully used classical elements of Soviet and Russian military thought and combined them with tools, tactics and capabilities of the XXI century”
- Russia conducting a special military operation in Ukraine;
- the decision of President Vladimir Putin to transfer the deterrence forces to a special combat duty mode;
- the need to ensure the unity of NATO as the main geopolitical tool of the West in the confrontation with Russia;
- NATO's decisions on the implementation of the Alliance's defense plan;
- the problem of further expansion of the Alliance, the involvement of neutral states (Sweden and Finland) in the alliance;
- reform of NATO's civil and military structures;
- adoption of new features;
- strengthening the military potential of the alliance.
The strengthening of NATO's military preparations and the expansion of the geopolitical scale of its activities is linked to the emergence of a "new norm of the alliance, a new security environment, a new reality", the emergence of which is associated with the allegedly increased aggressiveness of Moscow. Under the cover of diplomatic chatter, the alliance is making a gradual transition from operations outside the zone to strengthening collective defense in Europe using advanced capabilities, with increased defense spending, high readiness, combat groups and everything else, a new command structure.
Among the important factors contributing to the formation of a new norm, NATO includes the rapprochement of Russia and China, which conduct joint exercises, interact more closely militarily and politically. It is noted that China has not condemned the invasion of Ukraine. An important reason for the nervousness of the alliance is the joint statement of President Putin and President Xi at the beginning of the Olympics, where China criticized the expansion of NATO.
The US and NATO are concerned about deterring Russia
These issues form a set of problems that should receive a coordinated assessment of the member states of the bloc on the eve of the June summit in Madrid and the adoption of a new strategic concept of the alliance.
Given Russia's determination to achieve its goals, the US and NATO operations justify their own military preparations with an imaginary concern for maintaining control over the situation and the desire to prevent escalation.
One of RAND's recent works "Containment and Escalation in Competition with Russia" serves as a guide for such activities. Taking into account the ideas expressed in the work, the goals of urgent measures to prevent Russia's operation in Ukraine from escalating into a direct conflict with NATO today are, firstly, to prevent uncontrolled escalation and reduce the risks of NATO being drawn into a military conflict. To do this, the US and NATO military commands must maintain their existing communication channels with their Russian counterparts. These channels can be used to provide additional transparency - if it does not undermine operational security - about the nature of the transfer of US and NATO forces to the allied states bordering Ukraine.
NATO believes that today and in the future it is important to have a clear idea of how the transfer of forces from the United States and Canada to Europe can be used to deter Russia from additional aggressive actions in the competitive struggle, what military steps can provoke Russia to escalation, what are the escalation options for Russia and their consequences, what preventive measures or mitigating measures can be taken by the United States and NATO to reduce the likelihood of escalation.
Along with military and military-technical measures, it is important to coordinate the efforts of the allies in carrying out information and psychological measures, which by the strength of their impact on the population and troops are comparable in results.
Secondly, it is in the interests of the United States and its allies that the Russian military, at a time when they are acting under extreme pressure, should not be surprised by NATO's activity and misinterpret the deployment of troops from an ally as an intervention in Ukraine.
And finally, military-technical assistance to the Ukrainian military should be coordinated between allies, carefully calibrated and carried out out of the public eye. U.S. and NATO military leaders should take concerns about escalation into account when deciding what to deliver and how.
One of the urgent military measures approved by the NATO emergency summit on February 25 is a significant additional deployment of defensive forces in the eastern part of the alliance.
For the first time, NATO has deployed its response force, which has more than 130 aircraft on high alert and more than 200 ships from the Far North to the Mediterranean Sea.
An advanced detachment consisting of about 500 soldiers from the French Army's Alpine huntsmen unit ("Alpine Hunters") has arrived in Romania. A motorized infantry unit of the Belgian Armed Forces is also heading there.
There is an understanding in NATO that the alliance's aircraft and military contingent should not be sent to Ukraine, and the introduction of a no-fly zone over Ukraine may lead to the spread of the conflict to other European countries.
NATO's long-term strategy
An intensive exchange of views continues in NATO on the main provisions of the new strategic concept as a document reflecting the alliance's long-term strategy in forming a "new political dimension" of the bloc, concerning the revision of existing stereotypes in assessments and reactions to changes in the world situation.
Following the well-known strategy of NATO to weaken and collapse Russia, Secretary General Stoltenberg said: "Russian aggression has created a new norm of our security when fundamental principles are challenged with the use of force." From this, in particular, it follows that a new political dimension should give the "consultations" the status of a new NATO function in addition to the three main functions defined in the 2010 strategic concept: collective defense, crisis management and joint security. The approval of such an approach will lead to a clear re-evaluation and activation of Article 4 of the Washington NATO Treaty.
Already in the short "London Declaration" of the heads of state and Government, adopted at the meeting dedicated to the 70th anniversary of NATO in December 2019, consultations were twice mentioned. It was confirmed that NATO is an important forum for security consultations if the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the Contracting Parties is threatened. In this regard, the Secretary-General will have to put forward a proposal for a forward-thinking process to further strengthen the political dimension of NATO, including consultations.
Along with the development of a new political dimension, it is considered necessary to counter threats by strengthening the resilience and responsiveness of NATO societies, military structures and critical infrastructure. This task is so important that it is also supposed to be included as an additional core function in the new strategic concept.
The NATO members proceed from the fact that the Ukrainian crisis, included in the broader context of the ubiquitous and obviously far-fetched Russian threats, will become one of the main prerequisites for the formation of new strategic approaches that meet the realities of our time. However, this is far from the only reason. A powerful catalyst for change is the ruthless struggle of the United States to maintain its global monopoly on power and the status of the only power of the world order. One of the new approaches was the decision of the Foreign Ministers to include Finland and Sweden among the permanent participants in all NATO crisis management meetings. Note that this is another step towards drawing the two neutral Scandinavian states into NATO.
Steps to adapt NATO to the realities of our time have been taken for a number of years. The new NATO military strategy "MS-400" was adopted at a meeting of the Alliance's Military Committee at the level of the Chiefs of General Staff on May 22, 2019 in Brussels. This is a closed document on the practical priority military plans and preparations of the alliance, as well as on the directions of development of its military capabilities.
The document is based on an analysis of the challenges and threats to the alliance, as they are seen by the military. Quite frankly, such a vision was discussed at the NATO Defense College conference in Rome, "NATO's Response to Hybrid Threats," where it was about two strategic simultaneous challenges to the alliance from the east and south, emanating from very different actors and characterized by various forms of modern hybrid warfare.
The revision of NATO's functions and tasks as a response to far-fetched security challenges is carried out under the guise of the following strategic considerations, united by common characteristics.
First, each of the three key functions of NATO covers challenges of different scale, number and density in the areas of collective defense, crisis management and security through cooperation. Secondly, challenges from the east and south require a full-scale NATO response and are associated with threats from ballistic missiles and the proliferation of WMD.
The threat from the east is traditionally associated in NATO with Russia's actions, and the conduct of a special military operation in Ukraine reflected Moscow's sophisticated, complex and multivariate approach to using force to achieve decisive political goals developed by Russian politicians and the military. Russian Russian military planners skillfully used the classical elements of Soviet and Russian military thought and combined them with the tools, tactics and capabilities of the XXI century, which made it possible to create a new model of military operations adapted to the Russian strategic situation. This model is based on the factor of surprise and the use of forces and means with difficult to determine affiliation, such as cyber and information warfare, proxy warfare and special operations forces.
Political sabotage, economic pressure, intelligence and special operations are widely used. A high degree of readiness for intervention was demonstrated by the ordinary Armed Forces of Russia. The continuity and synchronization of threats, including conventional and unconventional methods, form the basis of the hybrid warfare strategy allegedly developed in Russia. It should be noted that such a strategy was first formulated by American military specialists at the beginning of the third millennium and is being successfully tested by the United States in hybrid armed conflicts in many parts of the world. In the context of threats and opportunities in the east, China is still very cautiously mentioned.
In the south, the alliance faces a completely different challenge compared to the interstate competition allegedly imposed by Russia. This challenge has unique characteristics that require a unified NATO response based on strengthening the defense of the southern flank against a wide range of risks and threats, including civil war, extremism, terrorism of various scales, popular movements and the proliferation of WMD. The catalysts of extremism, violence, terrorism and civil war are the lack of food, drinking water, poverty, poor governance and poor health care, the complex nature of challenges and threats and ways to counter them.
Challenges from the east and south create new norms for NATO and require a new political dimension built on a flexible strategy and a reliable framework.
The strategic documents of the bloc should provide for a hybrid response to hybrid threats, include conventional and unconventional actions, and ensure cooperation at all levels. NATO members emphasize that these challenges will persist for many decades and will require non-traditional approaches of the alliance at the political-diplomatic, informational-psychological, military and military-technical, economic, financial, intelligence levels.
Alexander Bartosh, Corresponding Member of the Academy of Military Sciences
The newspaper "Military-Industrial Courier", published in issue No. 10 (923) for March 22, 2022
