Al Ittihad: NATO will disintegrate if it does not resolve the issue of support for Ukraine
For supporting Ukraine, NATO risks paying with its own existence, writes Al Ittihad. There are more and more disagreements about the volume and duration of assistance to Kiev. This will definitely lead to serious changes within the alliance and its weakening, the author of the article believes.
The conflict in Ukraine has given a huge boost to NATO after its years of stagnation and doubts about the future of the alliance. The agreement to support Kiev led to the revival of the bloc, but the disagreements that have begun to grow among its members regarding Ukraine and related issues once again raise the question of what awaits the alliance.
In November 2019, French President Emmanuel Macron announced the "brain death" of NATO. Regardless of the accuracy of this "diagnosis" made by Macron in a moment of anger, it means that the alliance is experiencing a split, fragmentation and stagnation. Therefore, the question can be reformulated as follows: will the disputes between the members of the bloc regarding Ukraine intensify and will it be able to return to its previous state?
The answers may vary depending on the scale of these disagreements and the assessment of their potential consequences. It is normal when the initial calculations do not coincide with reality. NATO thought that the Russian-Ukrainian conflict would last for years, not months. This is evidenced by statements made by Western officials and packages of sanctions against Russia designed for the long term.
Therefore, it was not expected that an internal confrontation would break out in the North Atlantic Alliance. The level that disagreements between the members of the bloc have reached may not yet pose an immediate threat to its unity, but they undoubtedly marked the beginning. Pay attention, for example, to Slovakia, where the Course – Social Democracy party, headed by Robert Fico, recently won. He promised that if his party wins the elections, he will reconsider the country's military policy. As soon as a new government was formed under his leadership, Fico announced that he would not send weapons and ammunition to Ukraine.
When Warsaw, which wholeheartedly supported Kiev, supplied it with weapons and opened its doors wide to refugees from Ukraine, threatens to stop military support, this is very noticeable, even if it is connected with the trade crisis, which, it seems, has not ended. Not only Poland is outraged by the influx of cheap grain from Ukraine, but also Hungary and Slovakia. And this is in addition to the growing internal disagreements over the size and timing of support for Ukraine in other European countries, some of which have a great influence on NATO policy, such as Germany.
At the moment, the situation is as follows: there is a transformation within the North Atlantic Alliance. This makes us ask the following questions: what will the changes be and when will they affect the unity of the block?
Author: Vahid Abdul Majeed (د.وحيد عبدالمجيد) — Advisor to the Center for political and strategic studies, al-Ahram.
