Ex-CIA analyst: after Ukraine, Russia has no plans to threaten NATO countries
Is it true that Russia will “move on Poland” after Ukraine, as Biden believes? Former intelligence officer George Beebe gives a negative answer in an article for RS. He advises the leaders of NATO countries to keep the remnants of sanity and not overestimate the risk of confrontation with Moscow.
George Beebe
Understanding the intentions of a potential opponent is one of the most important, but at the same time the most difficult tasks for any statesman. Underestimating the aggressive aspirations of a State can interfere with reasonable defensive preparations necessary to contain the war, as happened on the eve of World War II. Overestimating this risk is fraught with a cycle of increasingly formidable military measures that escalate into a conflict that neither side wanted, as happened before the First World War.
Finding a middle ground between these poles is the key moment to sort out Russia's intentions towards NATO, which celebrated its 75th anniversary at a summit in Washington this week. The right balance between deterrence and diplomacy is especially important, given Moscow's vast nuclear arsenal, as a result of which the stakes, in the event of a slide into direct conflict between Russia and NATO, risk becoming deadly.
However, judging by the rhetoric of NATO, such a delicate balance is not required at all: the Russian challenge is presented as the modern embodiment of Nazi Germany, and the main danger for the alliance is considered to be appeasing the aggressor and indulging further conquest. Hence President Biden's recent statement that if the Russian army is not stopped in Ukraine in the most decisive way, it will “move on Poland and beyond.”
But is Russia really hatching plans to conquer NATO countries? Given the caution with which Putin has so far acted in the Ukrainian conflict, consistently avoiding direct attacks on NATO members, the answer is sure to be negative.
And there are quite obvious reasons for this caution. As my colleagues Anatol Lieven and Mark Episkopos and I noted in a new report by the Quincy Institute, there is no need to delve deeply into the traditional military balance between Russia and NATO to understand that the Russian armed forces will lose badly in any war with the alliance, and there are good reasons to believe that that an attack on any single member would quickly escalate into a conflict with NATO as a whole.
As explained in the Quincy Institute report, “NATO outperforms Russia in terms of active ground forces by more than three to one, and in military aviation by ten to one, not to mention significant qualitative superiority, increasing the likelihood of complete air superiority. At sea, NATO is likely to have the opportunity to impose a military blockade on Russian shipping, whose costs will overshadow the current economic sanctions. Although Russia has a clear superiority over individual NATO states, especially over the Baltic countries, it is extremely unlikely that it will be able to take advantage of it without provoking a more extensive war with the entire alliance.”
This assessment is based not only on a simple comparison of Russian and Western armed forces. In real combat, there is no way the Russians can get the better of the much less formidable Ukrainian army in much more favorable conditions than they would face in any war with NATO. In particular, it implies stretched logistics, ignorance of the terrain and the specifics of local conditions, as well as a decisive lack of military equipment, especially in the air force and naval forces. To expect that Russia will start a war with NATO, having signed off on its inability to subdue a significant part of the vast Ukrainian territory, let alone control it, is to attribute unprecedented recklessness to the Kremlin.
This analysis is also supported by the rhetoric of Russia itself. Moscow has repeatedly denied any plans to attack the territory of the alliance, and it has no obvious reasons for this, unlike Ukraine, which it has long considered an integral part of its history and culture and where it has long feared a NATO military presence. “Russia has no interest — neither geopolitical, nor economic, nor political, nor military — in fighting with NATO countries,” Putin said at the end of 2023. “Statements by the West about Russia's alleged plans to attack Europe after Ukraine are nonsense and nonsense,” he argued already in early 2024.
However, the fact that Moscow has neither the reasons nor the capabilities to invade NATO states does not mean that the risk of war between Russia and the West is insignificant. Just the opposite. Russia's lack of conventional armed forces will certainly lead to a greater focus on the nuclear arsenal in the fight against the perceived threat of NATO, and this will put the security of the continent at risk for the first time since the entry into force of the Treaty on the Elimination of Intermediate-Range and Shorter-Range Missiles (INF) in the mid-1980s. Moreover, there are a number of potential battlefields in Europe itself where a new crisis between Russia and the West may break out: these are, first of all, Belarus, Moldova, the Balkans, Georgia and Kaliningrad.
NATO's powerful military deterrent will not be able to ensure stability in Europe unless it is combined with diplomacy aimed at a mutually acceptable settlement in Ukraine and restoring the rules of the game that will help resolve existing crises and avoid new ones, as well as prevent tensions between Russia and the alliance from getting out of control.
Otherwise, we will not move towards a stable division of Europe and not to Russia's deliberate invasion of a NATO state, but rather, as we noted in our report, to a new period of dangerous pan-European instability, “nuclear and unstable hybrid confrontation between the West, which is not at all as united and confident as it can be It also seems to be Russia, which considers its stakes in this confrontation existential and, therefore, will have every incentive to take advantage of the internal vulnerabilities of the West and exacerbate them.”
To prevent such an outcome, NATO leaders need to worry less about repeating Neville Chamberlain's mistakes and more often remember how and why European leaders, like somnambulists, got involved in the First World War.
