Анджела Стент - Putin's World - Russia Against the West and with the Rest

Would Russia’s NATO membership have been the answer? Strictly speaking, NATO’s open-door policy meant that Russia was theoretically eligible to join, although that might have raised questions about whether NATO was ready to come to Russia’s defense in a possible conflict with China. But Russia’s membership in NATO was probably never a realistic option, as explained by a senior official in the Clinton administration:

The reason that Russian membership in NATO never became a real possibility was more fundamental—and not always easy to talk about. How one felt about Russia being a member depended on how it became one, on how its accession was interpreted by both sides. Was membership a matter of geopolitical entitlement, or was it something to be earned? Was Russia to be asked to join because of its power or because it honestly embraced NATO’s goals? The way Russia had been whisked into other international institutions did not provide a good model. 59

Russians, as Bill Clinton once remarked, were “lousy joiners.” They did not like joining organizations whose rules they had not designed and had to accept. And many of the organizations in which they had hitherto been members—with the exception of the UN—had been dominated by them because they had written their rules.

In the years since the Soviet collapse, Russia has been very vocal about what it does not like but usually unable to present a positive agenda for change. It has largely been reactive to Western policy, and when it has been proactive, as in Ukraine in 2014, it has often used military and cyber instruments of coercion in its neighborhood and beyond.

Looking back over the past twenty-five years, it is difficult to make the argument that NATO enlargement alone led Russia and the West into a dangerous downward spiral of relations. NATO enlargement offered the post-communist states a security framework in which they have been able to develop and prosper. It is only one of the reasons for the deterioration in Russia’s relations with the West. The more important reason is that Russia has not, over the past quarter century, been willing to accept the rules of the international order that the West hoped it would. Those included acknowledging the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the post-Soviet states and supporting a liberal world order that respects the right to self-determination. Russia continues to view the drivers of international politics largely through a nineteenth-century prism. Spheres of influence are more important than the individual rights and sovereignty of smaller countries. It is virtually impossible to reconcile the Western and Russian understanding of sovereignty. For Putin, what counts is power and scale, not rules.

The election of Donald Trump has raised serious questions about whether the US and Russia will continue to have such opposing views about European security. Indeed, Putin has a new trump card in his campaign against NATO: the American president. During the election campaign, candidate Trump sounded two consistent themes about Russia and NATO. Of NATO, he said, “It’s obsolete, first because it was designed many, many years ago. Secondly, countries aren’t paying what they should,” and NATO “didn’t deal with terrorism.” 60Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov echoed President Trump’s assertion that NATO is “obsolete,” saying, “NATO is indeed a vestige [of the past] and we agree with that.” 61

The other consistent Trump theme during the US election campaign was that Vladimir Putin is a great leader and the United States and Russia should be friends and jointly fight “Islamic terrorism.” An “America first” vision, moreover, is in line with Putin’s views about absolute and limited sovereignty more than with the traditional Euro-Atlantic understanding of sovereignty and of the mutual support embodied in Dean Acheson’s words in 1949.

Despite the White House’s apparent disdain for NATO, Trump’s cabinet appointees told a different tale. At the February 2017 Munich Security Conference, Defense Secretary James Mattis reassured his worried audience that NATO remained the bedrock of transatlantic security, saying the “transatlantic bond remains our strongest bulwark against instability and violence.” 62The stark contrast between the White House and the Department of Defense raised serious questions about what US policy going forward would be. Nevertheless, the prospect of a lessened US commitment to NATO has galvanized the rest of the alliance to recommit to increasing their own defense spending.

The July 2018 Brussels NATO summit exposed the deep rift between Trump and his allies, raising questions about whether NATO is facing an existential crisis. Trump began with a breakfast at which he attacked Angela Merkel for being “captive” to Russia because of Germany’s imports of gas: “We’re supposed to protect you against Russia, but they’re paying billions of dollars to Russia, and I think that’s very inappropriate.” 63As he berated his allies, a grim-faced NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg tried to push back politely, pointing out that most allies have already increased the percentage of their GDP they spend on defense. The next day Trump interrupted a session with the Ukrainian and Georgian presidents and insisted at an emergency meeting that the US would pull out of NATO unless all the allies pledged to increase their defense spending immediately. Eventually he claimed victory, saying that they had agreed to do so. 64In fact, the NATO communiqué to which Trump signed on was very tough on Russia. It contained language about “Russia’s aggressive actions,” which had adversely affected the European security environment, and committed NATO to further deterring Russia while at the same time continuing the NATO-Russia partnership “based on respect for international law and commitments.” 65

Given the uncertainty about NATO’s future, it is quite possible that by the end of Trump’s term in office, two fundamental elements of NATO may have been further eroded: the US commitment to Europe and the Euro-Atlantic agreement to defend Europe against aggression from a hostile power. The possibility of European populist parties gaining power or at least leverage to diminish their own governments’ investment in NATO could create a radically different European security landscape.

If NATO does survive in its present form, the West has limited options. It can work with Russia while eschewing previous attempts to persuade Russia to sign on to a rules-based order. In that case, the issue will be how the alliance deals with Russian actions in the post-Soviet space going forward. For the time being, NATO serves a useful purpose for Russia. It provides a most convenient main opponent.

The Moldovan president Igor Dodon walked up to the podium at the 2017 Saint Petersburg International Economic Forum plenary. He criticized the European Union and the Association Agreement that Moldova had signed with Brussels in 2014. Then he turned to Putin, who smiled as he declared: “We are different from the Western world. We have got different cultures, we have got different values, we have different customs…. We used to have an anti-Russian foreign policy, but after the presidential elections we decided to rectify this situation.” 3Rarely does the leader of such a small, poor country—population 3.6 million, average per capita income $3,000 per year—have the opportunity to appear on stage at a major international conference with the same status as President Putin and his other guest, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi. But Dodon was there for a specific purpose, to show that Moldova was the “un-Ukraine.” It had realized the error of its ways by seeking to turn West and align with the European Union, had repented, and was now returning to Mother Russia. No matter that Moldova’s pro-European prime minister shortly thereafter contradicted Dodon, claiming that he had no authority to “declare or make such decisions.” 4For the thousands of conference attendees, Dodon’s message was clear: Russia’s neighbors were rethinking their international alignments, expressing remorse about their flirtation with the West, and gravitating back to Moscow.