Abstract
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is back in the business of deterring aggression on the part of Russia. This return to great power deterrence has brought widely acknowledged military challenges related to power projection, force modernization, and burden sharing but also and notably a political challenge of defining NATO’s collective political ambitions for a continental order in which Russia will not become like the West. Like during the Cold War, the most convincing posture for NATO has become one of deterrence by punishment, building on a fairly dynamic military ability to strike Russia at a point of choosing, as opposed to defending every entry point to Alliance territory. However, NATO, not sure of what political order it represents, struggles to read Russia’s political character and intent and size its military posture accordingly. NATO’s political deficit effectively robs it of a middle ground from where it can build its military posture and invest in its upkeep. In the 1960s, NATO forged such a middle ground as an essential platform for strategic adaptation; today, NATO’s full deterrence posture is suffering from the absence of such a middle ground. Thus, a comprehensive politico-military posture of deterrence vis-à-vis Russia will require NATO’s reengagement with its own political fundamentals.
Highlights
“We have debated this endlessly, and it is just not easy,” one North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) official remarked in early 2015 when asked to identify the principles underpinning NATO’s new deterrence posture.1 Russia had in the course of 2014 “fundamentally challenged our [NATO’s] vision of a Europe whole, free, and at peace”, and NATO spoke boldly of its determination to remain the “essential source of stability in an unpredictable world”.2 whether its deterrence would be by punishment or denial, how it would build on US extended deterrence, and how it would tie into dissuasion and persuasion, that was the question
The military chiefs of the Alliance responsible for strategic guidance and regional defence plans had to cope with changing political and organizational conditions within the Alliance—Greece and Turkey acceded to the treaty; Western Germany was on the horizon as a defence obligation; and NATO gained major commands to take over from its disparate regional planning groups—and the fact, as they dryly noted, that the Strategic Concept “contains no assessment of the capabilities or possible intentions of the enemy”
NATO challenges in terms of limited muscle and institutional memory when it comes to joint high-intensity warfare;8 a political geography that favours Russian interior lines and confounds NATO plans of reinforcement;9 and discomfort with a new interface between conventional and nuclear deterrence
Summary
Á Á Keywords North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) ÁÁÁÁÁ grand strategy reassurance deterrence access denial burden sharing collective defence horizontal escalation
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