Not one inch
A discussion of NATO and Putin and how we got here on Fresh Air yesterday:
My guest, Mary Elise Sarotte, is the author of a book about the history of NATO in the years just before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It’s called “Not One Inch,” and it helps explain how NATO, Ukraine and Russia got to where they are today. It’s based in part on papers she got declassified after fighting for years to get them released. Sarotte is the Kravis professor of historical studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and she’s a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She’s also the author of an earlier book about the collapse of the Berlin Wall.
Knows her stuff.
Putin could move on a Baltic state next, and that would get NATO involved, and that would be…scary.
NATO came into existence in 1949 as an alliance of 12 countries against the Soviet Union. Basically, its job was to prevent Soviet tanks from rolling into Western Europe, and it tried to do that through a combination of nuclear deterrence and conventional forces on the ground, including in West Berlin, which was an island inside East Germany, where I was studying in 1989 as a student abroad, which is where my interest in this topic comes from. And that alliance is, in essence, a Cold War alliance. And Article 5 came out of that construct. But Article 5 endures to this day. NATO persisted through the end of the Cold War into the post-Cold War era. And the new member states all enjoy that very same guarantee. There were critics at the time that Naito was expanding to the Baltics. Of course, the decision to expand NATO in the post-Cold War world was a very controversial decision. And there were critics who said, among other things, we should not give Article 5 to countries on the assumption we’ll never have to live up to it.
But now we have given Article 5 to the United States, and NATO members collectively have extended it to 30 countries. And so we are bound by this article to defend the Baltics. And this is no small challenge. There was a war game conducted by the American think tank Rand in 2016. The goal of the war game was to estimate how long it would take Russia to conquer the Baltics, and the answer was measured in hours. So given, you know, that kind of challenge, if NATO really were to face a Russian, shall we say, incursion in Article 5 territory, this could swiftly become very difficult and be a very serious issue.
Let’s not do that. Let’s Putin not do that so that we don’t have to do that. Let’s not any of this.
We’ve had proxy wars with Russia, in Vietnam and Afghanistan, but not the in your face kind.
So the Cold War was, in many places, also a hot war, but there was no direct military conflict between, to put it bluntly, Americans and Russians. And so this is a new situation where we’re looking at Americans and their European allies directly fighting with Russians. That is something that has – did not happen in any serious extent. There might have been isolated incidents but not to any serious extent during the Cold War.
But then Bush 2 came along.
SAROTTE: Well, NATO actually stated Ukraine will become a NATO member at its Bucharest summit in 2008. By 2008, many countries had already joined NATO, and Ukraine and Georgia were showing interest as well. There was a NATO summit in the Romanian city of Bucharest, and at that summit, there was a fight essentially between President George W. Bush and his advisers, such as Condoleezza Rice, and Europeans who thought it would be a bridge too far, because of the friction with Moscow, to put Ukraine and Georgia into NATO. And so what resulted was a compromise, which was unfortunately the worst of all possible worlds.
NATO did not take any practical steps to make Georgia or Ukraine members. In other words, if a country is really going to become a member, once that’s clear, there’s a series of practical steps that immediately kick in. None of those happened. But as a compromise, the alliance issued a summit declaration with the words, Georgia and Ukraine will become members of NATO. The idea was on some distant day in the future, and we’re not actually going to take any steps to implement it. And so that was a compromise to make President George W. Bush and the Americans happy.
Except some of the Americans, such as Rice, opposed the idea.
The problem was that when President Vladimir Putin of Russia saw that, he took it at face value and said, Georgia and Ukraine will become members of NATO over my dead body, and immediately found an excuse to take military action in Georgia in 2008. And that de facto put an end to Georgian hopes of membership because the NATO alliance is loathe to take on a new ally that already has a preexisting conflict on its territory. And that makes sense because as we discussed before, if you take on a new country and you extend Article 5 guarantees to it, you’ve immediately made yourself party to that conflict. So in 2008, Putin took violent action in Georgia, and that, I think, is a clear precursor to then what followed in Ukraine.
So, perhaps, if Bush 2 hadn’t been all gung-ho in 2008 we wouldn’t be watching Ukraine being bombed into rubble today. Nice work, Dubya.
The problem with this analysis is that NATO has never extended an invitation to Ukraine, not before 2008, not after 2014, and still declares it won’t. If Putin just wanted Ukrainian neutrality, he already had that. What Putin wanted was the Crimea and the Donbas, along with a puppet Ukraine state. Ukraine is not going to accept being a “Little Russia” again, and blaming NATO for Putin’s war of aggression is missing that important point.
If I understand her correctly she’s not blaming NATO, but rather explaining what the NATO issue has to do with it. She’s definitely not not blaming Putin.
NATO is a collective security pact that serves a legitimate purpose by providing otherwise vulnerable small nations protection from Russian aggression. Not that Poland needs to be told this. NATO isn’t an offensive threat to Russia itself, and it never has been. What NATO has done by including Poland and the Baltic states is prevent Russia from intimidating them to get what it wants, or if that’s not sufficient, invading them.
I think we’ve got ample evidence now that the 2016 wargames were too bullish on Russia’s ability to conquer territory quickly, so I guess that’s a bit of consolation.
I believe that is the exact thing guaranteeing Putin will not do that intentionally.
#4 BK
Maybe; those wargames were concerned with Russia invading the Baltic nations, not Ukraine. Those nations are both smaller and poorer than Ukraine, if memory serves.
The wargames were operated under the following analysis.
Holms has the right of it. The Baltic States are smaller, poorer, closer to the major port of St. Petersburg and the capital of Moscow, and mostly coastline — it is notable that the Russian advance in southern Ukraine has gone swimmingly, with them taking vast swathes of coastline and rolling steadily inland from there. There is no “steady inland” for the Baltics; there is coast and there is Russia or its proxy state of Belarus, within a few hours’ drive of each other.
A narrow strip of about 65 kilometres connects Lithuania and Poland, called the Suwalki Gap. (Technically the gap is about 100km, but this is accounting for the squiggly border between Poland and Lithuania, which I doubt Russian invaders would bother much with.) On one side of this gap is the Russian client state of Belarus, which has just now proven to be a happy highway for Russian tanks and artillery.
The other side of this gap is capped off by the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, which used to be the northern portion of East Prussia, which the Russians wrested from the Germans in a devastating advance that culminated in a brutal assault of the city then known as Königsberg. After the war, the Soviets kept the city and much of the surrounding countryside, expelled all of the Germans who’d lived there to replace them with Russians, and renamed it to its current provenance. Now it is an integral part of Russia and one of their most fortified positions, designed to fend off any aggression in the Baltic Sea and keep the seaways between Copenhagen and Saint Petersburg open.
So…yes, a Russian military offensive in the Baltic States, without the threat of NATO’s nuclear deterrent or any ongoing war sapping Russia’s military capabilities, would have taken Russia a matter of hours at best and days at most to secure total strategic supremacy. There would certainly be handshakes between marines from the coast and special forces from the forests within a matter of hours, and the major cities would find themselves under siege before the end of the first day.
Except, and this is a big except…Russia looks like it is going to commit itself to occupying at least part of Ukraine, possibly all of the east of the country up to the Dnieper, if not the whole of it. That is going to cost the Russian economy a lot of resources, and the Russian population a lot of young men. This will severely limit Russia’s strategic options. As long as Russia is tied up holding a hostile population across the vast steppe, it will not be able to threaten the Baltics conventionally.
Yet Putin’s ambitions are unlikely to diminish. It is not unthinkable he believes the Baltics might be sacrificed by a cowed West. In a year or two, once the fate of Ukraine has become clear and another string of unpredictable geopolitical events have happened, it would not surprise me if Russia attempted to shake the Baltics down with an implicit or explicit threat of a nuclear strike should the West continue to “provoke” Russia by insisting Russian soldiers don’t belong in the Baltics.
And, if he is serious, that very well could be it, at least for Europe. If so, it was nice knowing ya.