There is a near consensus in NATO among member state chiefs-of-defense staffs, their ministries of defense, service chiefs, and heads of intelligence services that Russia will realistically be positioned to challenge NATO in 3 to 5 years, a remarkable reduction from earlier forecasts of 10 to 20 years. (However, Admiral Tony Radakin, the UK’s current chief of defence staff stated that there is no Russian threat to NATO—an assessment that is an outlier.) How can we account for this?
First, if an attack on NATO is defined as Russia attacking all of NATO, then this minority assessment holds, but this is a straw man proposition since nobody is suggesting Russia will attack in a manner that would trigger a unified NATO response. Realistically, Russia would use a creeping incremental approach to targeting a single soft ally, at a time when Article 5 itself was under question, in order to bring disunity to the Alliance. Under these circumstances, the classic dilemmas posed by a land grab fait accompli (Russian forces move 30km into a NATO member state then threaten nuclear retaliation if dislodged) apply.Second, a more cynical explanation might be that Radakin is under political orders to only declare as threats those that are politically and financially convenient, for example, only those threats the UK government is willing to spend resources on countering. If so, the calculus is that the risk of adjusting government spending to meet actual threats is considered greater than the risk of leaving the UK open to catastrophic defeat through leaving them unaddressed, as, for example, with the UK’s policy that integrated air and missile defence is not required for homeland defense. Similarly, calling acts of war hybrid, grey zone, or liminal threats obviates the need for expensive and politically challenging responses in kind.
Since the end of the Cold War in 1990, Europe has enjoyed its so-called “peace dividend,” reducing its armed forces and defense industries and outsourcing defense to the United States. In other words, the operating assumptions has been that Allies would provide what they promised, and the United States would continue its broad and unconditional commitment to Europe. Thirty years of peace cuts have hollowed out capability, shown up by a proliferation of NATO headquarters without sufficient forces and enablers. Resilience and civil defense of the homeland have been eroded or eliminated altogether, as western European states assumes war happens to others. Ukraine is holding the line for now but cannot protect the West forever.
The US’s “escalation management” approach to Ukraine over the last three years has been predicated on three assumptions:
First, Ukrainian victory will inevitably mean Russian collapse, civil war, and vertical and horizontal escalation of the conflict. Second, a mutually hurting stalemate will lead to negotiations (peace for territory, in other words, European peace for a piece of Ukrainian territory?) and so de-escalation. Under this logic, alternative futures for Ukraine that include Ukraine adopting the South Korean model, are unlikely. In this scenario, a NATO “coalition of the least unwilling” friends of Ukraine offer bilateral security guarantees to West Ukraine, including extended deterrence, or the West German model, where a divided Ukraine is granted NATO membership and with that the Article 5 guarantee. However, both are predicated on the presence of foreign forces in Ukraine that can guarantee its security against future Russian attack, which is not feasible. This leaves equally unlikely scenarios: 1) Ukraine as “Big Israel,” suggesting external guarantees and active defense partnerships (US and NATO coalition of the willing enforcing no-fly zones?), societal resilience, and intelligence dominance; or 2) nuclear Ukraine, as a standalone sovereign option in lieu of meaningful Western commitments or guarantees of Ukraine’s security and an inability otherwise to defend itself or deter future Russian attacks. Third, after the war, Russia must be able to reset relations with Euro-Atlantic space and be reintegrated gradually into a European security order, rather than be contained. Russian military-operational defeat in Ukraine is assumed to foreclose reset and reintegration, echoing Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s oft cited mantra: “There can be no European Security without Russia.”
Ukraine’s future strategic options will have implications for a new transatlantic bargain between the United States and Europe. As well as shaping how Russia relates to Europe and so to East and South Asia, it will also impact the United States ability to undertake burden shifting to East Asia to meet the “pacing” and “near peer” threat that is China. In other words, the management of these complex and unpredictable sets of relationships will impact our understanding of the global order paradigm in which we live. After January 20, 2025, President-Elect Donald Trump is likely to accelerate US burden shifting efforts to East Asia and Israel, and could apply the same escalation management logic to European NATO member states that has been applied to Ukraine. This would call into question Article 5 on which NATO unity and collective defense is built as well as whether the defense of Europe remains a core US strategic interest.