Talk of NATO as past its sell-by date began thirty years ago, with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of NATO’s fifty-year adversary, the Warsaw Pact. Strong U.S. advocates of the western alliance agreed with the summary view of the late republican Senator Richard Lugar: NATO—”Out of area or out of business”. And NATO did, indeed, move decisively “out of area”: Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq and Syria are a far cry from the north Atlantic, and few if any of these posed an immediate threat to NATO’s historic territory.
Given the current crisis in europe’s far east, Ukraine, it behooves us to look at some significant milestones in post-cold war history. First, Soviet, then Russian leaders from presidents Gorbachev to Putin, proposed a new Euro-Atlantic security alliance that would better reflect and serve contemporary realities [for example, non-state terrorism rather then nuclear confrontation]—“from Dublin to Vladivostok” was how Putin described the possibility. This, of course, did not sit well with the United States [reaching as it did only as far west as the Republic of Ireland.] rebuffed, post-Soviet Russia looked on as NATO welcomed as members first Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic in 1999, then the Baltic states and a number of other former eastern bloc countries, including Bulgaria and [although not in Moscow’s former orbit] Romania. The same three soviet/Russian presidents—Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Putin—then changed tack and inquired about Russian membership of NATO, and this too was rejected out of hand. It was quite obviously the fulfillment of the mission of NATO laid out by its founding secretary-general, Lord Hasting Ismay: “to keep the Soviet Union out, America in, and Germany down.”
At this point, let me make one thing absolutely clear: none of what follows is in any way, to any degree, to remove blame from Mr. Putin for the brutal assault on Ukraine. Quite apart from the tragic consequences for Ukraine, the violent act will do myriad forms of harm to Russia itself—economic, military, diplomatic. I merely wish to posit that [a] had the attitudes and actions of the West following the cold war been more conciliatory, this sad chapter might not have been written; and [b] there will still be a Russia—wounded, more resentful to cope with when this war is over.
The fateful moment—in terms of the Russian war on Ukraine—came in 2008, when at the NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania, the George W. Bush administration proposed—to the consternation of NATO allies, especially France and Germany—a path to alliance membership for Ukraine and Georgia. This was, for Russia, the ‘red line’: simply put, and despite American scorning to the contrary, Russia has a relationship with Ukraine—historic, cultural and, yes, strategic—that the US cannot understand because it has no equivalent for us Americans [Canada? Mexico?] the emptiness and tragic irony of this gesture has been demonstrated over the past three months, as it became obvious that Ukraine in NATO was a non-starter—a fact not lost on Ukrainian president Zelenskiy the day after the Russian invasion began: “NATO let us down by being afraid to let us in”. The other lamentable lesson of recent history is this: if someone [President Emmanuel Macron of France?] had had the sense to simply state the truth—that the Bucharest 2008 declaration about Ukraine in NATO was a sham—the war might have been prevented.
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Beyond Ukraine, but in light of recent tragic events, there are some observations to be offered about NATO in general:
The entire history of the alliance over the past thirty years lays bare the lie about NATO as a ‘purely defensive’ entity [Afghanistan? Libya?] dedicated to building peace and democratic governance in countries that had suffered under communist despotism in the cold war [many of us argued indeed that, if this were so, what country had suffered more under communist rule than Russia?]
Through its eastward expansion [which represented an outright lie to Russia, which had given consent to Germany’s unification in exchange for verbal assurances of NATO moving ‘not an inch’ to the East] NATO is plausibly seen as a threat to Russia [to this, we can add us’s tearing up of the anti-ballistic missile (ABM) treaty, nuclear installations in Poland and Romania and increasingly robust multi-NATO country exercises that encircle Russia, from the Baltics to the Black Sea. Even Pope Francis has spoken of ‘NATO barking at Russia’s door’.]
The West, and the US in particular, is quick to dismiss Russian fears as unfounded, even paranoid. But as professor John Mearsheimer, the leader of the realist school in international relations, has observed, “it does not matter what we think about what Russia thinks; all that matters is what Russia thinks.” Moreover, consider this: had the Soviet-led Warsaw pact prevailed in the cold war, embraced the rest of Europe as members and then eyed Canada and Mexico, what would have been the US response?
As Mearsheimer and others have said, whatever security architecture for Europe emerges post-Ukraine, Russia remains a part of Europe, and thus to be dealt with. This may be an unpalatable fact to many, but a fact it is.
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As far as a future independent Scotland is concerned, several thoughts occur:
[a] Do we follow Finland and Sweden in seeking nato membership, or remaining in the alliance under an arrangement with the UK? I leave the modalities of such an arrangement to others, but consider this: Sweden and, especially Finland have both complicated historical relationships, and geographical proximity, to Russia that Scotland does not have. Nor does Scotland present any strategic threat to Russia or others—apart from the nuclear submarine fleet capacity of the holy loch, which, as far as I can see, would be the sole reason for Scotland’s value to NATO.
[b] NATO currently stipulates that 2% of a member state’s GDP be allocated to defense spending as a condition of membership [this level has until recently only been fulfilled to my knowledge by the US, UK and Poland]. The ante is very likely to be raised in the post-Ukraine security environment. Given the factors listed above, is this an investment that an independent Scotland with predictable economic challenges and choices feels it necessary to make? I would also note that pre-war Ukraine had the third-largest army in Europe [after Russia and Turkey] and military expenditures were 6% of GDP. Money, to paraphrase the old adage, can’t buy security.
[c] a more esoteric but interesting thought: Scotland in mediator role [!]
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The battle for Ukraine may be seen as a proxy conflict between Russia and NATO. This is so because of massive injections of weapons and materiel from NATO, led by the US, to the Ukrainians, and the presence of NATO ‘military advisors’ in Kiev [I was there in 1994 and NATO personnel were already there; as one expert has observed, ‘Ukraine may not be in NATO, but NATO is in Ukraine”.] This means that some—not all—NATO states may be compromised when it comes to picking up the pieces post-Ukraine war. [in this regard, there is a strong case for an independent Scotland distancing itself from the record of Boris Johnson’s UK—remember the episode of the British warship in threatening mode in the Black Sea?]
I would also argue—perhaps quixotically—that the US should sideline itself—that this is a European problem, for a European discussion of a European future, and again, Russia will be part of that discussion. Mr. Zelenskiy has allowed as much in a recent, rather strange address to the nation that basically said: the war will continue, there will be more death and destruction, but ultimately a ceasefire reached and peace restored as a result of diplomatic engagement.
The Ukraine conflict will come to an end—one hopes not with an escalation of hostilities between Russia and NATO, but at the negotiation table, as Mr. Zelenskiy suggests. It is often forgotten that there were three months of talks in Vienna and Geneva before the outbreak of war in late February, and there are negotiators and proposals on hand from those talks; these can, and must, be reconvened. There is also the framework of the Minsk and Normandy agreements between Russia and Ukraine, along with France and Germany, following the Maidan protests and coup in 2014; these can be revisited, revised and updated as necessary. In short, the means to lay down arms and stop the killing are there. The hard question is: how is this to be accomplished?
There is a quiet—and quietly effective—pan-European outfit called the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe [OSCE]. This was set up at the end of the cold war as the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, and subsequently made permanent as the “organization”. OSCE has been a presence in areas of conflict such as Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan, in the breakaway provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia, and it has a high commissioner for minorities to address issues of minority populations in east and central Europe [issues that loom ever larger in Europe’s future].
OSCE’s nonmilitary, mediatory role has quite clearly been curtailed by NATO’s territorial primacy, but I would argue that this role will be a vital one in the tough discussions on a new Europe. It might clearly be in Scotland’s best interest to seek a role for itself within OSCE, rather than one as a minor player within NATO—the point being that some of europe’s smaller players—the Scandinavians, the Benelux countries, for example, along with Germany and France, who have already played a part—should be called upon to help lay the foundation for a secure European future.
David C. Speedie, an ACURA board member, was Senior Fellow and Director of the Program on U.S. Global Engagement at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs in New York from 2007 to 2017. He is a native of Scotland.