While the outcome of the war in Ukraine remains speculative, one consequence is not in doubt: it has radically transformed the entire landscape of European defence security. “Finlandisation” was once a term for neutrality enforced by the proximity of a powerful and aggressive neighbour: today Finland is in NATO.
Sweden, another icon of Cold War “non-alignment”, is on the threshold of NATO membership, with Stockholm confirming that Hungary is keeping its promise not to be the last country blocking entry to the alliance, but Turkey is still trying to extort F-16 jets from America as the price of its agreement.
On paper, Sweden’s 24,000 active military personnel and 32,000 reservists may not look formidable, but it has a long military history, a population in which three million are of military age and troops that have seen combat in some notorious hot spots, as part of United Nations forces. Its air force is respected in international defence circles. The Russian invasion of Ukraine served as a wakeup call to Swedes, to the extent that their government has now signed a Defence Cooperation Agreement with the US, giving America access to 17 bases on Swedish soil, a previously unthinkable commitment.
The island of Gotland, with its sophisticated intelligence listening system and its command of Russia’s only sea route to the West, is not an asset that Vladimir Putin will be happy to see join the NATO defence network. As for Finland, the amazing damage it inflicted on the Red Army, making it Stalin’s worst nightmare, belies the notion that “Finlandisation” reflected any weak passivity on the part of the population, rather than a hard-headed realpolitik acceptance of a compromise that enabled it to live outside the Soviet system for the duration of the Cold War.
Sweden and Finland’s adherence to NATO completes the cordon sanitaire running from the south, through Poland and the Baltic States, against Russian aggression. But that cordon is weakest – virtually non-existent – at the worst possible place: Germany is the weakest link. The recent revelation that Germany would not be capable of fighting a defensive war within the next 15 years undermines all the other advances made by NATO in reinventing itself in response to Russian expansionism.
Much of this debacle is the responsibility of Ursula von der Leyen who, as German defence minister, presided over a further implosion in Germany’s already minimalist military capacity. When she left office, not one German submarine was seaworthy and the other arms were similarly ineffective. Yet now she is presiding over the European Union at a time of major war on the continent.
Germany likes to luxuriate in the status of its historical economic miracle and its current economic strength, though that is weakening, but it has constantly refused to beef up its armed forces to credible strength. The weasel pretext is contrition for the ravages caused by past German militarism, but three generations after the fall of the Third Reich that excuse is wearing thin. Japan, which went through a similar syndrome of post-War guilt, long ago woke up and smelt the coffee, as Chinese belligerence grew, and is now fulfilling its security responsibilities, signing a defence cooperation agreement with Britain earlier this year.
Some defence analysts believe that Japan and South Korea should be invited to join AUKUS. At any rate, Japan has shrugged off the apologetic pacifism that would have become a threat to peace had it persisted, so what is Germany’s problem? Its shilly-shallying over military aid to Ukraine, with some of the equipment it supplied proving unserviceable, is a huge encouragement to Vladimir Putin. The AfD party that is close to entering government is opposed to sanctions against Russia and, if it entered a coalition, it is a safe bet that Volodymyr Zelensky would have received his last Leopard tank.
Against this ragged background, the consensus among pundits that NATO has done well in the Ukraine crisis, though mainly true, begins to look partly problematic. There is, too, a danger that the scale of the Ukraine conflict may distract Western strategists from paying adequate attention to other dangerous flashpoints. Kosovo is a case in point: despite current containment of Serbian ambitions, the region has the potential to become a running sore, the Kashmir of Europe.
Another concern should be Azeri aggression against Armenia, geographically in Asia but geopolitically considered as European. Azerbaijan’s conquest of Nagorno-Karabakh and threat even to Armenia itself reflects a major destabilisation. In the first week of the Azeri invasion, 100,000 Armenians, or 80 per cent of the population, fled from Nagorno-Karabakh and the Armenians’ memories of the genocide of 1915 make them fear some kind of repetition. Now Azerbaijan is turning its attention to the Armenian territory known as the Zangezur corridor, separating Azerbaijan from its exclave of Nakhchivan.
Ironically, this aggression and consequent disruption has been made possible by Russia, Armenia’s protector in normal times, being distracted by the Ukraine war.
Here there arises a moral and philosophical challenge for Western strategists. Russia has always maintained that, like any other great power – a status that can hardly be denied to a nation with the largest land mass and nuclear arsenal – it should be entitled to a sphere of influence, like America and China.
The charge that the West secured Boris Yeltsin’s cooperation by guaranteeing no eastward advance by NATO is contested. Today, NATO is congratulating itself on having neatly sewn up all the previous gaps in the Russian interface with the West. But the question must be asked: is that not fuelling Russian (as distinct from Putin personally) paranoia about NATO sitting on the Federation’s frontier, without the historical buffer states of the former Warsaw Pact to cushion confrontation?
The obvious response is that a power that invades a sovereign nation needs to be contained and has no right to complain when other nations or power blocs take that precaution. But, long after Putin has gone, Russia will resent being straitjacketed, which does not bode well for Russo-Western relations post-Putin. The fact is that the West, in triumphalist, end-of-history mode, squandered the possibilities of 1991 when the Soviet Union dissolved.
Another key factor in Western defence thinking is the increasingly likely election of Donald Trump. Zelensky has just walked away, empty-handed, from Washington, where GOP resistance denied him the multi-billion dollar aid package he requested. In Brussels, aid for Ukraine was similarly obstructed in the early hours of Friday morning by Viktor Orban, taking revenge for the €30bn withheld previously from Hungary by the EU.
The return of Trump would likely signal an end to full-blown US support of Ukraine. Trump is perfectly capable of saying: “So, the folks that live in Crimea and the Donbas are Russian and want to live under Russia – didn’t Woodrow Wilson call that the right of self-determination?”
But the portrayal of Trump as an isolationist loose cannon is not wholly accurate. His “anti-NATO” posture during his first term was a demand that NATO member states should pull their weight financially, rather than freeloading off Uncle Sam.
As Con Coughlin pointed out in the Telegraph recently, Trump used US power sparingly, but strategically, to deter North Korea and Iran, in striking against Syria twice when it deployed chemical weapons, by revising coalition forces’ rules of engagement, resulting in the destruction of the Isis caliphate, and by ordering the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander.
Contrasted with Biden’s ignominious scuttle from Afghanistan, Trump’s record is hardly that of a maverick.
Against that, Trump in a second term will be a different proposition. He is the radicalised creature of the January 6th disgrace, who has been abandoned by many of his old advisers. In office again he will be surrounded by a strange cast of characters determined to punish the so-called “deep state.”
If elected, he will undoubtedly make it a priority to end the Ukraine war by negotiation, gifting Putin the opportunity to free himself of an incubus if he can retain ethnically Russian territory.
The situation looks increasingly difficult for Ukraine. A report from Shashank Joshi, defence editor of the Economist, this week, posted on X, revealed that, on the southern Ukrainian front, where just months ago artillery fire between the opposing armies was on a ratio of 1:1, or slightly favourable to Ukraine, the ratio is now 1:4, or 1:5, in favour of Russia.
In this context, the squabbling in Brussels and Washington is highly dangerous. The EU has had a poor war, obsessing over Ukrainian “accession” negotiations, while its dilatoriness in supplying weaponry increases the possibility of there being no Ukraine to join the EU. Unless the increasingly divided West raises its game, the prospects for European security may not be as good as NATO’s front-foot response to the crisis initially gave hope.
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