Strategic Challenges in the Baltic Sea Region

Russia, Deterrence, and Reassurance

Ann-Sofie Dahl

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781626165717, 9781626165700
• eBook ISBN: 9781626165724
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

How should the countries in the Baltic Sea region and their allies meet the strategic challenges posed by an openly aggressive and expansionist Russia? NATO and the nonaligned states in the region are now more concerned about an external threat than they have been since the end of the Cold War. Russia has been probing air space, maritime boundaries, and even land borders from the Baltic republics to Sweden. Russia's undermining of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea worries former Soviet republics with Russian minority populations, nonaligned Sweden and Finland are enhancing their cooperation with NATO, and the Trump presidency has created some doubt about America's willingness to follow through on NATO's collective defense commitment.

Ann-Sofie Dahl brings together an international group of experts to examine Baltic security issues on a state-by-state basis and to contemplate what is needed to deter Russia in the region. The contributors analyze ways to strengthen regional cooperation, and to ensure that security in the region stays at the top of the agenda at a time of many competing strategic perspectives in the transatlantic community. This book will be of great interest to foreign policy and defense practitioners in the US and Europe as well as scholars and students of international relations.

PART I

The West, Russia, and Baltic Sea Security

1

Still the Indispensable Power

The United States and Baltic Sea Security

ROBERT J. LIEBER

For seven decades, the United States has served as the guarantor of security and stability in Europe. Yet for a time it appeared that this role was no longer so essential. The end of the Cold War, the breakup of the Soviet Union, the liberalization and democratization of Eastern Europe, and the successful independence of the Baltic states marked a profound transformation on the continent. Alongside these events, the enlargement of NATO, the expansion and deepening of the European Union (EU), and steps toward a working relationship with a much-diminished Russia through NATO’s Partnership for Peace (1994) and the NATO-Russia Founding Act (1997) suggested that Ronald Reagan’s vision of a Europe whole and free was at last at hand.

Under these circumstances, it was not surprising that Washington could undertake a sweeping drawdown of American forces in Europe. Already well under way in the 1990s when the focus for NATO seemed to be shifting and its challenge one of going-out-of-area or out of business, de-emphasis of the European theater accelerated after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. The US military soon found itself immersed in the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, both of which became grinding conflicts after stunning initial successes. By the latter part of the decade, an American president elected with a mandate to bring the troops home now spoke of a pivot to Asia.

European Reassertion and Its Limits

Many Europeans too entertained the vision of a strong, prosperous, and self-confident Europe able to hold its own in world affairs, not divorced from America but now on a much more equal footing. This was evident as early as 1991 with the outbreak of conflict in the former Yugoslavia. Representing the then European Community (the EU’s precursor), Luxembourg’s foreign minister, Jacques Poos, could proclaim, “The Hour of Europe has dawned.”¹ But four years, two hundred thousand deaths in Bosnia, and the Srebrenica massacre of July 1995 made painfully clear the painful limits to Europe’s aspiration and finally brought the United States back in, as Washington led the NATO effort in achieving an uneasy end to the Bosnian conflict.

Sentiment for Europe’s reassertion regained momentum in the following decade. The formal enlargement and deepening of the EU, the creation of the Eurozone, and the promise of a common European Defense and Foreign Policy seemed to signal that a prosperous and unified Europe of five hundred million people really was ready to assert itself.

Then came Iraq. In 2003 and 2004, France, Germany, Belgium, and others emerged as strident critics and political antagonists of the George W. Bush administration’s fateful intervention against Saddam Hussein. To be sure, some two-thirds of the EU- and NATO-member governments had initially endorsed the war, either signing the Blair-Aznar letter or a similar statement of support by the Vilnius Group.² In the midst of a rancorous Atlantic debate, the then secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, could favorably contrast support from Eastern European and Baltic countries, the “new Europe,” with the “old Europe.” In any case, events and growing public disenchantment during this period widened the sense of distance between Washington and key European capitals.

But that was then. The twenty-first century also saw change in Russia. Vladimir Putin succeeded the faltering Boris Yeltsin in 1999 and in the following years gradually reconsolidated state power, rebuilt the military, reined in the regions, and eviscerated the nascent Russian democracy. Emboldened in the mid-to-late 2000s by an explosive run-up in world oil prices and the almost limitless financial resources they seemed to provide, Putin began to pull back from Russia’s growing engagement with the West. The process was by no means linear. Alternating the presidency and the prime ministry with the relatively more moderate Dmitri Medvedev, Putin nonetheless signaled a desire to reassert influence over Russia’s former republics wherever the opportunity beckoned.

Moscow’s covert and then overt interventions in the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia and its invasion of the Republic of Georgia in 2008 were the most conspicuous, but there was also Russia’s role in the Transnistria region of Moldova and its heavy-handed influence in the internal politics and factional, regional, and ethnic conflicts of the former Central Asian republics of the USSR. In addition, manipulation of natural gas supplies to Ukraine and Poland became a form of energy blackmail against Russia’s neighbors.

Putin’s return to the Russian presidency in 2011 and large-scale public protests against election rigging and repression were followed by a clampdown on domestic media and opposition groups. This was coupled with a growing and deliberately orchestrated antagonism toward Western values, increasingly explicit threats to Russia’s neighbors, and a campaign of Soviet-style disinformation (dezinformatsia) against the United States and Western Europe.

Russia and Ukraine

Unwilling to see Kiev engage more fully with the EU and what it represented as a compelling alterative to a Moscow-dominated “Eurasian Community,” Putin seized on the Maidan protests of early 2014 and the subsequent flight of Ukraine’s president, Viktor Yanukovych, as a pretext to intervene. In doing so, he employed the tools of hybrid warfare. These included the arming, manipulation, and direction of local and not-so-local opponents of the Ukraine government in Crimea and then in the Donbas region of Ukraine, as well as the provision of well-armed military personnel whose uniforms and armored vehicles mysteriously lacked identifying military insignia (the notorious “little green men”). Accompanying these phenomena, there was propaganda, manipulation of the media, a rigged referendum on annexation of Crimea, and then overt intervention by Russian “volunteers” and military units.

Some, even many, of these measures had been foreshadowed by Putin’s previous actions, but the scale of military intervention and the outright annexation of Crimea marked a shift in order of magnitude. Moreover, Moscow’s actions in breaching a post-1945 border by force broke the rules of the European order that had been in effect since the end of World War II. This is no mere quibble about international norms and niceties: Putin transgressed agreements and treaties to which the Soviet Union and Russia had long been committed. These include the provisions of the United Nations Charter, the Helsinki Agreement of 1975, the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 (by which Ukraine surrendered its nuclear weapons in exchange for guarantees of sovereignty and nonintervention), and other signed accords, such as the Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe.

Baltic and European Security beyond Ukraine

The meaning of these events and of Russia’s actions is profound, though it remains disputed by some American advocates of offshore balancing and disengagement as well as by those in Europe who would rationalize Moscow’s behavior as a reaction to Western provocation. But timing is everything. The enlargement of NATO and of the EU took place long before Putin’s return to the presidency and did not then engender a fierce Russian reaction.

It is well to remember, after all, the Russian president’s notorious remark that the breakup of the Soviet Union was the greatest catastrophe of the twentieth century. Putin’s actions represent deliberate, willful measures to reassert Russian power.³ In doing so, he has employed multiple methods from the Russian diplomatic, political, military toolbox. Among these has been political and financial support to populist parties in Europe that aim to weaken or fragment the EU, as was the case with a €9 million loan to Marine Le Pen’s French populist party, the National Front. In addition, Moscow has employed an increasingly sophisticated information apparatus, broadcasting and distributing Kremlin propaganda and conspiracy theories across multiple media platforms.

Moreover, Russian policies in the Syria conflict have exacerbated refugee inflows to Europe, where the surge has contributed to disarray within the EU and to rising populist opposition to beleaguered European governments.

Still the Indispensable Power

Notwithstanding the more than seven decades that have passed since the end of World War II, the US role remains crucial. US commitments have a catalytic effect. They provide, as Michael Howard wrote during the Cold War, not only deterrence and defense but also reassurance.⁴ No other Western country or group of countries comes close to possessing the overall capabilities of the United States. The fact that Europe has a larger population is beside the point because on security matters there exists no overall European entity that can be much more than the sum of its parts. As a result, NATO member countries require the tangible guarantee of Washington’s support to galvanize their own collective efforts within the Alliance. Increases in American defense spending for Eastern Europe and the Baltic Sea region thus take on both practical and symbolic importance.

Though the measures taken were modest—a 2016 increase of $2.4 billion from military contingency funds rather than the base defense budget itself and an additional brigade of three to five thousand US troops to be rotated through the Baltics and Poland rather than permanently stationed in one place—they signaled that years of retrenchment in commitments to European defense were being reversed.

The importance of American engagement and evidence of what happens when it is not credibly present is telling. Two examples make this painfully clear. In the case of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, the agreement had been signed by the United States, Russia, Ukraine, Britain, France, and China—that is, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. Yet when the agreement was egregiously violated by Russia’s actions in February 2014, it went unenforced. None of the other signatories were able or willing to step forward, and the one country that might have made a difference, the United States, responded to initial Ukraine pleas for defensive weapons by providing not body armor, night-vision goggles, or antitank weapons but military field rations.

A year later, in February 2015, an accord meant to halt the fighting in Eastern Ukraine (the Minsk II Agreement) was signed by the foreign ministers of France, Germany, Russia, and Ukraine and embodied terms promoted by the Russian government. Conspicuously absent from the negotiations was the United States. Not surprisingly, despite providing lip service to the agreement, Moscow and its proxies continued to violate its provisions without concern that the US might play a role in its enforcement.

In sum, Russian actions and explicit threats to the Baltic countries provide a reminder that the long-standing realities of international affairs have not been superseded in the twenty-first-century world. The United States thus remains critical for providing the military and diplomatic presence to deter Russia and the reassurance and leadership required for the European members of the Alliance to play their part in a coherent and effective partnership.

The Trump Phenomenon

The stunning surprise of Donald Trump’s election as president of the United States and the contradictory signals sent by his words and appointments of senior foreign-and security-policy officials have stoked an atmosphere of uncertainty and even disarray in transatlantic relations. Defining a Trump foreign policy, let alone a Trump doctrine, is unrealistic, but, based on the foreign policy impulses that seemed to underlie his presidential campaigning and early phases of his presidency, he can best be understood as Jacksonian in his understanding of America’s role at home and abroad.

This approach, as defined by Walter Russell Mead, is nationalist and populist. In Mead’s words, a “Jacksonian believes that the most important goal of the U.S. government in both foreign and domestic policy should be the physical security and the economic well-being of the American people. . . . Jacksonians believe that the United States should not seek out foreign quarrels, but when other nations start wars with the United States, Jacksonian opinion agrees with Gen. Douglas MacArthur that ‘There is no substitute for victory.’ ”⁵

Trump himself has left many Europeans unsettled, for example, in his contradictory statements about NATO, initially describing it as obsolete but subsequently expressing support. In addition, his “America First” slogan evokes comparisons with the reprehensible isolationist movement of the late 1930s, as do his complaints that America “never wins” in its negotiations and that existing bargains ought to be reevaluated.

European reaction has been negative and sometimes quite hyperbolic, replete with references to Benito Mussolini and to Weimar Germany.⁶ A sense of distancing and alarm is evident, for example, in a widely circulated essay by the editor of Germany’s Der Spiegel Online, which called for Germany to lead an international coalition, together with Asian and African partners, against the United States.⁷ A more nuanced, American perspective comes from the editor of the influential foreign policy journal The National Interest. He suggests that the Pax Americana could come to be replaced by a Pax Germania, adding that “[Chancellor] Merkel could oversee a truly consequential change in foreign affairs. . . . The role of guardian of the ‘liberal world order’—tamping down national egoism, promoting peace—isn’t one Germany has sought, but it may be one it can’t avoid.”⁸ Another caution comes from former CIA director and general David Petraeus, who points to America’s essential role in maintaining world order and to the fundame...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I. The West, Russia, and Baltic Sea Security
• Part II. NATO Allies and Baltic Sea Security
• Part III. NATO’s Nordic Partners
• List of Contributors
• Index