NATO Secretary General meets with the President of Ukraine, July 12, 2023, Vilnius, Lithuania
Optimists will probably say that the surest sign of the Atlantic Alliance’s longevity lies in the doubts it never ceases to arouse. Almost three years ago, before Russia’s all-out war against Ukraine, I devoted a long essay here to explaining its contradictions, its indispensability and its structural weaknesses. I won’t repeat the terms of that long analysis here. Pessimists will argue that the very fact that, after 75 years, we’re still questioning our strategy is a sign of a malaise that’s written into the organization’s DNA. It’s certainly a case of long unfinished business.
I won’t comment again on the French President’s long-standing comments about the organization being brain-dead. Indeed, some might argue that what the Alliance’s lack of real response to the Russian war of extermination demonstrated was its state of biological death. Today, it is in the light of this war—even if it is not a war against a NATO country, and doubtless because it is not one—that we need to appreciate both the Alliance’s flaws and its avenues for renewal. It’s as if the structure of the organization has taken this into account—NATO as a military organization is nothing like it was during the Cold War—but not its doctrine of intervention, which can only be defined by the Alliance Council. To put it simply, how do we move from a situation where the ultimate deterrent is nuclear to one where its primary credibility is conventional?
When we speak of deterrence, we have to talk about its ultimate guarantor, both nuclear and conventional: the United States. In short, Washington has become the Alliance’s number-one problem—precisely because it is indispensable to it. It’s an issue that affects its foundations far more than Turkish ambiguities or flirtations with Moscow, so advanced they resemble an engagement, of Budapest and Bratislava. Some experts, not without good reason, point to the worst catastrophe that would be Donald Trump’s return to the White House, but they scarcely mention the structural problem of American policy from Barack Obama to Joe Biden, which constitutes a threat to eviscerate NATO from within. Yet it is this primary risk that is reflected in NATO’s abstention from the present war—and I’ll come back to what this means.
To keep to the point of this essay, I’ll sum things up simply: the fact that NATO is the world’s leading military alliance, that it holds sway over all the democratic countries not yet integrated into it, from Ukraine to Georgia, from Moldova to (one day) Belarus—not to mention Sweden and Finland, who have just joined—and that it has no substitute in Europe—and certainly not for a long time to come in the form of the Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP)—cannot conceal this brutal fact: a mortal uncertainty about the credibility of the deterrence it provides.
The problem here is not technical or capability-related, but political. NATO, however potentially effective it may be militarily, has certainly been considerably strengthened in operational terms and has succeeded in extending its sphere of action to new dangers—notably what are known as hybrid threats—but it is immersed in a political and doctrinal fog that could become lethal. We need to understand this in order to get out of it.
What reality for deterrence?
The ultimate value of the Atlantic Alliance lies in its ability to deter. During the Cold War, conventional deterrence was of course fundamental—the French and British armies in particular were much larger than they are today—but it was perceived above all as nuclear (again depicted as its pillar in the 2024 Washington Summit’s statement). For the Alliance, the balance of power was largely based on nuclear parity, with neither of the Super-Grands, the US or the USSR, able to gain a decisive advantage in this respect. This was the Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) “system”. As for France, having opted for an independent nuclear deterrent in the days of General de Gaulle, the response was that of the weak to the strong: despite its superior power, Paris was likely to inflict immense damage on Moscow in the event of a nuclear attack—as is still the case today.
In today’s context, nuclear deterrence remains a decisive component that cannot be renounced, but in the face of Russia’s attacks on Ukraine—which are only possible because the latter renounced its nuclear weapons in exchange for protection under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which the Kremlin has violated—and its all-out threats, including to certain NATO member countries, the most concrete deterrent is conventional.
In other words, if a NATO country were to be attacked—we’ll discuss the possible nature of such aggression later—what would NATO’s response be? A major question lies in the nature of this response: should it be proportionate or disproportionate? Which would be more dissuasive?
The reality is that Alliance countries have already suffered Russian attacks on their soil: cyber-attacks, assassination or attempted assassination on their soil of opponents (Alexander Litvinenko, Sergei Skripal and his daughter Youlia, several Chechen opponents of the Kadyrov regime), actual terrorist attacks (Vrebtice ammunition depot in the Czech Republic and Bulgaria, fires and sabotage in Poland in particular where Russia is strongly suspected of being involved) or foiled (Roissy, France, in June 2024), intimidation, including through legal action by bodies or personalities linked to Russian power (action by oligarchs against journalist Catherine Belton, multiple Russia Today cases, including against me) without the state taking any notice, or threats, etc.
We have to admit that responses have been weak, beyond (not always) protests, and in some cases it was unthinkable that democracies would respond in the same way—democracies cannot commit terrorist acts unless they become illegitimate, and we know in advance the outcome of legal proceedings before Russian judges with no independence from power. More recently, we have even seen Russian drones or missiles fall or fly over the territory of member countries of the organization (Latvia, Romania). A Turkish ship carrying wheat has also just been hit by a Russian missile. Now, while democratic states cannot respond in the same way, except in the case of cyber-attacks, they are not without tools, a fortiori when these actions, as has been the case since 2008 and, above all, 2014, are accompanied by military action against another democratic state.
So, in the case of a direct attack on, say, Estonia, what would be the appropriate action? In the worst scenario of a direct attack, the only solution would be to send conventional troops from NATO countries to repel the Russian army. However, we know that this response, should Tallinn request the application of Article 5, would not be automatic. Is it likely, especially from Washington? This is where we find the doubts raised by the rhetoric employed by the United States in response to the attack on Ukraine. The inadequacy of the American response in terms of the weapons supplied and the authorization given to Kyiv to target the enemy in the depths of its territory, under the false pretext of the risk of escalation and a Third World War, casts a suspicion that cannot be unfounded a priori. On the contrary, the risk could not be less.
In reality, the issue at stake is much broader, and concerns the strategy that will ensure NATO’s credibility and legitimacy. It’s a question of raison d'être. Many leaders and analysts have yet to grasp the extent to which NATO’s failure to act in Ukraine has cast a shadow over the organization itself. It is precisely the distinction between territories within and outside the NATO zone that needs to be questioned today—all the more so as we know that NATO intervention outside its zone has never been an impossibility (Serbia in particular).
On the one hand, some argue that the possible blurring of the distinction between NATO members and allies could undermine the specificity of the security guarantees—never total, incidentally—for member countries. On the other hand, unanswered attacks against non-member countries not only risk undermining the guarantees for member countries, as I have just said, but also, as in the case of Ukraine, Georgia and, potentially, Moldova, represent an increasingly direct risk for member countries. This makes the former’s assertion both dangerous and shortsighted: there is in fact a continuum of security that transcends membership of the organization. To refuse to recognize this is to forget the lessons of the 2008 Bucharest summit’s refusal to grant membership action plans to Kyiv and Tbilisi. Nothing has been corrected since, or only on the margins.
As a result, the weakness of NATO’s response—for which we cannot lay the blame on the organization’s Secretary General and his staff, who have often taken a bolder stance (notably on deep strikes on Russian territory), but on the Alliance Council and its members, who have the most massive capacity for intervention—raises decisive questions for its future. This is all the more the case given that two countries in particular, the US and Germany, continue to oppose any clear prospect of Ukraine’s integration. The refusal to intervene directly, which Emmanuel Macron has since loosened slightly, actually increases Europe’s insecurity. It raises the deadly question: what’s the point of NATO if it doesn’t take military action against a nuclear-armed power? If NATO’s potential conventional interventions are limited to confrontations with powers with little military weight—and even then, as the refusal to act in Syria shows—does this not call into question the organization’s deterrent capacity?
An organization without borders?
NATO’s territorial jurisdiction is indicated by its name, even if Article 6 of the Washington Treaty, which refers directly to certain territories, remains relatively vague. NATO has also intervened beyond its own sphere whenever the interests of its members have justified it: Afghanistan (after 2001) and Libya (2011), not to mention assistance, cooperation and rescue operations far beyond Europe and the Atlantic area. The organization’s approach has been pragmatic, but for a long time the core of its action was the protection and defense of Europe against the risks posed by the USSR.
The threat presented by Russia—now the main vital danger in Europe, precisely because the Kremlin is bent on destroying it—logically remains the basis of the organization’s current existence. It is not without significance that the final communiqué of the Washington summit in July 2024 includes a large section on the People’s Republic of China. The terms used are exceptionally harsh—indeed, some consider this to be the only significant outcome of this summit, which once again proved very disappointing for Ukraine beyond the information-sharing and training activities. For the first time, in fact, a joint declaration by the 32 member states—some of which have hitherto been rather reserved in expressing this reality—highlights and condemns Beijing’s support for Russia’s all-out war against Kyiv. The leaders of the four main democratic powers in Asia and Oceania (Japan, South Korea, New Zealand and Australia) were also invited to attend part of the summit.
This contrasts with the pointless controversy of 2023, when France protested against the possible opening of a NATO liaison office in Tokyo, seeming to see in it a sign of the Alliance’s possible expansion into Asia, even though this idea is not currently on the table. Nevertheless, NATO cannot turn a blind eye to the destabilizing actions of the People’s Republic of China. Of course, it is fully competent to respond to such actions on Alliance territory, and even in its immediate environment in the event of an indirect threat. We cannot ask it to project itself militarily towards Asia. However, if we consider that it is impossible to conceptually separate the various dimensions of the Chinese threat in different parts of the world, which remains all the more global as its arrangements with Moscow are strengthened, a watertight separation of geographical zones remains impossible.
In short, there is also a security continuum between the security of the wider Atlantic zone (which broadly includes the Mediterranean and the Red Sea) and the Indo-Pacific zone, albeit different from that which prevails in Europe. This does not mean that NATO should be turned into a kind of Swiss Army knife—it would lose both legitimacy and operational capacity—but that it is more necessary than ever to articulate the organization’s security strategies with those stemming from treaties signed with our allies in Asia and Oceania.
This presupposes a joint effort by the organization’s member countries, which do not all have the same treaties and agreements with their partners beyond the Atlantic. A go-it-alone strategy that could divide the Allies in the face of threatening countries—in this respect, the aforementioned joint communiqué is in itself a step forward, as we know that Washington, on the one hand, and Paris and Berlin, on the other, had a markedly different approach—cannot stand. The race for separate agreements is certainly not good policy. Of course, it is perfectly legitimate for the United States to hold on to its long-standing and fundamental agreements with its allies in the region, as they constitute the strongest guarantees today. It is no less essential to cultivate particularly structured exchange formats such as QUAD, even if the ambiguity of Indian membership is problematic. The AUKUS, which is not an alliance in the strict sense of the term, has certainly sent out a disastrous signal.
It is therefore essential to find a multilateral framework that brings together all the region’s democratic powers and allies. If this new framework were to emerge—we’re still a long way from it, and both Washington and the main European capitals fear an overly constrained format that would restrict their room for maneuver—it could and should find the best possible ways of coordinating with NATO.
For a political and doctrinal alliance
On several occasions, I have reiterated a legal and institutional reality that is all too seldom mentioned publicly in the speeches of Western heads of state and government: the Atlantic Alliance is not just a military alliance—and a purely defensive one at that—but also a political alliance. This is the basis of its legitimacy: to defend, if need be by force of arms, the principles enshrined in its charter. Admittedly, the Alliance still includes a number of countries whose conception of the values of freedom and the rule of law is at times somewhat orthogonal to the Charter—some now even have a vision of relations with Putin’s Russia which contradicts these principles and the action of the integrated military organization—and it is hardly acceptable that such a situation should last for long, even if Moscow’s defeat could only have a salutary effect on the attitude of these countries. In times of total war, these fundamental rules must be remembered, but they raise questions about the Alliance’s mission, which were finally resolved during NATO’s intervention in the former Yugoslavia, but are still unresolved due to its failure to intervene directly in support of Ukraine.
Indeed, from the moment the Alliance not only protects its members if they are directly or even indirectly attacked—Russia’s attack on Ukraine should be considered an indirect attack—and responds to global security threats, but also aims to defend principles, which are also those of the United Nations Charter, it becomes a global political alliance in its area. Of course, it is not its vocation to intervene everywhere, nor could it do so. But can it remain indifferent to war crimes and crimes against humanity which directly contravene its principles when perpetrated in a country which, while not yet a member, is considered an ally? Is there not a moment when the crimes are too considerable and too revealing of the enemy’s very intention for abstention to be even possible? This is, after all, what the leaders of the Alliance’s member countries considered after the crimes in Kosovo or those that Gaddafi was preparing to commit in Benghazi.
It is all the more essential to reflect on this issue now that we find ourselves confronted by the Russian regime, whose threat combines immediate risks for collective security with a radical challenge to the principles of international law. In a strategic analysis of threats, we cannot separate these two dimensions. Understanding that the danger posed by today’s Russia is both directly security-related and doctrinal, that it is these two elements combined which reveal both its intent and the specific nature of its destructive ambition, is at the same time strategically essential and, as it were, obscured by most democratic leaders.
From this point of view, insisting on the means NATO must deploy to enable Ukraine to win and ensure that the Russian regime is defeated is a necessity, but it cannot be exclusive of an understanding of what makes the present time particular in terms of principle. Specifically, NATO cannot banish from its sphere of action and reflection questions relating to international law and the justice that must be meted out against Russian criminals. Its military action must be guided by principles that are integral to medium- and long-term security concerns—and to the Alliance’s future role.
Thus, a Russia that is not completely defeated would not only continue to be a major threat to the security of Alliance and neighboring countries in the long term, including through explicit or implicit agreements, but would also be a glowing stone in the garden of the principles on which the Alliance is founded. This doctrinal danger, which would directly call into question the consistency of Western democracies, corroding them from within, is not the least. It is also one of the famous “hybrid threats” which are often not understood to mean the very foundation of free countries, and of freedom as such. To come back to this point, judging crimes and combating attacks on the essential rules of democracies are also missions that NATO must make possible. A Russia only partially defeated would continue to fuel these internal threats.
This conversion of thinking cannot wait—nor this doctrinal deterrence at home and abroad, which remains an overlooked aspect of deterrence itself.