– NATO...Are Its Final Days Just Ahead
 

Taking Aim at the New NATO
By Alexander Golts

Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov is a remarkably open and sincere person. It makes you wonder how he ever served as an intelligence agent. He was ordered to strengthen relations with NATO, and he has done all he could to accomplish this task. Once every six months, smiling till it hurts, he meets with NATO defense ministers, signs cooperation agreements and observes joint military exercises intended to develop operational interoperability between Russian and NATO troops.

Everything about the military and political alliance with NATO makes Ivanov sick, however, and his hatred for that "aggressive military bloc" has been known to slip out at the most inopportune moments. In an interview with the Spanish newspaper El Pais, Ivanov was asked to assess Russian-NATO cooperation, and he got a little carried away. "Five years ago, no one could have imagined the progress that we have made in our relations to date," he said. "Having said that, the unification of our military capabilities strikes me as unrealistic. We cooperated in Kosovo in the 1990s, but I don't see any region of the world where we could repeat that cooperation today. Iraq is out of the question. Afghanistan is also not an option for historical reasons, although we provide the country with military assistance."

I find it difficult to believe that Ivanov simply forgot about the joint Russian-NATO patrols in the Mediterranean set to begin next year, Russia's proposal to create a common anti-missile defense system for the entire European continent, and other programs. It's just that Ivanov despises NATO to such an extent that he considers all cooperation with the alliance to be completely pointless. And the top brass couldn't agree more. No sooner had Ivanov spoken out about the impossibility of cooperation with NATO than Konstantin Sivkov, head of the General Staff's Center for Strategic Military Research, told Interfax-AVN that NATO expansion toward Russia's borders posed a potential threat to national security. U.S. tactical aircraft, operating from advanced NATO bases, are capable of striking key cities in European Russia such as Moscow, Tula and Kursk, Sivkov said.

Brussels prefers to view statements like these as remnants of the Cold War mentality. In fact, such hostility toward NATO is entirely rational. For all the declarations of cooperation and the existence of the NATO-Russia Council, the Russian military establishment cast NATO in the role of "global enemy" from the very beginning. The brass desperately need an enemy of this size and scale to justify maintaining its massive, conscription-based Army -- an enemy so mighty that in order to defend against it the Defense Ministry must have the capability of placing 6 million to 8 million men under arms. At the same time, military leaders aren't so brash as to single out a specific country as the enemy. NATO, regardless of its actual policies, has therefore become a euphemism referring variously to the United States, the European Union or the West as a whole.

At times, this approach leads to blatant contradictions. The Defense Ministry's program for developing the armed forces, occasionally referred to as the "white book," declares at one point that military cooperation with the United States should be expanded, then does an about-face, stating elsewhere in the document that NATO -- dominated by the United States -- is pursuing a policy of aggression that must be repulsed.

The fact that as a result of its ongoing transformation NATO looks less and less like a "global enemy" plotting to attack Russia only fuels hostility toward the alliance in Moscow. NATO's rapid expansion to the east, which the General Staff views as a threat to Russian national security, actually makes it difficult if not impossible for NATO to conduct large-scale military operations on the continent. In order to admit new members in Eastern Europe, NATO military leaders have been forced to abandon their attempt to impose a single standard on the armed forces of all member states. This in turn means that NATO command cannot deploy the armies of all member states at once.

NATO leaders made this decision based on the reasonable calculation that such large-scale operations were no longer necessary now that the threat of a Soviet invasion had passed. Under a new proposal that has been widely discussed within the alliance, the armed forces of member countries would no longer be responsible for defending their national borders. From the perspective of Russian strategists, this proposal smacks of incredible stupidity or even treachery. But NATO is increasingly focusing on so-called "niche capabilities": that is, separate, select units that when required could be combined to form an expeditionary force. The limited size of such expeditionary forces obviously renders them incapable of attacking Russia.

The fact that the former Soviet republics of Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova have made NATO membership a foreign policy priority only compounds the Russian military's hostility toward the alliance. The point is not that these countries want to thumb their noses at Russia by allowing NATO to install bases on their soil. Like the former Warsaw Pact nations, these former Soviet republics want to join NATO as part of their broader integration into European institutions, not because they fear for their safety.

It's worth noting that candidates for NATO membership must meet political as well as military criteria: They must be democracies with civilian control of the military. This is what guarantees their integration into the military community of civilized nations. Ukraine and the other former Soviet republics believe they can meet these criteria. Russia, on the other hand, has repeatedly insisted that it has no intention of joining NATO, obviously having decided that the membership criteria are unacceptable. But when a country rejects civilian control of the military it has no choice but to believe its generals, who look for threats around every corner.

Alexander Golts, deputy editor of the online newspaper Yezhednevny Zhurnal, contributed this comment to The Moscow Times.