Little could better capture the predicament of Estonia than the image of Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas perched cross-legged and apparently fearless in a purple jumpsuit and leather jacket on the edge of an open helicopter tailgate. She was flying home on the British Chinook from a visit to NATO exercises on Wednesday last week, about 130km south of the capital, Tallinn.
Spring Storm 2024, as the event was called, involved 9,000 Estonian soldiers and reservists, with 5,000 troops from other alliance members, hundreds of armored vehicles, aircraft and naval vessels.
The goal, said Kallas, was to send a clear message to Moscow: “Don’t come here.”
For Estonia, that strategy is surely sound. To simply hope that Russian President Vladimir Putin is not crazy enough to risk attacking a NATO member and so do nothing to prepare, would invite him to ask the obvious question: Are British, Spanish and US mothers really willing to send their sons and daughters to fight thousands of kilometers away against a large military force that has a seemingly limitless tolerance for casualties?
For a nation of 1.3 million people, deterrence would be unachievable without clear evidence that NATO’s security guarantees are rock solid, and backed by the full might of the US and major European allies.
It is all or nothing, and the only way to provide that kind of certainty is to train and develop the capacities to fight the war that should never happen.
This, also, was the lesson of the Cold War.
Today, finally, those preparations are at least beginning to look credible in the Baltics.
For sure, 14,000 troops could not withstand a Russian invasion, but they might delay it long enough to bring in the kind of force that could — especially now that nearby Finland and Sweden are members.
“My military tells me NATO works now the way we thought NATO worked before we joined,” Kallas told reporters.
She has not always been so complimentary about the levels of European commitment to the bloc’s eastern front, let alone non-NATO Ukraine. Yet for every sign of an alliance that is learning to put its military capabilities together, recognize failings and begin to address them, there is another that speaks to its brittle underpinnings.
France was showing off four of its impressive new Jaguar infantry-fighting vehicles, but alongside aging armor from the UK. All acknowledged that words will mean nothing if the ammunition and weapons to fight a sustained land war with Russia cannot be produced when needed.
More worrying was the reminder — with the news of an assassination attempt on a European leader — that events have the potential to change all the political assumptions that must determine any NATO military strategy.
As the word spread on Wednesday last week that Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico had been shot, you could feel the ripple of concern.
Kallas expressed her shock and sympathy in a statement, but the thoughts of some others visiting the training field quickly moved to how the Kremlin might try to exploit the attack to divide the alliance, perhaps blaming it on Ukraine and spreading conspiracy theories, no matter what might have motivated the perpetrator.
Empires might get their coups de grace from external enemies, but they usually implode from within. Putin of all people knows that, having lived through the self-destruction of the Soviet Union.
However, in Russia, for all the breathless talk of his regime’s frailty a year ago, he just won another, uncontested term in office and last week visited a powerful ally in China, free to plan for the future with confidence.
His determination to reverse Moscow’s decline as a superpower, impose a sphere of influence across the territories of the former empire at their cost, and stoke instability among those who stand in his way is clear.
Meanwhile, in the West, NATO’s collective strategy and strength depend on a slew of unpredictable elections, above all in the US in November, where former US president Donald Trump has made it clear he has little commitment to Ukraine’s defense or the transatlantic alliance as a whole.
Putin’s dual narrative of Western arrogance and decadence is finding a ready audience across much of the globe, including some electorates in Europe and the US.
You do not have to look far for signs political fractures in the alliance. Fico won re-election last year on a pro-Russian, anti-US platform, pledging to halt sending military aid to Ukraine. The real impact was limited, because Slovakia had largely cleared out its available weapons stocks already and non-military aid continued.
Yet his election expanded the pro-Putin camp within NATO and the EU to two, alongside Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
Right-wing populists are expected to do better in elections to the European Parliament this summer.
Orban, who talks of “occupying” Brussels, already used his EU veto to slow the bloc’s provision of aid to Ukraine.
This week, he also slow-walked its condemnation of a violent government crackdown on protests against the passage of a so-called “Russian law” in Georgia, another small former Soviet republic that is in Putin’s crosshairs.
Whether Fico survives remains unknown, so it is too soon to say what the effects of the attempt on his life — apparently by a 71-year-old Slovak who disliked his policies — would be.
Yet the threat of destructive polarization of such a political assassination is plain to see, especially at a time when so much of the West itself is uncertain about the worth of democratic institutions.
NATO has more than enough resources and capacity to put an end to Putin’s revanchism if it wants to, but that is a significant “if.”
Coming away from Estonia’s Spring Storm, it was hard to avoid the conclusion that the alliance is only just starting to get its military act together at a time when its political undercarriage is weak and at risk from events whose outcomes are simply unpredictable. The only way to correct that is to strengthen those foundations by deciding what is worth fighting for.
Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East. He was previously Istanbul bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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