“It was the best of times; it was the worst of times” So begins Charles Dickens’s novel A Tale of Two Cities. It is an observation that could equally apply these days to NATO.
By Jamie Shea, Deputy Assistant Secretary General Emerging Security Challenges NATO.
In the first place, Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its military incursion into Eastern Ukraine, have given the Alliance a new lease of life. In the 18 months since the Kremlin’s actions upended the post-Cold-War European security order and raised alarm bells regarding the extent of Russia revisionism, NATO has been busy around the clock organizing exercises, and deployments in Central and Eastern Europe.
These have intended to reassure the Eastern Allies that NATO will stand by them if Russia attacks. The Alliance has substantially changed its force posture to be ready to respond with new high alert multinational reaction forces.
It has placed six new Headquarters on the territories of its Eastern Allies and overhauled its command and control arrangements and air defences, so as to be able to handle the requirements of large-scale manoeuvres and major incoming forces should it come to the worst case scenario. 
As it heads towards its next Summit in Warsaw in July 2016, the question will be just how many soldiers and how much hardware NATO will need to station durably in Eastern Europe to deter Russia as well as reassure its own member nations. Enough to prevent war – or to successfully fight one – but not so much that Vladimir Putin concludes that Russia is now locked into a long-term confrontation with the West; nor so much that the Alliance has no forces left for crisis management or the next generation of military interventions elsewhere.
Getting this balance right between a capacity for military escalation on the one hand and political de-escalation on the other will be the crucial task for NATO ambassadors and their military colleagues in the months ahead. T
his said, the spring in its step that the Alliance is getting from returning to its classical mission of collective defence should not make us think that NATO is now condemned to be successful, or that security is once again automatic. It is also, if not the worst of times for NATO, certainly one of the most demanding and challenging in its entire history, and this for a number of reasons.
First is that defence budgets do not necessary follow new threats. Governments will try to avoid cutting their military forces further but the costs of re-settling hundreds of thousands of refugees and bailing out the weak Eurozone economies, will make it difficult for many Allies to respect their NATO commitment to spend 2% of their GDP on defence. Currently only five out of 28 Allies do this.
The modern demands of security with the focus on terrorism, border controls and intelligence services, also means that the classical military no longer has the monopoly on security funds that it once enjoyed.
Many governments will take a gamble that they can re-establish effective deterrence relatively on the cheap through more military activity and joint multinational units rather than new capabilities and additional soldiers. This will make risk assessment a very important topic on the NATO agenda.
Secondly, what if Russia does not pose a direct military threat to NATO, given NATO’s overall superiority in budgets and capabilities, but tries instead to exploit the Achilles Heel of hybrid warfare? This involves intelligence operations, infiltrating special forces, economic pressures and propaganda campaigns to intimidate an adversary and undermine his will to resist.
We saw this with the “little green men” in Crimea and the way in which Russia rapidly took over key facilities and the entire communications system of the local Ukrainian government and armed forces.
Although it is beyond question that NATO countries are less vulnerable than Ukraine to hybrid warfare, it will still be a challenge for the Allies to identify the early warning indicators of this type of covert campaign and to sort out who is the best responder: the nation, the EU with its economic instruments or NATO with its military forces? How does NATO help its member states to identify their vulnerabilities and improve their resilience against hybrid warfare? The third issue concerns the South where the threats stemming from the breakdown of governments and sometimes entire societies in North Africa and the Middle East are arguably as severe as those posed by Russia – and certainly not something that any diplomat can negotiate his way out of in the foreseeable future.
Success here will require patient conflict resolution and institution and defence capacity building to help legitimate local governments stand on their own feet. Ultimately, interventions on the ground may be needed to eliminate the most radical and extremist elements, like the Islamic State, which unfortunately are also the best equipped, financed and organized and unlikely to submit to pressure from air campaigns alone.
Here the Alliance is not 80% of the solution, as it is in dealing with the military threat posed by Russia in the East and its brain power in forging alliances with local actors and other organizations like the UN and the EU, will be as important, if not more so, than its military brawn. So ultimately, the pressures on NATO have never been more diverse.
Gone are the days when the Alliance could deal with one challenge at a time and have it more or less under control before a new challenges arises. Moreover after 20 years in which NATO member states have had partnerships and cooperation and stabilization missions as the principal DNA of NATO’s raison d’être and daily activities, restoring NATO’s reputation as a major military power to be feared as well as respected will not be straightforward.
It will not be the task that many NATO ambassadors would have looked forward to at the beginning of their mandate or that Alliance-watchers had hoped would be necessary in the new Europe after the Cold War; but it has become, whether we like it or not, the new prerequisite for transatlantic security in the decades ahead.
