Is NATO overreaching?

During the Cold War, Elbe, the river, became the line that separated the United States-led alliance from the Soviet Union in Central Europe. It was ironic because Elbe was where the Western allies and the Soviet army had linked up in 1945. The US army was ordered to stop there, which allowed the Soviet army to attack and seize Berlin.

Then the new peer competition began. And Elbe, which symbolised cooperation near the end of World War II, became the line separating West from East Germany and, in a broader sense, came to depict the segregation and adversarial relations between the US-Soviet blocs.

Now the line has shifted further east, to Dnieper in Ukraine, a major waterway that flows roughly north to south and links Kyiv to the Black Sea. In a way it slices Ukraine, but more than just geographically. As the Polish photojournalist Justyna Mielnikiewicz — she traversed its winding path — told CNN in 2015, “The farther east of the river you go, residents tend to lean toward pro-Russia rebels. The farther west of the river, people are more likely to support the government.”

That was seven years ago. Now, since February 24, Ukraine is at full-scale war with Russia and the Russian army has taken most of Luhansk since the fall of Severodonetsk and also controls a large part of Donetsk.

History’s ironic march continues, though. One of the reasons for President Vladimir Putin’s decision to attack Ukraine was his declared anger at NATO’s eastward expansion. His primary — now failed — objective when Russian troops rolled into Ukraine was to capture Kyiv, install a puppet government and then negotiate with the West from a position of strength. A quick, easy victory was supposed to put everyone on notice; a quick victory followed by talks was also supposed to take care of the shock at the aggression by giving the West a fait accompli.

That did not happen. Kyiv did not fall. Russia had to abandon its main war effort and focus instead in the east and south. The war has dragged on with major losses of men and equipment on both sides. The resilience of Ukrainian fighters has brought a major coalition of Western powers together. Sweden and Finland, which had stayed away from NATO through the Cold War, applied for NATO membership. As the June 29 Madrid [NATO] Summit Declaration puts it: “Today, we have decided to invite Finland and Sweden to become members of NATO, and agreed to sign the Accession Protocols.”

To get a sense of the broadening coalition, point 14 of the Declaration says: “We have met here in Madrid with many of NATO’s partners. We had valuable exchanges with the Heads of State and Government of Australia, Finland, Georgia, Japan, the Republic of Korea, New Zealand, Sweden, and Ukraine, as well as the President of the European Council and the President of the European Commission.”

This is certainly the opposite of what Putin’s initial plan had hoped for. In trying to push the line back to the Bug River, he has got everyone ganged up on him with Ukrainians resisting the Russian army east and west of Dnieper and NATO and the European Union coming together in an impressive show of solidarity, though, as one analyst put it, this “display of unity hasn’t been easy because different member states of the alliance have very different geographical locations and different perceptions of the world.”

At the military level, some lessons are obvious. A major land and air war between states is still possible; such a war, given the weapons systems, will take a heavy toll of men and equipment and test not only the belligerents’ will to fight but also their industrial strength and production capacity; while quantity has its own quality, possession of and training on state-of-the-art systems will create its own asymmetries, especially when force is innovatively employed. There are other lessons but they need a separate treatment.

At the politico-strategic level, the world has entered another ideological dividing line: democracies versus autocracies. While it is true that the appellation ‘democracy’ is a stretch even when one looks at some of the NATO partners, this is how it is being and will continue to be marketed. This is how, in fact, the Madrid Declaration puts it: “We are united in our commitment to democracy, individual liberty, human rights, and the rule of law. We adhere to international law and to the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations. We are committed to upholding the rules-based international order.”

One can pick many holes in this. Whose democracy, whose individual liberties and rights, whose rule of law and whose rules-based international order. It does serve an important purpose to unpack this narrative. But going by Neo-Realism and what John Mearsheimer called the tragedy of great power politics, it is about power and, as one can see, the coalitions one can build up and sustain.

There’s also the problem of collections and collective interests. As Reinhold Niebuhr put it in his Moral Man and Immoral Society, “reason is also the weapon to defend the interests and privileges of individuals and groups. It defends, justifies and frames the moral deception for social conscience.” This basically means that individual morality cannot be applied to social groups, nations and states because “a sharp distinction must be drawn between the moral and social behaviour of individuals and of social groups, national, racial, and economic; and that this distinction justifies and necessitates political policies which a purely individualistic ethic must always find embarrassing.”

The narrative about democracies and rights must, therefore, be put in its proper perspective, the exercise of power. This does not mean that one cannot or should not distinguish between sociopolitical and economic systems that are more inclusive from those that are statist, centrist and oppressive. One must and can. But the rhetoric has to be seen in and through the prism of statist rivalries. Put another way, the stress on democracy and rights is not an exercise in a real moral sense but weaponised as part of the narrative of a coalition against its adversaries. This in fact is an approach many Neo-Realists have long opposed.

Point 6 of the Madrid Declaration makes it clear with surprising degree of honesty: “We are confronted by cyber, space, and hybrid and other asymmetric threats, and by the malicious use of emerging and disruptive technologies. We face systemic competition from those, including the People’s Republic of China, who challenge our interests, security, and values and seek to undermine the rules-based international order.”

The lines, once again, have been drawn along we, us and our. There’s a danger in this approach, of overreaching. As Henry Kissinger once said, “Absolute security for one power means absolute insecurity for all others.” That does not create a balance; it invites a pushback. Kissinger has already warned against that. As I wrote in this space last month, he made two points at the World Economic Forum at Davos on May 23: it is time to think of a diplomatic solution to end the war and which will likely involve territorial concessions to Russia, even though “Ideally, the dividing line should be a return to the status quo ante”; “Pursuing the war beyond that point would not be about the freedom of Ukraine, but a new war against Russia itself.”

At the moment, no one is listening.

The writer is a journalist with interest in foreign and security policies