James Sherr
Head of the Russia and Eurasia Programme
Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), London
In the time of its establishment, NATO was an organisation with confrontational ideology. After the dissolution of USSR it changed its ideology to cooperation. Do you think that in upcoming years NATO will come back to the confrontational ideology?
I do not think that NATO had ever been a confrontational alliance. It was a defensive alliance and it had no means of invading the Warsaw Pact or Soviet Union or taking an offensive against it. What has changed is that NATO has become much more of a political alliance than a military alliance. It was always a mixture of these two and it has invested very heavily in NATO-Russia partnership. But it has failed to see two things in this investment. It has defined this partnership in very narrow mechanistic and quantitative terms. How many exercises take place, how many meetings, how many committees there are, how often they meet, how many activities there are and partnership plans etc. And what they have ignored about all this is a progressive deterioration in Russian thinking about the West as a whole, about NATO and about its intentions. And therefore very belatedly NATO has come to realise that Russia regards NATO as an enemy. This is a very disturbing adjustment that NATO is making. It is only starting now. Certainly no one is talking about meeting this problem through confrontation. But one does have to ask, in these circumstances, and circumstances are that we are deeply engaged in the former Soviet Union, where we have very important partnerships with Ukraine and Georgia, what are our vital security interests, how do we maintain these interests and the interests of our key partners? In the phase of very strong Russian opposition and Russia´s willingness to find means of power that are usable to stop us.
Some people say that Russia has explicitly said that it is no longer their priority to find common interest with NATO.
But all of this has been happening a long time ago. Everything that president Putin, as he was, said in February 2007 in Munich, which shocked so many people, has been said in one form or another many times before. Why did we ignore it so many times before? I think that we ignored it because, until recently, Russia was weak. And so it was easy to ignore the fact that Russia was not happy with a post cold war status quo. They were deeply opposed to NATO enlargement. They have been nursing a sense of a bidder, great injury and insult because of the West´s policy. And only recently we are listening because we see that Russia has a quite means to do something about this mood. The fact that in Georgia these means became military was a complete shock to the system. Up to this point, NATO did not have a single contingency plan involving the use of military force by Russia on any part of its periphery. This was regarded as impossible. People are beginning to go back to essentials, to the drawing board. What is the real security environment that we find ourselves in? Do we have the right mix of tools – political, psychological, military, security, intelligence - to be able to achieve and maintain our interest in this environment in ways that are safe, in ways that are not provocative, in ways that are realistic, in ways that will not create unnecessary apprehensions in Russia but enhance our respect and our ability to deal effectively with Russia and other countries? These are the challenges we are beginning to face, we must face. The sadness I have is that we are doing so late, after so much damage has been done.
There are some opinions that accelerated membership plans for Ukraine and Georgia would mean a kind of demonstration from Brussels that Moscow cannot dictate who should we accept to NATO or not.
What the Georgia conflict demonstrated is that we have allowed, over the period of years, ourselves through neglect distracted by other issues, such as Afghanistan, to put ourselves in a position of weakness in this area. And to simply be tough from the position of weakness is very dangerous. This is one of the lessons of the Georgia crisis. President Saakashvili did not understand the difference between toughness and strength. There were some in the Bush administration that did not understand the difference between toughness and strength as well. When Russia invaded Georgia, President Bush said that they must leave this and that. Oh, really, how is that going to be accomplished, please? What is needed by NATO is again in a professional serious way to try to rebuild our strength. The object must be for Georgia and Ukraine to join NATO at such a point when membership strengthens their security and strengthens the security of NATO. That is not where we are today.
Interview by Martina Hodúlová (Slovak Atlantic Commission)
Transcript: Tomáš Špavelko (Slovak Atlantic Commission)
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