NATO may be about to expand again, without Putin’s blessing
In 1999, NATO was dropping bombs on Montenegro, a small state in southeastern Europe that at that point was part of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia alongside Serbia. Sixteen years later, things have certainly changed. If a now-independent Montenegro gets what it hopes for, it could be asked to join NATO in just a few months.
“I am certain the conditions are there for the alliance member states in December to take the decision to invite Montenegro to join,” Montenegrin Foreign Minister Igor Luksic told Reuters.
Top NATO officials have been visiting Montenegro this month, a trip they say is designed to assess whether the country has made progress on reforms required to join the alliance. The country is one of four seeking NATO membership (alongside Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia and Georgia), but experts say it is most likely to join next.
For the alliance, Montenegro’s ascension to NATO wouldn’t exactly prove a game changer. The country has a population of not much over 600,000 and a military budget of $28 million (U.S.) — a paltry figure when compared with, say, Britain, where $55 billion has been spent on defence over the past year. The Montenegrin armed forces number around 2,000 during peacetime, and one recent government report suggested that they were desperately in need of modernization.
However, despite Montenegro’s small size, many in Europe will be watching the situation closely for one big reason: Russia.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has complained for years about NATO’s eastern expansion, often arguing that the alliance broke promises made at the end of the Cold War. “I think it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any rela- tion with the modernization of the alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe,” Putin said in a scathing speech at the 2007 Munich Security Conference. “On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust.”
European concerns about Russia’s reaction appear to have ended talk of NATO membership for Georgia, a former Soviet republic on Russia’s southern border that fought a brief war with its larger neighbour in 2008. Putin has also suggested that Russia’s intervention in Crimea was a result of concerns about NATO.
Even if Montenegrin membership of NATO would essentially be symbolic, that symbolism could prove potent for Russia. Montenegro would be the first new member of NATO since 2009, when two other former Balkan states — Albania and Croatia — were granted membership. Crucially, it would be the first new NATO member since relations between the West and Russia plummeted after the conflict in Ukraine last year.