Failure to offer support could destroy Nato’s credibility and spell the end of its role
For Britain’s eastern-most Nato allies, the sight of British troops marching across the Tarmac at Estonia’s Amari airbase was a stirring – and long overdue – sight.
With raw memories of Soviet occupation during the Cold War, the governments of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland have been lobbying frantically for an enhanced Nato presence ever since Russian troops swept into Crimea and east Ukraine three years ago.
In the event of an actual war with Russia, however, they probably would not last long. The Russian military has tens of thousands of troops in its western military district.
Thankfully, no one really expects that to happen. In public, at least, serious Russian military thinkers pooh-pooh the idea of Moscow making a land grab in the Baltics. The factors that drove the annexation of Crimea – overwhelming pro-Russian public sentiment, the need to secure a strategically vital military port, and a militarily decrepit enemy without allies – simply do not exist, they say.
And while Western planners have learnt the hard way to take Russian assurances with a pinch of salt, even Jens Stoltenberg, the Nato Secretary General, has made it clear that war in the Baltics is unlikely. But there is a more fundamental cause at stake. Nato’s credibility is based on the principle of collective defence – that an attack on one is an attack on all. On paper, that is a sacred commitment that grants even the smallest allies a cast-iron security umbrella that is enough to deter all but the most fanatical (and suicidal) of enemies. But with the exception of the September 11 attacks, it has never really been tested. And no one really knows what would happen if a company of Russian paratroopers, say, occupied a patch of the Curonian spit.
Would Donald Trump, who has called the alliance “obsolete,” risk World War Three over a remote patch of sand and forest on the Baltic coast?
Would the German public, scarred for historical reasons, be willing to send troops to fight Russia again?
How, for that matter, would British voters, having voted to extricate themselves from Europe, react to the idea of a ruinous continental war?
Failure to respond could destroy the alliance’s credibility and spell the end of its de facto role as the foundation of European security – a long-term goal of Russian foreign policy.
In a sense, then, this deployment is addressed as much to Russia as to Nato itself.
The alliance is telling itself that even in these times of rising isolationism, it is not prepared to give up the ghost just yet.