NATO’s Future: Beyond the Dnieper

Col. Jerry Landrum, PhD, U.S. Army
Lt. Col. John Nagl, DPhil, U.S. Army, Retired 26-08-2024

Through its unlawful, unnecessary, and misguided foreign policy since 2008, the Kremlin has validated every concern of those who advocated for NATO’s continuation in the 1990s and expansion in the following decades. During this time, Russia illegally occupied Georgian territory, annexed the Crimean Peninsula, invaded Ukraine, and, by extension, threatened Western Europe.

These actions reinvigorated NATO’s purpose as an organization whose raison d’être is the defense of Western democracies from Russian aggression.

Finland and Sweden walked a middle line in East-West rivalry throughout their respective histories. Still, even they have abandoned neutrality in favor of NATO’s peace and security assurances in reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Their invasion prompted Western Europe to unite in providing bilateral assistance to Ukraine to defend its territorial sovereignty. The Baltic countries offered U.S.-made Javelin antitank weapons to Ukrainian military forces.

After the invasion, military aid increased exponentially with the provision of Next Generation Light Anti-tank Weapons from Luxembourg; Bayraktar TB-2 drones from Türkiye; tanks from the Czech Republic; and, after a time but quite significantly, High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems from the United States.

 This robust support played a significant role in Ukraine’s ability to reverse Russia’s advance on Kyiv, at least for the first two years of the war.³⁵ The aid has not been one-sided; Ukraine has been generous in sharing military lessons learned from the conflict with NATO even as it fights for its national existence.

NATO recently published a compendium of lessons for its military forces to implement immediately to enhance deterrence of further Russian aggression.

Mobile training teams from the National Defence University of Ukraine visited professional military education institutions in Europe and the United States to pass on battlefield lessons rapidly.

As of September 2023, the United States has invested $46.6 billion of humanitarian, financial, and military aid to help Ukraine maintain its sovereignty, and the EU has pledged over €400 million for Ukraine’s defense.

 Although the exact numbers are uncertain, U.S. officials estimate that approximately seventy thousand Ukrainian soldiers have been killed or wounded since Russia invaded.

 Ukraine’s willingness to fight and die for independence has opened the way for NATO membership.

In the July 2023 Vilnius Summit, NATO reaffirmed its 2008 commitment to bring Ukraine into the Western Alliance. Opening the door to Ukraine merely acknowledges that sovereign countries have a right to determine their security arrangements.

 However, Ukraine’s entry into NATO and its survival as an independent nation are not foregone conclusions. Russia is engaged in a pervasive and effective information operations campaign to undermine Western support for Ukraine. Its efforts have slowed the flow of aid and created operational advantages for Russian military forces.

Pulling the plug on NATO when Putin’s regime has demonstrated a willingness to lose tens of thousands of soldiers in a mad attempt to restore the Russian empire is beyond folly; it is madness.

For seventy-five years, NATO has bound Europe and the United States together against aggressors from Moscow to the Hindu Kush. The alliance now faces its most difficult challenge since 9/11.

 To defeat irredentism in Europe again, the West must remain firm in its principles of democracy, peace, and security. Ukraine is the frontline in that battle.

Meanwhile, while NATO membership is Ukraine’s best hope for a prosperous future, the fate of Europe and the world also hinges on the fate of Ukraine.

 Ukraine’s demise would signal to other dictators that the established order is ineffective and legitimize other revanchist regimes. The repercussions would resound far beyond NATO’s boundaries.

If the West fully commits to providing Ukraine with needed military capabilities, it can enable the country’s success in its war for independence. 

Vladimir Putin’s theory of victory is a war of attrition, but he knows that Russia’s industrial base cannot keep pace with a united Western Alliance backing Ukraine. Thus, Putin has identified Western political will as a critical capability, and Russia’s ongoing influence campaign targets this political will.

The next NATO Summit, scheduled for July 2024 in Washington, D.C., will be closely followed by an American presidential election that will be determined in part by the candidates’ competing visions for continued American leadership of NATO. These two events will have enormous ramifications for whether NATO is still around to celebrate its centenary in 2049.

Will the West stand firm on the principles of democratic integration that enabled NATO’s success for generations, preventing the world wars that scarred the continent in the first half of the twentieth century, or will it allow Putin to steal Ukraine’s independence and put at risk the freedom of all of Europe? The implications will reverberate around the world.

It is difficult to overstate NATO’s success over the past seventy-five years, or how critical American support has been to that success. Just over a century ago, the European balance of power became unbalanced because of the rising power of a unified Germany.

An interlocking set of alliances designed to contain that power created a delicate balance that toppled into the First World War, the deadliest in world history, killing more than twenty million directly and another twenty million as a result of the great flu that originated in Camp Funston, Kansas, and spread rapidly through populations weakened by war.

America joined that war late, but the latent power of the new world led to Germany’s defeat, saving an exhausted France and an England that could no longer provide an offshore balancer to keep the peace in Europe.

In the wake of the “War to End All Wars”—since no one could imagine ever doing that again—America decided that it was safe behind its oceans and could afford to ignore the rising tide of fascism on two continents.

 On 7 December 1941, the folly of an “America First” strategy was exposed on the worst day America experienced for the next sixty years.

America’s unflinching commitment to NATO prevented World War III, saving millions of lives. It was the founding security concept for the greatest period of peace and prosperity the world has ever seen.

 After the horrors of the First and Second World Wars, which killed more than one hundred million people in a little more than a generation, the absence of great power war for the next four generations has been a boon that few could have predicted but from which all peoples worldwide have benefited.

Pulling the plug on NATO when Putin’s regime has demonstrated a willingness to lose tens of thousands of soldiers in a mad attempt to restore the Russian empire is beyond folly; it is madness. Without American support, NATO would collapse.

 The assumption that European peace and security can endure without NATO is as naïve as the idea that the world would live in harmony after the Great War and generates many dangerous questions.

Could Western Europe continue to cooperate on a common security vision without NATO? Recent negotiations between France and Germany suggest that such an agreement is not guaranteed. 

In the absence of NATO, who would provide nuclear deterrence against Russia? Would the absence of NATO force smaller countries toward nuclear proliferation to defend against Russia’s ambition? Poland is eager to participate in NATO’s nuclear sharing program, and the absence of NATO might force the country to pursue nuclear weapons independently. 

Under significant pressure from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia, Ukraine voluntarily gave up nuclear weapons in 1994 and undoubtedly regrets the decision.

The Putin regime will not stop at Kyiv, and the Kremlin’s next move is likely an attack on the Suwalki Gap to create a land bridge to Kaliningrad like ongoing efforts to hold the one it has established to Crimea; that would mean war with NATO.

A Europe “united and free” is not the birthright of any generation; like democracy itself, it must be created and preserved at enormous cost.

The great promise of NATO is that a united and free Europe could be maintained without the blood that was spilled in that effort a century ago.

Now, as it celebrates seventy-five years of shared work that has built a better present than its founders could have dreamed of, NATO faces its greatest challenge as its most important partner debates again whether it will devote American treasure and armed force to the pursuit of peace; it is no exaggeration to state that the lives of millions hang in the balance.