Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine has exposed the “weakness and division” within NATO’s “defensive shield”, and the bloc is setting itself up for “catastrophic failure” if it doesn’t adopt a more aggressive approach, The Guardian contributor Simon Tisdall has suggested.
In a piece in the newspaper on Sunday, Tisdall, who is also the outlet’s assistant editor, wrote that “taken together, all the rationales and excuses for passivity and inaction” purportedly demonstrated by the bloc in recent months “produce a picture of an alliance significantly less united, powerful and organized than its admirers pretend”.
The observer accused important alliance members, including France, Germany, Turkey, and Hungary, of “cowering behind” the alliance, avoiding “costly national commitments to Kiev that might anger Moscow”, and chattering, using delay tactics, and, in Ankara’s case, making “cynically self-serving” attempts “to sabotage Finland and Sweden’s membership applications”.
Tisdall warned that with the passage of time, “and if the threat of wider conflict rises, NATO’s long unaddressed weaknesses and vulnerabilities will become more obvious and more hazardous for those crouching behind its battlements”.
The journalist, who cheerled the NATO intervention in Libya in 2011 and pushed for Western involvement in Syria in 2014, complained that in Ukraine, tough proposals being pushed by the US, Poland, and the Baltic allies, like more troops, weapons, and planes on Russia’s borders, and warships in the Black Sea, have yet to be implemented.
Tisdall protested that each member of NATO has an equal say on alliance policy “when, in terms of military capacity, they are absurdly unequal”, and said this principle “hinders swift, bold, decision-making”. At the same time, he accused “laggards” of “lurking” behind and being overly reliant on the US.
“Organizationally and militarily, too, NATO is all over the place. It has three joint command headquarters – in Italy, the Netherlands and the US. But its top general is based in Belgium. Inter-operability of different countries’ weapons systems is lacking, as are joint training exercises, arms procurement and intelligence-sharing”, the columnist wrote.
Tisdall did not elaborate on the causes of these various issues, which apparently exist notwithstanding the Western alliance’s eye-wateringly outsized share of world military spending (more than half of the global $2.1 trillion total, not counting US allies in Asia, in 2021).
Ultimately, Tisdall suggested that NATO had “dropped the ball” after the USSR’s disintegration in 1991, paving the path for Russian President Vladimir Putin to “batter” the alliance’s shield and “putting the West to the test”.
NATO spent over two decades pushing toward Russia’s borders in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse, swallowing up every member of the former Warsaw Pact alliance, the three Baltic states and four republics of the former Yugoslavia after bombing that country in 1999. The expansion came despite repeated promises to Moscow that NATO wouldn’t move “one inch” eastwards following the reunification of Germany in 1990.
At its Bucharest Summit in 2008, the alliance proclaimed an “open-door policy” on further expansion, and welcomed the aspirations of Ukraine and Georgia’s pro-Western elites to join.
Russia has spent years criticising the bloc’s eastward push, saying it violates Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe principles laid down after the end of the Cold War on the need for “indivisible security for the region”.
“We made clear that NATO’s expansion to the east is unacceptable. The US is on our doorstep with its missiles. How would Americans react if we placed our missiles at the US border with Canada or Mexico?” Putin asked in his year end press conference in December. “It is not the course of the negotiations that is important, but the result. ‘Not a single inch to the east’, they told us in the nineties. And? They tricked us. There have been five waves of NATO expansion. Missile systems appearing in Romania and Poland. Did we come to them? They came to us”, Putin stressed.