Predictable unpredictability: The future of euro-atlantic security?

PREDICTABLE UNPREDICTABILITY: THE FUTURE OF EURO-ATLANTIC SECURITY? IAN BOND

A participant in this year’s Riga Dialogue began his presentation by saying that Russia was now more predictable than the US or the EU. It was designed to be provocative, but it was an accurate reflection of reality. Unpredictability has become an important risk factor in the Euro-Atlantic area. Two of the main actors, Russia and the US, are actively encouraging instability in the third, Europe. The EU and European members of NATO are repeatedly knocked off course by unpredictable events (or events that they have failed to predict). In Russia, Vladimir Putin has been in power, as president or prime minister, since 1999. In May 2018 he was sworn in for what should be his fourth and final term as president, ending in 2024. Yet most Russian commentators expect Putin to remain in charge of Russia, whatever his formal constitutional role, beyond that date. Russian domestic politics under Putin has become predictable to the point of stagnation. Western commentators who predicted that Putin might appoint a new prime minister, or at least make a start on much-needed structural economic reform, have so far been proved wrong. Not for the first time, when faced with the possibility of domestic instability linked to reform, Putin seems to be backing away: in June the government announced an increase to the pension age for both men and women—an essential change in view of Russia’s demographic and economic situation—but on 20 July Putin said that there was no final decision, and that he did not like the options presented to him. Putin’s great skill in foreign policy has been to act predictably, sometimes even announcing his intentions in advance, and yet still take the West by surprise. There were plenty of warnings in 2008 and earlier 34

that Russia might interfere with Georgian sovereignty, but Western nations discounted those warnings or played them down; they made little attempt to dissuade Russia politically, still less to deter it militarily. Likewise, in the case of Ukraine, Putin had made clear to George W Bush in 2008 that he did not see Ukraine as a ‘real state’. Moreover, he told the audience at the Valdai Discussion Club in 2013 that Russians and Ukrainians were ‘one people’ and that Ukraine was ‘art of our greater Russian, or Russian-Ukrainian, world’. The West comforted itself with the idea that such comments were aimed at a specific segment of the Russian domestic audience, yet the comments turned out to be an indication of the way that Putin saw Ukraine and his inability to treat a stable, prosperous and independent Ukraine as a partner rather than a threat to Russia. Putin wants to increase Russia’s relative strength in Eurasia visà-vis its potential adversaries—especially the West. One pillar of his strategy has been strengthening the Russian military by investing in re-armament, making up for years of under-investment following the collapse of the Soviet Union. But as the domestic economy has drifted, the defence budget has fallen for the last few years (although the extent of the reduction is disputed). The other pillar is to weaken his perceived adversaries, within and beyond the territory of the former Soviet Union. Though most Western politicians only woke up to the idea of ‘hybrid warfare’ when Russian special forces in unmarked uniforms took over Crimea with barely a shot fired, the Kremlin has been conducting an undeclared war against the West since well before 2014. In particular, this has taken the form of cultivating populist parties, especially right-wing groups, and exploiting new technologies to spread disinformation. Putin has pursued this conflict both by ‘traditional’ methods, using Russia’s intelligence agencies to carry out what the KGB termed ‘active measures’, as well as through more indirect means, relying on wealthy Russian political allies to engage with Western populists and sometimes even support them financially. Most notoriously, an obscure Russian bank allegedly connected to one of Putin’s favourite oligarchs, Gennady Timchenko, lent €9.4 million to the Front National in France in 2014. Russian agencies have also been adept at using various elements of information warfare to increase divisions within and between Western countries. 35

Putin’s greatest success has come not with right-wing insurgent parties in Europe, however, but with a right-wing insurgent president in Washington. Experts may disagree about the extent to which Donald Trump’s election success depended on Russia’s hacking of the emails of various Democratic Party individuals and organisations, or covert financial support channelled (for example) through the US National Rifle Association. They cannot dispute, however, that Putin wanted Trump to win: at the press conference after his bilateral summit with Trump in Helsinki on 16 July 2018, Putin himself confirmed that he did, “because [Trump] talked about bringing the US-Russia relationship back to normal”. Putin may have thought that Trump would work to improve the US– Russian relationship; he probably did not foresee the extent to which Trump would damage the relationship between the US and its European allies. Euro-Atlantic security and prosperity since World War Two has depended on the partnership between the US and its European allies. NATO, with the US as the leading member, has provided Europe with a defence guarantee, and the EU (and before that the Coal and Steel Community, and the European Economic Community) has made Europe prosperous. Trump attacked NATO and the EU during his election campaign, and he has continued since. He is not the first American leader to put pressure on European allies to spend more on their own defence—that began with Senator Mike Mansfield in the early 1960s. But Trump is the first US president to suggest that the US might not live up to its obligations to NATO countries that do not meeting the target of spending two percent of GDP on defence—or, as he put it himself, ‘I guess I implied, you don’t pay, we’re out of there’. At the NATO summit in Brussels in July, Trump disrupted the programme by insisting on an emergency discussion of burden-sharing, at the expense of a scheduled meeting with the presidents of Georgia and Ukraine. And after the summit, despite claiming credit for saving NATO by getting other members to pay ‘hundreds of billions of dollars more over the years’, Trump called into question NATO’s Article 5 defence guarantee, suggesting that he was worried that Montenegro, ‘a tiny country with very strong people ... they’re very aggressive people’ could precipitate World War Three. One consequence of Trump’s approach 36

has been a serious collapse in European trust in the US, driving a wedge between Europe and the US—a goal that Soviet and Russian leaders failed to achieve despite decades of attempts. Trump’s attitude to Europe also reflects his consistent opposition to free trade since the 1980s. He is particularly hostile to multilateral trading arrangements, which he sees as diluting America’s power by giving other countries the ability to work together against US interests. The EU and US have not always seen eye-to-eye, whether over trade issues or the EU’s defence ambitions, but the US has never sought to question the importance of the EU as one of the foundations of EuroAtlantic stability—until now. Trump, however, has reserved particular hostility for the EU, which he described (in spite of facts to the contrary, in 2016 as ‘formed, partially, to beat the United States on trade’. He has imposed tariffs on steel, aluminium and other goods on spurious ‘national security’ grounds, damaging both the US and European economies and undermining European trust in the US. Though a truce of sorts seems to have broken out since the president of the European Commission, JeanClaude Juncker, visited Washington on 25 July, there is no reason to suppose that it will last, or that Trump will not continue to lash out every time the US runs a trade deficit. Europe’s problems are not limited to Trump. In the same way that Putin’s aim of weakening the West is partially implemented by non-state actors, Trump’s hostility towards the EU results in concrete actions by non-state actors from the US, including former administration figures like Steve Bannon, who is now trying to unify disparate far right parties in Europe under a single label—‘The Movement’—and provide the resources to enable the far right to win a large number of seats in the European Parliamentary elections in May 2019. In many cases, US right-wing forces and the Kremlin seem to be supporting the same parties and causes, either coincidentally or deliberately. Europe should not blame outside powers for all its problems. The rise of populism has been driven to a significant extent by the effects of the economic crisis that began in 2008, and policy responses to it. Research in the UK, for example, has shown that the areas worst affected by austerity were also those most likely to vote to leave the EU in the 2016 referendum. 37

While the scale of migration from the Middle East and North Africa would have been hard to deal with under any circumstances, EU missteps have made things worse. But Europe finds itself under attack not only from the Kremlin, which it might have expected, but also from the White House, which it did not. Though it is hard to say that Trump has a strategy in this regard, both he and Putin seem to be approaching Europe with the intention of weakening a (real or potential) geopolitical rival by pursuing divide-and-rule tactics. Putin has proved adept at exploiting ‘cultural’ or ‘values’ agendas to portray himself as a defender of Europe’s traditional Christian culture in the face of migration from Islamic countries, homosexuality, and ‘globalism’ (often used as a surrogate for traditional anti-Semitism); Trump also has repeatedly suggested that Europe is being overwhelmed by Muslim migrants, and claimed (falsely) that migration to Germany has led to a big rise in crime. Consciously or unconsciously, Trump often seems to reserve his sharpest criticisms for Germany, the most powerful state in Europe, seeking either to weaken Chancellor Angela Merkel, to attack Germany’s economic power (notably its automotive industry), or to increase tensions between Germany and its neighbours (for example in relation to the Nordstream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, over which Germany and a number of Central European countries are at odds). The EU rarely if ever thinks in geopolitical terms; acting to weaken its rivals is foreign to its nature. It is struggling to meet the twin challenges of Putin and Trump. Since the end of the Cold War, European countries have been able to rely on their security and economic partnerships with the US to keep Europe safe and to set out the rules of the international economic system. Now, Putin is seeking to extend his influence beyond the former Soviet Union and into other parts of Europe, the US seems to be a less reliable security partner, and the rules of the global economy may increasingly be set by others, including China, as Trump and those around him believe that the existing multilateral system of governance works against America’s interests. What should European leaders do? First, they need to accept that stability should not be a goal in and of itself. The problems in Europe that Putin and Trump are exacerbating are real. These problems can only be solved if things change. If stability were 38

Europe’s only ambition, the Cold War would still be ongoing; however, if Europe had not moved swiftly to create stabilising mechanisms— European agreements with the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, the Partnership and Co-operation Agreement with Russia—then the situation on Europe’s borders could easily have got worse rather than better (as, indeed, it did in former Yugoslavia, where Europe and the US were initially indecisive). But Europe needs to ensure that change is incremental, or at least that it is well managed. Second, they need to improve their understanding of the challenges they face from Russia and Trump, and they need to ensure that actors in the US and Russia—both state and non-state—understand the EU and NATO better. There are several strands to this improved mutual understanding. One is diplomatic engagement and traditional intelligence gathering. After the end of the Cold War, and particularly after the heady optimism of the early 1990s, when the West (and many Russians) hoped that Russia would rapidly become a ‘normal’ country, most foreign ministries and intelligence services shifted their priorities elsewhere, to deal with terrorism and instability in the Middle East and South Asia, or to watch the rise of China. The EU and NATO and their member states need to improve their understanding of how Putin’s Russia operates, including how non-state actors contribute to pursuing state objectives. Though the space for unofficial contacts in Russia is much narrower than it was in the early 1990s, Europeans also need to keep making the effort to engage with non-official Russians and those who work in state-funded but non-governmental bodies such as academic institutes. Dialogue is essential for confidence-building. In the current climate, increasing mutual transparency may be difficult if not impossible, but it is worth the effort even if the short-term returns are limited. Europeans and Russians both need to explore what drives policy-making on the other side, and to get a better understanding of the significance of various decisions. Nowhere is this truer than in the defence and security sphere. Old mechanisms have effectively broken down. Russia has withdrawn from the CFE treaty, it is in violation of the INF treaty, and it ignores 39

the confidence- and security-building measures of the OSCE’s Vienna Document. The West cannot prevent Russia from making these choices, even if it believes that they are bad for the security of both parties. But it is strongly in the interest of European states to explore whether any alternative arms control, or at least confidence-building measures, could be negotiated with Russia. It may be that, as with the Mutual and Balance Force Reduction (MBFR) talks, which dragged on without a result from 1973 to 1989, the process of working toward a dialogue may itself be of some benefit; some of the groundwork done by the MBFR negotiators subsequently helped to make the negotiation of the CFE treaty easier, once the political will to come to an agreement existed. Alongside building their knowledge of Russia, and improving contacts at all levels, Europeans also need to build up their understanding of how Trump’s America operates. Trump himself may be a one-off, but the tensions in American society that brought him to power will not disappear. Traditionally, European diplomatic efforts in the US have focussed on coastal elites, but that is not where the problem is. European countries and the EU should try to understand, and to shape, public opinion in the US more broadly. Trump’s criticism of the EU, and his sometimes-outlandish claims about social problems in European countries, have prompted more efforts by member states and the EU delegation in Washington to make their case directly to business groups and others; however, Europeans need also to ensure that they know how much traction Trump’s rhetoric has, and that they counter it where necessary. A survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs in 2017 showed that 69 percent of Americans thought that NATO was still essential to US security—but among core Trump supporters, the figure was only 54 percent. Moreover, while only 38 percent of Americans thought that Trump was right to threaten not to defend allies who did not meet their spending commitments, among core Trump supporters the figure was 60 percent. Third, Europeans need to increase their resilience. Dialogue alone will not prevent sudden, unplanned and dangerous lapses in European security. Europe needs to continue to strengthen traditional military deterrence, to ensure both that Russia—or any other adversary—knows that military pressure on a European country is unlikely to succeed, and 40

that military intervention would come at a high cost. One of Ukraine’s problems in 2014 was that Russia knew that the Ukrainian armed forces were unable to inflict significant losses on Russian forces; once that calculation changed, Russia stopped advancing. There are still enough pro-NATO voices in the US to ensure that for the foreseeable future Europeans are unlikely to be left unprotected, but no-one can predict how Trump might respond to Russian pressure on an ally in a crisis, and there is every reason for Europeans to invest more in their own defence, both individually and collectively. EU initiatives (such as the Permanent Structure Co-operation [PESCO] and the European Defence Fund) should be valuable in rationalising Europe’s fragmented defence industry landscape and increasing the efficiency of every Euro spent on defence. Europe must also be resilient in the face of non-traditional threats, including those originating from either Russia or the US. In recent years, money—legally or illegally acquired and exported—from Russia (and other parts of the former Soviet Union) has helped to create a constituency of individuals and companies that are dependent on good relations with Moscow and willing to lobby against sanctions and other forms of pressure. The EU needs to do a better job of ensuring that antimoney laundering directives are not merely transposed into national law in the member states but implemented actively and aggressively to drive out illegal activity and to inoculate European countries against financial influence from the Kremlin. Revelations about the Internet Research Agency in St Petersburg and its efforts to influence political debate in the US and Europe through social media have underlined the fact that the tools of an open society can be turned against it. Europe needs to work with social media companies and with the US and other like-minded countries to weed out those who try to exploit them to increase divisions in society or to push political discourse to extremes. European countries and the US also need to do much more to increase civic education: democracy becomes more fragile and open to manipulation when voting populations do not understand how their own systems of government function, let alone multilateral institutions like the EU and NATO. 41

Fourth, Europe needs to become more agile in making policy. The world of the Cold War often changed at an appropriately glacial speed, but when it broke down, the EU and NATO had to respond quickly. Overall, they succeeded, helped by the fact that the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, did not resort to large scale conflict to try to save the old system; the inhabitants of Yugoslavia were less lucky in their leaders. But Europe today seems more paralysed in the face of unfamiliar events than it was then. There is less consensus in an EU of 28 (soon to be 27) and a NATO of 29-member states than there was in the past, and it is inevitably harder to quickly agree on a course of action and implement it. Without more agility, Europe will always be at a disadvantage to the less restrained leaders of the US and Russia. For the EU, it is time to re-examine the idea of making foreign policy decisions by qualified majority rather than unanimity; for NATO, this means building in the flexibility needed for ‘coalitions of the willing’ (including key non-members like Sweden and Finland) to use NATO structures and assets in crises. Europeans may look back nostalgically to the post-Cold War period, when the world seemed to be evolving towards democracy and the free market, and when America had presidents with some attachment to the international system. But the situation today is different, and the tools needed to preserve Europe’s stability and prosperity will also be different. The only thing that is now predictable about the future is that it will be unpredictable. It is time for Europeans to take to heart the lesson of Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s famous novel ‘The Leopard’: if they want everything to stay as it is, everything must change.

42