NATO (excerpt), August 30th 2014 P52 (北大西洋条約機構)
Setting the tripwire
NATO can only act by consensus, and some members feared that basing troops in Poland and the Baltic states would breach agreements reached with Russia in 1997 under the Founding Act, which formally declared an end to hostile relations. At a meeting of NATO foreign ministers in April, a call from Poland for 10,000 NATO troops to be stationed on its territory was rebuffed. Some did not want to hear Mr Rasmussen's message that years of attempts by NATO to make Russia a strategic partner had failed, and that under Mr Putin Russia saw NATO only as an adversary.
But as evidence mounted of Russia's engagement in the increasingly bloody insurrection in east Ukraine, the arguments of NATO's doves seemed ever more feeble. The big shift in public opinion came in July, when separatist rebels shot down Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 with advanced weapons supplied by Russia. “Those clinging to an optimistic view of Russia had to recognise it had not worked；they had no answer,” says a senior NATO diplomat. The alliance must be prepared to deal with an antagonistic Russia for a long time, says Mr Rasmussen. “I would caution against thinking this is just about Putin. It is deeper-rooted in Russian society.”
The result is that General Breedlove is unlikely to face much political resistance to the deterrence package he sets out at the Newport summit. A “readiness action plan” has been drawn up with the aim of enabling NATO to respond rapidly to an Article 5 crisis. A compromise has been reached between those who think basing NATO forces permanently in the east and north of Europe, close to Russia's borders, would breach the Founding Act, and those who argue that Russia's own actions mean the act is already a dead letter：General Breedlove will propose pre-positioning command and control, logistics specialists, heavy weapons and ammunition, probably at an existing base in Szczecin in Poland. The idea, he says, is to be able to “travel light but strike hard if needed”. The base is likely to be staffed on rotation, with troops from different member countries moving in and out. Frequent, large-scale exercises will signal NATO's preparedness and main
tain the crucial interoperability between national forces that was forged in Afghanistan.
An important element of the plans is to hold the newish NATO Response Force (NRF), which has 13,000 well-equipped troops provided on a rotating basis by member at its disposal, at a much higher state of readiness than before as the “spearhead” for the alliance's future deployments. Within it a multinational force of brigade size (about 5,000 troops) will be deployable at the first sign of trouble, possibly within hours, on the order of the SACEUR without the usual requirement for consensual political approval.
The intention, says Mr Rasmussen, is to ensure that “any potential aggressor will know that if they are to attack one of our allies, they will not just meet national troops, but they will meet NATO.” The implication is clear：foes will have to reckon with a tripwire force that will trigger a response from whole alliance. As one senior NATO official puts it：“There is extraordinary muscle memory in this organisation. We can still tool up pretty fast.”
A potential complication is that the hybrid warfare practised by Russia in Ukraine is more ambiguous than a conventional armed attack. General Breedlove says NATO must be ready for the “little green men” - special forces without sovereign insignia who cross borders to create unrest, occupy government buildings, incite locals and give tactical advice to separatists, thus destabilising a country. In an interview published on August 17th he told Germany's Die Welt：“If NATO were to observe the infiltration of its sovereign territory by [anonymous] foreign forces, and if we were able to prove that this activity were being carried out by a particular aggressor nation, then Article 5 would apply.”
NATO may no longer be scrabbling about looking for a role, but Jens Stoltenberg, a former Norwegian prime minister who takes over from Mr Rasmussen in October, will still have to grapple with many of the same old problems that afflict the alliance. Mr Rasmussen says that ahead of the summit about half of NATO's members have committed to no further reductions in defence spending, though that is, for many, a far cry from meeting their commitment to spending 2% of GDP. Nor, despite Mr Obama's insistence that he sees Europe's security as indivisible from America's, is there likely to be much change in America's strategic preoccupation with China. Mr Obama affects to see Russia more as a troublesome regional power than as a military and political rival like the Soviet Union of old. Whether NATO will play much of a role in Europe's turbulent Middle Eastern back yard is also doubtful.
But for all its shortcomings, NATO retains an extraordinary ability to reinvent itself in the face of new threats. With enemies like Mr Putin, its continued relevance is not in doubt.
