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 President Vladimir Putin's annexation of Crimea and support for
Russian-speaking separatists in eastern Ukraine has raised
dramatically a sense of vulnerability among NATO's new eastern
members from the Baltic to the Black Sea.
It has also highlighted unresolved questions about security in
countries such as Georgia and Moldova as well as Ukraine in the
post-Soviet space sandwiched between NATO and Russia.
When NATO's 28 leaders hold a summit in Wales on Sept. 4-5, military
plans to reassure former Soviet bloc states Poland, Estonia, Latvia
and Lithuania will top the agenda. The future of NATO's frozen
relations with Russia will also loom large.
That will eclipse the impending end of the alliance's longest, least
popular and least successful overseas mission in Afghanistan - a
high-casualty stalemate against Taliban fighters who still threaten
Kabul.
"Six months into the Russia-Ukraine crisis we must agree on
long-term measures to strengthen our ability to respond quickly to
any threat, to reassure those allies who fear for their own
country's security and to deter any Russian aggression," British
Prime Minister David Cameron, the summit host, said in a letter of
invitation to fellow leaders.
NATO has made clear it will not use force to support Ukraine, which
is not an alliance member. At the same time it has warned Russia,
which has mobilized 20,000 troops just across the border, against
military intervention in eastern Ukraine under the guise of a
humanitarian or peacekeeping operation.
"We are not considering military operations," NATO chief Anders Fogh
Rasmussen told Reuters in an interview this week.
"If the Russians were to intervene further in Ukraine, I have no
doubt that the international community would respond determinedly,
notably through broader, deeper, tougher economic sanctions that
would isolate Russia further," he said.
"PERSISTENT PRESENCE"
Whether to permanently station NATO forces east of the Cold War era
east-west border, or just to store weapons there, modernize air
bases and increase joint exercises and air patrols, will be one of
the main topics at the summit.
Cameron called for a new schedule of exercises, building new
military infrastructure, pre-positioning equipment and supplies, and
enhancing the NATO Response Force of up to 25,000 troops.
However, the easterners want "boots on the ground" with
forward-based troops and a NATO headquarters on their soil to deter
any Russian attempt to destabilize their region.
An opinion poll found nearly three-quarters of Germans oppose
permanent NATO bases in eastern members.
Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski told Reuters NATO member
states were close to reaching consensus over steps to beef up the
alliance's military presence in eastern Europe.
"We've welcomed the proposals by the military authorities of the
alliance who have formulated what they think a reasonable
reassurance package is," he said in an interview.
A senior NATO official said the likely compromise would be called a
"persistent presence".
A designated command structure will be established to defend the
eastern allies, upgrading an existing joint German-Polish-Danish
headquarters in Szcezcin, Poland, with frequent visits and exercises
but no permanently deployed allied forces.
"Everything we've seen so far says NATO is not going to war over
Ukraine," said Stephen Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Kiev now
at the Brookings Institution think-tank in Washington.
"The real focus is on looking at the European NATO allies and
reassuring them."
DOCTRINE UPENDED
The return of territorial defense as a priority upends two decades
of evolving NATO doctrine.
"After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the prevailing message at
NATO was 'out of area or out of business'," said a senior NATO
official, citing a landmark 1993 RAND Corporation analysis of the
alliance's future.
"Either we responded to new security challenges beyond our borders -
in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, on terrorism and in cybersecurity -
or the alliance would become irrelevant."
U.S. officials came to regard NATO mostly as a toolbox for building
coalitions of the willing for expeditionary warfare or humanitarian
missions.
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"Now to some extent it's 'back to basics'. There's a renewed
emphasis on Article V," the official said, referring to the mutual
defense commitment enshrined in the founding 1949 North Atlantic
Treaty.
However, unlike during the Cold War, there is no sense that Russia
is the sole security threat.
Putin's assertion of a right to defend Russian speakers beyond his
borders alarmed NATO allies, especially Baltic states with sizeable
Russian minorities, but it falls short of the global ideological
confrontation with communism. Moscow and the West have continued
to cooperate on issues such as curbing Iran's nuclear program and
disarming Syria of chemical weapons despite the conflict in Ukraine.
Mediterranean NATO allies, who see the main threats to their
security in instability in Africa and the Middle East, are eager to
maintain a dialogue with Russia and avoid any return to a purely
Cold War posture.
So the alliance needs to be able to handle both crisis management
missions and territorial defense.
That is a tall order given the sharp shrinkage of defense spending
in most NATO countries, which took a peace dividend after the Soviet
Union collapsed and have cut military outlays further since
financial crisis struck in 2008.
Most European allies spend far less than the NATO objective of 2
percent of economic output. Only Poland is significantly raising its
defense budget.
Latvia and Lithuania, among those pleading loudest for a NATO
presence, spend respectively just 0.9 and 0.8 percent of their GDP
on defense although they have pledged to meet the alliance's
spending target by 2020.
Washington wants a firm commitment from allies to increase military
outlays but expectations are low.
 ENLARGEMENT SHELVED
One divisive issue NATO leaders are likely to avoid in Wales is any
further enlargement of the alliance.
Some analysts blame an ambiguous compromise in 2008, when NATO
agreed that Georgia and Ukraine would eventually become members but
did not put them on a path to membership, for triggering a war that
year between Georgia and Russia.
Putin has made clear NATO enlargement up to Russia's borders is a
red line for Moscow. He justified the annexation of Crimea partly by
saying NATO warships might otherwise have taken over the Russian
Black Sea fleet base in Sevastopol.
A senior U.S. official involved in summit preparations acknowledged:
"There is not unanimity within the alliance about enlargement."
Washington and its allies will reaffirm that NATO's door remains
open but avoid any move that might be deemed provocative by Russia,
he said, adding: "This is not an enlargement summit."
That means the countries between NATO and Russia are likely to
remain an unstable buffer zone for years to come.
No one knows whether the Russian leader will escalate the conflict
before the NATO summit or calm things down to avoid a harsher
reaction.
"The harder things are on the ground, the more aggressive the mood
music at the summit will be," said Janine Davidson, a former U.S.
Defense Department official and now a senior fellow at the Council
on Foreign Relations.
(Additional reporting by Peter Apps and Matt Spetalnick in
Washington, Adrian Croft in Brussels, Marcin Goettig and Christian
Lowe in Warsaw. Editing by Mike Peacock.)
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