Rolling Stone'un Putin-NATO Uyarısına Responsible Statecraft'tan Eleştiri

Rolling Stone hits hysterical note suggesting Putin NATO attack nigh

The Ukraine war has become fertile ground for a dangerously misguided way of thinking about the dynamics between Russia and the West — one that, if left unchecked, will set the stage for a larger and more destructive confrontation in the coming years. The increasingly popular narrative goes something like this: President Donald Trump, by undermining the transatlantic alliance, has provided Putin with a window for achieving his long-held aim of waging war on NATO. Journalist Mac William Bishop offers a thorough articulation of this view in a recent report for Rolling Stone. Putin “may be emboldened by the increasingly strained relationship between NATO and its most important member nation,” Bishop writes, as a result of the Trump administration’s “contempt for allies and unwillingness to defend Europe.” Putin, according to Bishop’s sources, is driven by a kind of megalomania, a fixation on himself as a great historical leader that may be enough to push him into the reckless decision to wage war on a military bloc orders of magnitude more powerful than Russia. Putin would take such a risky step, Bishop avers, because the Russian leader wants to “remove NATO from the geopolitical chessboard, and place Eastern and Central Europe firmly back in Russia’s sphere of influence.” In an attempt to advance the dubious narrative that Trump has somehow painted a bullseye on Europe’s back, Bishop pores over a cavalcade of criticisms of NATO made by Trump going back to 1987, when “he famously purchased a full-page newspaper ad accusing U.S. allies of free-riding, saying it was time to make ‘others pay for the protection we extend.’” The body of evidence presented here amounts to little more than an anodyne preoccupation with burden-shifting and concerns over regional stability. Yet it is apparently enough for the Atlanticist cognoscenti to cast Trump as handing Eastern Europe to Putin on a silver platter. But the author’s biggest challenge in building up his case is that, try as he might, he can’t quite get his own sources to agree with him. As the lone “NATO official” quoted in this story told Bishop, “I wouldn’t say that we’re seeing anything remarkably different than we’ve seen before.” Military expert Michael Kofman correctly stressed to Bishop at the outset that scenarios involving direct Russian assaults on NATO states are “low likelihood possibilities.” Of these possibilities, the one that’s most commonly cited and treated in depth by Bishop is the “limited incursion” model. This concept centers on the threat of a Russian lighting advance to chop off part of a NATO state’s territory, with Estonia commonly presented as the easiest target. Moscow would be gambling that the U.S. and potentially other NATO members will conclude that it’s not worth entering a full-scale war with Russia over a small chunk of an eastern flank state, and that this would set off a political crisis that may lead to the neutering or dissolution of NATO. My colleagues and I have explained in depth why this scenario is unlikely, but casting that aside, it should warrant some degree of reflection that Estonian officials themselves do not see such a threat on the horizon. “Every now and then, someone claims that Russia is about to attack NATO, particularly the Baltic states. At this moment, neither Estonia nor NATO sees any indication that Russia is preparing a large-scale military attack against the Alliance. Estonia’s threat assessment has not changed,” said Estonian Foreign Minister Margus Tsakhna last week. “There are two reasons for this: Russia is struggling in Ukraine and currently lacks the capability for such an attack. And Russia is deterred by NATO.” It was true long before Trump’s second presidency that there is no ironclad guarantee in NATO’s Article V collective defense provision that the U.S. will go to war with Russia over Europe. The fact remains that European NATO is more than capable of assuming the responsibility for deterring Russia without the U.S. acting as the region’s primary security provider. As with previous entries in this genre, the Rolling Stone report comes off as a rather cynical attempt to hinder a much-needed recalibration of the U.S. role in NATO by inflating the threat to Europe almost to the point of caricature. Worse still, it conjures a shibboleth that distracts from the real challenge of how to effectively manage transatlantic relations and advance regional stability in light of the most destructive war in Europe since 1945. The threat of escalation between Russia and Europe is real, but it is not being shaped, let alone accelerated, by the changing nature of U.S.-Europe relations.