NATO/OTAN and the Eastern Threat to Europe

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) - known in the organization's other official language as OTAN (Organisation du traité de l'Atlantique Nord) - is a mutual defense pact. It's not a monolithic entity meant for all conflicts, where if one nation goes to war for any reason every country in NATO has to follow along. On the most basic level, it's defense and counterattack only.

Article 1
The Parties undertake, as set forth in the Charter of the United Nations, to settle any international dispute in which they may be involved by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security and justice are not endangered, and to refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations.

Article 2
The Parties will contribute toward the further development of peaceful and friendly international relations by strengthening their free institutions, by bringing about a better understanding of the principles upon which these institutions are founded, and by promoting conditions of stability and well-being. They will seek to eliminate conflict in their international economic policies and will encourage economic collaboration between any or all of them.

Article 3
In order more effectively to achieve the objectives of this Treaty, the Parties, separately and jointly, by means of continuous and effective self-help and mutual aid, will maintain and develop their individual and collective capacity to resist armed attack.

Article 4
The Parties will consult together whenever, in the opinion of any of them, the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the Parties is threatened.

Article 5
The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.

Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security.

Article 6
For the purpose of Article 5, an armed attack on one or more of the Parties is deemed to include an armed attack:

on the territory of any of the Parties in Europe or North America, on the Algerian Departments of France , on the territory of or on the Islands under the jurisdiction of any of the Parties in the North Atlantic area north of the Tropic of Cancer;
on the forces, vessels, or aircraft of any of the Parties, when in or over these territories or any other area in Europe in which occupation forces of any of the Parties were stationed on the date when the Treaty entered into force or the Mediterranean Sea or the North Atlantic area north of the Tropic of Cancer.

Article 7
This Treaty does not affect, and shall not be interpreted as affecting in any way the rights and obligations under the Charter of the Parties which are members of the United Nations, or the primary responsibility of the Security Council for the maintenance of international peace and security.

In modern times, NATO has also acted as a peacekeeping and peacemaking organization, as in the Balkans in the 90s. In the 2011 intervention in Libya, members enforced the no-fly zone or assisted as able (plus the airsrikes in support of anti-Qaddafi forces).

This conflict isn't what I'm leading up to, but it does raise an issue: funding. Because of budget cuts, the UK Royal Navy said in August 2011 their operations were not sustainable (sorties began in March of the same year). Remember when "Rule, Britannia/Britannia rule the waves"? They couldn't even afford to support and conduct airstrikes for a few months, and the UK has long been viewed as one of the core NATO members, along with France, Italy and (formerly West) Germany.

So what?

NATO accounts for ~70% of global military spending, right? Well, the target for military spending among NATO members is 2% GDP, and there are 28 member nations. Only a few members actually met that target in 2014. The US, UK, France, Greece, and Estonia. And the US accounted for 75% of NATO spending in 2012. The only 2 countries of the other 23 I let slide are Iceland, which is sort of a unique case since it has no standing military, and Poland, which only just falls short, and - from a standpoint that's not merely fiscal - seems to be consider its military a higher priority than the UK, France or Greece do.

But it's not just about money.

From the New York Times. I'd just post the link, but this way I can emphasize certain points, plus after a set period of time, only subscribers can view certain articles. I am one, since it's a good source of international news, and investigative jounalism.

As NATO faces a resurgent Russian military, a substantial number of Europeans do not believe that their own countries should rush to defend an ally against attack, according to a comprehensive survey to be made public on Wednesday.

NATO’s charter states that an attack against one member should be considered an attack against all, but the survey points to the challenges the alliance faces in trying to maintain its cohesion in the face of an increasingly aggressive Russia.

“At least half of Germans, French and Italians say their country should not use military force to defend a NATO ally if attacked by Russia,” the Pew Research Center said it found in its survey, which is based on interviews in 10 nations.

Ivo H. Daalder, a former American ambassador to NATO and the president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, said that after a quarter-century in which NATO worried little about defending its territory against Russia, “it will take a serious effort by the alliance to convince its public of the need to prepare for, deter and, if necessary, respond to a Russian attack.”

The survey is likely to send an unsettling message to Baltic members of the alliance, which have been looking for more assurances from NATO that it will protect them from Russian meddling.

Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia have been worried that they may become targets of some of the “hybrid war” tactics that Russia has used to try to mask its operations in eastern Ukraine. They include the use of specially trained troops without identifying patches whose operations are denied by Moscow.

“Our data shows that Germans, French and Italians have little inclination to come to a NATO ally’s defense,” said Bruce Stokes, the director for global economic attitudes at the Pew Research Center, “and if the next military conflict in the region is hybrid warfare, and there is some debate who these Russian-speaking fighters are, such attitudes will only further inhibit NATO’s response.”

The Pew report is based on 11,116 telephone and face-to-face interviews in eight NATO countries as well as Russia and Ukraine. The interviews were conducted from early April to mid-May, and the results have a margin of error of roughly plus or minus three to four percentage points, the center said.

The Western alliance has long found it difficult to mobilize public support for military spending. But public opinion is not always decisive in shaping NATO policy.

President Ronald Reagan managed to win sufficient European backing to deploy Pershing II and ground-launched cruise missiles on the Continent despite a substantial peace movement. Those missile deployments increased pressure on the Kremlin to negotiate a 1987 American-Russian treaty banning intermediate-range land-based missiles.

Not all of the data in the Pew report is bad news for NATO. According to the study, residents of most NATO countries still believe that the United States would come to their defense. Americans and Canadians also largely say that their countries should act militarily to defend a NATO ally, and nearly half of the British, Polish and Spanish respondents say the same.

“You would have a basis for building a political consensus if there was a serious Russian attack,” Mr. Daalder said.

But the study highlights sharp differences within the alliance’s ranks. Of all those surveyed, Poles were most alarmed by Moscow’s muscle flexing, with 70 percent saying that Russia was a major military threat.

Germany, a critical American ally in the effort to forge a Ukraine peace settlement, was at the other end of the spectrum. Only 38 percent of Germans said that Russia was a danger to neighboring countries aside from Ukraine, and only 29 percent blamed Russia for the violence in Ukraine.

Consequently, 58 percent of Germans do not believe that their country should use force to defend another NATO ally. Just 19 percent of Germans say NATO weapons should be sent to the Ukrainian government to help it better contend with Russian and separatist attacks.

Support for the NATO alliance in Germany was tallied at 55 percent, down from 73 percent in 2009. Those results are influenced by Germans in the eastern part of the country, who are more than twice as likely as western Germans to have confidence in President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

In the United States, the study notes, support for NATO remains fairly strong. Americans and Canadians, it says, were the only nationalities surveyed in which more than half of those polled believed that their country should take military action if Russia attacked a NATO ally. Forty-six percent of Americans believe that the United States should provide arms to the Ukrainian government, though Republicans are more likely than Democrats to support such a move.

The findings on Russians’ attitudes are likely to be disappointing for NATO supporters.

Western officials have calculated that economic sanctions will eventually erode Russian support for Mr. Putin’s decision to intervene in eastern Ukraine, but he has remained extremely popular by riding a wave of nationalism and controlling much of the news media. Most Russians are unhappy with the state of the economy, but they tend to blame not Mr. Putin but the drop in oil prices and the West’s efforts to punish Russia.

Eighty-eight percent of Russians said they had confidence in Mr. Putin to do the right thing on international affairs, the highest rating since Pew started taking polls on the question in 2003.

“The Ukrainian situation continues to be very good for Vladimir Putin with his own people,” Mr. Stokes said. “The Russians feel the pain of the economy, but they blame it on the West, not on Putin.”

It doesn't help that Russia has been financing far-right European parties like France's National Front, or been cozying up with Hungary's Viktor Orban. A few months ago, a conference of far-right European parties was held in St. Petersburg. Many of them have been admirers of President Putin's policies, especially his extolling of traditional values, which plays well in Russia, which has a population that is very "traditionalist" on social issues. Many of them also favor an exit from the Eurozone and NATO.

Putin knows his military only stands a chance against a divided NATO. If Russia can get EU nations to Ribbentrop while they Molotov, they have a huge advantage. Ironic that the instigator of World War 2 is the one declaring "peace in our time". (I would have gone with the more subtle "umbrella" reference to Chamberlain, but the last time I'm aware that was used was when Nixon went to China.)

NYT again:

The war in Ukraine that has pitted Russia against the West is being waged not just with tanks, artillery and troops. Increasingly, Moscow has brought to bear different kinds of weapons, according to American and European officials: money, ideology and disinformation.

Even as the Obama administration and its European allies try to counter Russia’s military intervention across its border, they have found themselves struggling at home against what they see as a concerted drive by Moscow to leverage its economic power, finance European political parties and movements, and spread alternative accounts of the conflict.

After protests and violent clashes, work at the site has come to a standstill.Russian Money Suspected Behind Fracking Protests NOV. 30, 2014
The Kremlin’s goal seems to be to sow division, destabilize the European Union and possibly fracture what until now has been a relatively unified, if sometimes fragile, consensus against Russian aggression. At the very least, if Russia can peel off even a single member of the European Union, it could in theory prevent the renewal later this month of economic sanctions that are scheduled to expire absent the unanimous agreement of all member states.

President Obama arrived in Germany on Sunday for a Group of 7 summit meeting at which he plans to rally European allies to stand firm against Russia, especially as violence flares again in eastern Ukraine despite a shaky cease-fire. In the days leading up to his trip, both American and European officials publicly voiced concerns about President Vladimir V. Putin’s subterranean — and sometimes more overt — efforts to win allies in the West.

“As it tries to rattle the cage, the Kremlin is working hard to buy off and co-opt European political forces, funding both right-wing and left-wing anti-systemic parties throughout Europe,” Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said in a speech last month at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “President Putin sees such political forces as useful tools to be manipulated, to create cracks in the European body politic which he can then exploit.”

That is a conclusion shared by Britain’s government.

“On the question of Russian money, yes, of course we are concerned about what is clearly a Kremlin strategy of trying to pick off, shall we say, the brethren who may be less committed or more vulnerable in the run-up to the June decision,” said the British foreign secretary, Philip Hammond, last week. “It will not have escaped the Kremlin’s notice that this is a unanimity process and they only need one.”

Whether the strategy will succeed remains uncertain.

American officials and European diplomats said they were confident for now that the sanctions would be renewed at a European Union summit meeting to be held in Brussels on June 25 and 26. Germany, the union’s most dominant member, supports extending sanctions until next January, and smaller nations may be loath to defy Berlin. But there is no appetite for adding more sanctions, as some American officials would like.

Russia’s efforts to influence the West have taken on different forms.

Russia has traditionally used its status as an energy supplier to sway customers in Europe, and it is now pressing countries in southeastern Europe, including struggling Greece, to support a new natural gas pipeline project with promises of economic benefits. Russian oligarchs have long kept so much of their money in Cypriot banks that the island nation is seen as a financial outpost for Moscow.

For several years, Russia has paid for a government-sponsored insert in newspapers and websites in 26 countries (including in The New York Times). More recently, it has proposed expanding RT, its international television network, which broadcasts in English and three other languages and delights in pointing out the foibles of the West, to French and German.

American and European officials have accused Moscow of financing green movements in Europe to encourage protests against hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a move intended to defend Russia’s gas industry. And a shadowy “troll farm” in St. Petersburg uses Twitter to plant fake stories about chemical spills or Ebola outbreaks in the West.

Since long before the Ukraine crisis, money has been a means for Mr. Putin to try to shape events in the West.

After Chancellor Gerhard Schröder stepped down in Germany, he was given a lucrative position with Gazprom, the Russian state energy giant. When President George W. Bush was in office, Mr. Putin asked “would it help you” if Donald L. Evans, Mr. Bush’s close friend and former commerce secretary, were given a high-paying Russian corporate job. (Mr. Bush rejected the idea.)

Russia appears to be getting some traction lately in countries like Greece, Hungary, the Czech Republic and even Italy and France. Not only is it aligning itself with the leftists traditionally affiliated with Moscow since the Cold War, but it is making common cause with far-right forces rebelling against the rise of the European Union that are sympathetic to Mr. Putin’s attack on what he calls the West’s moral decline.

The most prominent example has been the National Front in France, which under Marine Le Pen has confirmed taking an $11.7 million loan from the First Czech-Russian Bank in Moscow, which has been tied to the Kremlin. She has denied a news report that the money was just the first installment of an eventual $50 million in loans to help her party through a presidential election in 2017.

Austria’s far-right Freedom Party denied charges of dependency on the Kremlin, allegations made by its left-wing rival, the Social Democratic Party after the Freedom leader, Heinz-Christian Strache, posted pictures of himself and other party leaders at a conference in Moscow that called for an end to sanctions against Russia. Mr. Strache said in a statement that “we are convinced of our neutrality and we do not get financial donations or credits” from Russia.

The German tabloid Bild reported that the anti-euro Alternative for Germany Party had benefited from cheap gold sales from Russia, which the party denied. There have been investigations into some members of Hungary’s far-right Jobbik Party for any financial ties to Russia. And there have been similar accusations and inquiries in Bulgaria, with its far-right Attack Party; in Slovakia, with its People’s Party; and in the Baltic States, especially with Latvia’s pro-Russian party.

Far-right parties seen as aligned with Moscow vote against resolutions in the European Parliament critical of Russia and have sent observers to referendums and elections in separatist-held regions of Ukraine like Crimea and Donetsk, alongside members of some far-left parties like Die Linke in Germany and KKE in Greece.

The Political Capital Institute, a research organization in Budapest, which first documented Russian interest in Eastern European far-right parties in 2009, reported in March that Moscow’s interest had now spread to Western European countries as well. It listed 15 far-right European parties as “committed” to Russia.

The institute’s report said the newfound affiliations “are not necessarily financial, as commonly assumed,” but may involve professional and organizational help. Either way, it said, “Russian influence in the affairs of the far right is a phenomenon seen all over Europe as a key risk for Euro-Atlantic integration.”

Carl Bildt, a former prime minister and foreign minister of Sweden, said the trend was a major concern for Europe. It is “very clear that the Kremlin has every interest in fracturing Europe in whatever ways possible,” he said by email. “And it actively seeks to play on every division that it sees.”

Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has expressed similar worries about what he calls Russia’s “ability to employ other instruments of power” besides armed force.

“President Putin considers NATO to be a threat and will look for opportunities to discredit and eventually undermine the alliance,” he said in an email forwarded by a spokesman. “Putin’s ultimate objective is to fracture NATO.”

But Fiona Hill, a former national intelligence officer on Russia and now a scholar at the Brookings Institution, said that with the exception of Ms. Le Pen’s party in France, the assertions about Russia financing European parties seemed based more on speculation than facts.

“The question is how much hard evidence does anyone have?” she asked. “And it’s useful for the Russians themselves not to refute rumors and maybe even perpetrate some of them. They want everyone to think everyone is corrupt, everyone can be influenced.”

Either way, David Kramer, a former assistant secretary of state under Mr. Bush and now a scholar at the McCain Institute for International Leadership in Washington, said he thought that any Russian financing of European parties could backfire by alienating the governing elite in Europe.

“It is a big concern,” he said, “but I wonder if at the end of the day they’re going to shoot themselves in the foot and waste this money.”

So why doesn't the West do the same in Russia?

Well, Russia has this whole thing where any entity that takes money from abroad (in a way that's not related to making money of course, that'd be dumb) is required by law to register itself as a "foreign agent". So barring some nigh-untracable money-laundering to political opponents of
President Putin, or opponents of his allies, he's kinda set there.

The law took effect a while before the Maidan protests even started, to help consolidate political power. The most successful modern dictators are more like strongmen, saturating the airwaves with their message, demonizing their enemies, harassing them or penalizing them by pinning bullshit charges like embezzlement - a particularly common tactic in Russia - on them.

Regarding the "troll farms" mentioned in that article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_brigades

One last article. An editorial from the NYT:

The standard image of dictatorship is of a government sustained by violence. In 20th-century totalitarian systems, tyrants like Stalin, Hitler and Mao murdered millions in the name of outlandish ideologies. Strongmen like Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire left trails of blood.

But in recent decades, a new brand of authoritarian government has evolved that is better adapted to an era of global media, economic interdependence and information technology. The “soft” dictators concentrate power, stifling opposition and eliminating checks and balances, while using hardly any violence.

These illiberal leaders — Alberto K. Fujimori of Peru, Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Viktor Orban of Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia and Hugo Chávez of Venezuela — threaten to reshape the world order in their image, replacing principles of freedom and law — albeit imperfectly upheld by Western powers — with cynicism and corruption. The West needs to understand how these regimes work and how to confront them.

Some bloody or ideological regimes remain — as in Syria and North Korea — but the balance has shifted. In 1982, 27 percent of nondemocracies engaged in mass killings. By 2012, only 6 percent did. In the same period, the share of nondemocracies with no elected legislature fell to 15 percent from 31 percent.

This sea change might have started with Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, who combined parliamentary institutions with strict social control, occasional political arrests and frequent lawsuits to cow the press — but also instituted business-friendly policies that helped fuel astronomical growth.

The new autocrats often get to power through reasonably fair elections. Mr. Chávez, for instance, won in 1998 in what international observers called one of the most transparent votes in Venezuela’s history.

Soaring approval ratings are a more cost-effective path to dominance than terror. Mr. Erdogan exploited his popularity to amend the Constitution by referendum and to pack Turkey’s Constitutional Court.

The new autocrats use propaganda, censorship and other information-based tricks to inflate their ratings and to convince citizens of their superiority over available alternatives. They peddle an amorphous anti-Western resentment: Mr. Orban mocked Europe’s political correctness and declining competitiveness while soliciting European Union development aid.

When their economies do well, such leaders co-opt potential critics with material rewards. In harder times, they use censorship. The new autocrats bribe media owners with advertising contracts, threaten libel suits, and encourage pro-regime investors to purchase critical publications.

They dominate the Internet by blocking access to independent websites, hiring “trolls” to flood comments pages with pro-regime spam, and paying hackers to vandalize opposition online media sites.

The new dictatorships preserve a pocket of democratic opposition to simulate competition. Elections prove the boss’s popularity. In Kazakhstan, President Nursultan Nazarbayev was recently re-elected with 97.7 percent of the vote.

Advertising technology that was devised to sell Fords and cans of Pepsi gets reapplied. Mr. Putin hired a top Western public-relations company, Ketchum, to lobby for the Kremlin’s interests in the West. Others recruit former Western leaders as consultants — Mr. Nazarbayev, for instance, hired Tony Blair — or donate to their foundations.

Above all, the new autocrats use violence sparingly. This is their key innovation. Hitler took credit for liquidating enemies. Mobutu hanged rivals before large audiences, while Idi Amin of Uganda fed the bodies of victims to crocodiles. Claiming responsibility was part of the strategy: It scared citizens.

The new autocrats are not squeamish — they can viciously repress separatists or club unarmed protesters. But violence reveals the regime’s true nature and turns supporters into opponents. Today’s dictators carefully deny complicity when opposition activists or journalists are murdered. Take the case of the former Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma. A tape of him reportedly ordering the abduction of a journalist, Georgy Gongadze, who was later found dead, helped fuel the Orange Revolution of 2004, which brought Mr. Kuchma’s rivals to power.

And violence is not just costly — it’s unnecessary. Instead, the new authoritarians immobilize political rivals with endless court proceedings, interrogations and other legal formalities. No need to create martyrs when one can defeat opponents by wasting their time. Mr. Putin’s agents have begun numerous criminal cases against the opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny: He has been accused of defrauding a French cosmetics company and stealing wood and interrogated about the killing of an elk.

The West first needs to address its own role in enabling these autocrats. Lobbying for dictators should be considered a serious breach of business ethics. Western democracies should provide objective native-language news broadcasts to counter the propaganda and censorship. And because the information-based dictatorships are susceptible to the pressures of modernization and inevitable economic failings, we need patience.

Besides propaganda, citizens get information by their paychecks — in the Russian idiom, they can choose either “the television or the refrigerator.”

Comments

[RedHussar]

This is pretty cringe bro...