The West & Russia - for discourse

by Wolfgang Schwarz

[This article published on Jan 31, 2022 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://das-blaettchen.de/2022/01/der-westen-russland-zum-diskurs-42-60329.html.]

Russia is trying [..,]

the security architecture in Europe

step by step.

Sigmar Gabriel,

Chairman of Atlantik-Brücke e. V.

Moscow considers

the current security architecture

in Europe as inadequate

and the security situation as unsustainable.

Andrey A. Baklitskiy

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

In this country, when it comes to allegiance in the manner of the Nibelungs and specifically to the leading Western power, the Atlantic Bridge is the traditional club of the most loyal of the loyal. Therefore, in the course of the current general anti-Russian hysteria - particularly crudely stirred up by Washington - it was probably only a matter of time until the head of the association, Sigmar Gabriel (ex-SPD chairman and foreign minister who was bullied out of office by his own party comrades), not only spoke out, but went one better. Namely, while his predecessor in the office of the head of Brücke, the designated CDU chairman Friedrich Merz, has just urgently warned against pursuing the idea of excluding Russia from the international banking payment system Swift in a next round of sanctions (Merz: an "atomic bomb for the capital markets"), Gabriel is pulling the wool over his eyes and threatening that "Europe [...] could drastically [...] reduce its energy relationship with Russia, if not even drive it to zero [...]." Gabriel: "It is always claimed that this cannot be done. Of course it can, but it costs a lot of money." And above all, most certainly the money of consumers, not a few of whom are already running out of breath financially because of exploding energy prices. A concern that may not be quite as pressing at an income level like Gabriel's.

On the other hand, his idea is likely to make him even more popular with his Washington partners than he already is. At any rate, this is how one could interpret the schedule of the most recent short visit by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to Berlin on Jan. 20, 2022: 30 minutes with Scholz, 120 with Baerbock, a speech with Gabriel.

The fact that the energy relations of the Federal Republic of Germany with the then USSR were, incidentally, a thorn in the side of the USA from the very beginning and that they sought to torpedo this connection again and again over the decades has already been read in this magazine (see, for example, issue 16/2018). Decades ago, when the Carter administration was doing particularly badly in this regard, another Social Democrat and then German Chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, succinctly informed his friends in Washington: "Those who trade with each other don't shoot at each other."

*

In mid-December 2022, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg had rushed to Kiev to assure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Selenskyj that the promise made at the 2008 Bucharest NATO summit that Ukraine would one day be admitted to the pact still held.

That was the hook for U.S. political scientist Robert Legvolt in early January 2022 for an article titled "Beyond Ukraine: How to Revive the Vision of a Europe 'Whole and at Peace'?" that he published in The National Interest magazine.

Legvolt recalls the "Euro-Atlantic security community that would stretch from 'Vancouver to Vladivostok'" that was never seriously undertaken after the collapse of the USSR. Instead, the U.S. and its Western European allies set a course for NATO expansion eastward, which Legvolt calls a security policy "original sin." The project was rejected in the United States in the 1990s, among others, as Legvolt points out, by two figures formative for U.S. policy toward the USSR after World War II-George F. Kennan, the "inventor" of the containment doctrine from the late 1940s, and Paul Nitze, one of the most militant and influential anti-Soviet hawks in Washington during the first Cold War. Both Kennan and Nitze, Legvolt says, never agreed on hardly anything - except this: "The United States and its NATO partners would not like the Russia that NATO's advance would produce."

Predictions are difficult, especially when they concern the future, is a bon mot attributed to either Mark Twain or Winston Churchill. In the present case, however, the prediction could hardly have been more accurate, as could have been more than guessed at Putin's appearance at the Munich Security Conference in 2007 and in view of the massive Russian reaction to the Georgian war game in 2008. Finally, the pro-Western coup d'état in Ukraine in 2014, which was massively supported by NATO countries, especially by the U.S., gave - against the background of NATO's 2008 accession pledge to Kiev (and Tblissi) - practically the final impetus for that Russia, which "would [not] please Washington and its NATO partners," to finally peel itself out of the cocoon.

Regarding the current escalation of the crisis over Ukraine, Legvolt is certain: "Defusing current tensions by simply talking about the reasons for the crisis without making effective mutual concessions (emphasis - W.S.) is unlikely to lead to a solution and guarantees the prospect of new trouble in the future." To be sure, NATO "will never, and certainly not in a legally binding form, renounce admitting Ukraine to the Alliance." But, "one could [...] imagine it offering a ten- or fifteen-year moratorium on consideration of this issue." Moreover, "the United States and its NATO allies could make clear that they have no intention of turning Ukraine into a beachhead [...] by assuring that their training facilities in Ukraine will not be converted into operational bases." And directly to the West, Legvolt recommends: "Aid to Ukraine should be conditioned not only on promoting domestic reform and strengthening defense, but also on a willingness to reciprocate constructive moves by Russia."

The latter is all the more remarkable given that in Western understandings of the Ukraine crisis, the division of roles is usually set in stone: the victim is Kiev, the aggressor is Russia. Kiev's physical involvement in blocking any substantial progress toward a solution to the conflict in eastern Ukraine (keyword: Minsk II), for example, is ignored.

Incidentally, one can of course - like Legvolt - be of the opinion that a "Euro-Atlantic security community from 'Vancouver to Vladivostok' [is] a faded pipe dream," but the author of this article here holds a different view. One like the one recently restated by Rolf Mützenich, parliamentary party leader of the SPD in the Bundestag: "We need [...] a long-term perspective for a security architecture that overarches the blocs."

*

As early as the first half of the 1990s, and in view of a foreseeable trend toward NATO's eastward enlargement, Christoph Bertram* had presented conceptual considerations on how a restructuring of the security architecture in Europe involving the United States and Russia could look, or could be implemented. His study "Europe in the balance - How to secure the peace won in the Cold War" was published in 1995 by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in the USA.

Even then, Bertram noted a Western lack of "thinking about Russia's future role in Europe and the nature of the West's relations with that country" and, in particular, a conceptual deficit on the part of the West with regard to integrating Russia into pan-European stability structures. Instead, he said, "the debate has focused on the smaller and far less problematic states of Eastern Europe, as if European stability could be achieved by bypassing the continent's largest state." And, "When Moscow, predictably, raised objections to the admission of some Eastern European states to the alliance, the only response of Western leaders seemed to be to seek to overcome Russian resistance rather than to address the central question of Russia's place in the new Europe."

At the same time, Bertram said, "the most visible operational expression" of NATO remains "soldiers, weapons and military staffs:" "The military is the currency in which NATO trades [...]." Therefore, Bertram warned, any "NATO expansion that moves closer to Russia's borders must appear to Russian nationalists as a threat; to moderate Russians it must appear as an attempt to exclude Russia from equal participation in European affairs," and all the more so because "much of what was the security glacis, the Soviet Union's forward defense zone, in the Cold War years is becoming the security glacis of the West."

Bertram concludes, "It is therefore either thoughtless or dishonest to declare, as the West does, that NATO enlargement is inevitable and Russia has nothing to worry about."

For its part, Russia had fallen into a deep domestic, economic, and social crisis after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was far from reaching its peak in the mid-1990s. The country was also weak internationally, but Bertram argued vehemently against concluding from this that Moscow was permanently irrelevant to the stability of Europe and its future security structure. On the contrary, "Establishing a network of relations with a weak Russia that will endure with a strong Russia-that, after all, has been the lesson of the successful integration of Germany and Japan into the community of the West."

Against this background, Bertram developed the visionary idea of creating "a fully-fledged institution" for relations between the West and Russia, which he christened the "NATO-Russia Forum." To enable viable, resilient two-way relations, Bertram said, this forum would need "many of the institutional features that NATO has developed for itself." Specifically, Bertram outlined the following aspects, among others:

The "NATO secretary general and a corresponding Russian partner" should serve as "principal coordinators." They should be "responsible to a Council of Ministers consisting of the Russian foreign and defense ministers and [...] Western counterparts selected on a rotating basis within NATO, as well as a Committee of Permanent Representatives."

"A Military Committee composed of representatives of the Russian Ministry of Defense and the NATO Military Committee" should be effective "as a permanent body for the exchange of information on military planning and military operations and for the preparation of joint operations, including peacekeeping operations."

"A Nuclear Planning Group" should "address denuclearization and nuclear proliferation issues."

"An Arms Control Working Group" should work through an "arms control agenda, including the sensitive issue of arms exports."

"A parliamentary contact group" should bring together "a delegation from the North Atlantic Assembly and the Russian Duma on a regular basis."

Unfortunately, Bertram's equally fundamental and far-reaching ideas were not even duly noted in Russia at the time. Instead, Moscow eventually allowed itself to be sedated and fobbed off with a declaration of intent in the form of the NATO-Russia Founding Act and a consultation forum in the shape of the NATO-Russia Council (both 1997). The latter body in particular proved to be a completely toothless tiger in subsequent crises, because the West simply suspended this cooperation again and again as a punitive measure against Russia.

Why are such "old hats" spread here? Because whoever is not too narrow-minded or otherwise cognition-abstinent can, if necessary, suck honey from such wasted opportunities for future approaches - even if it is only for the purpose of avoiding the repetition of the same mistakes.

* Christoph Bertram, director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in London from 1974 to 1982 and head of the politics department from 1982 to 1998, then diplomatic correspondent for the journal DIE ZEIT, before moving in 1998 (until 2005) to head the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP), which is commonly known as the foreign and security policy think tank of the German government and Bundestag. - Later, Bertram was also a security policy interlocutor for this magazine; see issues 8/2013 and 11/2015.