Category Archives: NATO

By Abdul Karimkhanov

Deliveries of French lethal weapons to Armenia are contrary tothe interests of NATO. The last time Armenia received weapons fromFrance was after the visit of Armenian Defense Minister SurenPapikyan to Paris in September 2022. Besides, France is expected tosupply Armenia with Mistral air defense systems, among other modernweapons.

"In my understanding, the problem lies in the thin smokescreen.France considers Armenia as a Christian enclave among the states inwhich the majority of the population belongs to the number ofMuslims. Therefore, military supplies to Armenia should be assessedas an attempt to appease the Armenian diaspora in France andsupposedly protect French interests rooted in Islamophobia,"well-known British journalist, political analyst Neil Watson saidthis in an interview with Azerbaijan based Day.Az analyticalwebsite, Azernews reports.

As the journalist emphasized, France turns a blind eye to thefact that Armenia is a satellite of Russia and a Russian militarybase is located on the territory of Armenia. The political analystdid not also rule out Iran factor in this circle and France'sslurring over this matter.

"Furthermore, France is overlooking Armenia's long-establishedalliance with Iran, which wants to suppress the aspirations ofsouthern Azerbaijanis for independence. The supply of Frenchweapons to Armenia also contradicts the interests of Israel andTurkiye, Azerbaijan's two largest allies and arms suppliers,"Watson said.

The journalist believes that France is not set exclusivelyagainst Azerbaijan, despite attempts to impose sanctions lastyear.

"Rather, Turkophobic and Islamophobic sentiments prevail inFrance, while French interests in the South Caucasus and in thewider post-Soviet space are represented by Armenia. The influenceof the Armenian lobby in the French Senate remains overwhelming andArmenian propaganda is taken in France for some proof," thepolitical analyst emphasized.

According to him, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan facesa big dilemma - whether to prolong the peace process or to finalizepeace talks with Azerbaijan as well as to normalize relations withAzerbaijan and Turkiye.

"Pashinyan has an almost impossible task, andthere are questions as to whether he is a strong enough politicalpersonality with sufficient internal and external political supportto achieve the objective that he knows is necessary: peace withAzerbaijan and normalisation of relations with Azerbaijan andTurkiye. He has internal support for the Karabakh occupation toretain, the Armenian diaspora to placate and has to maintain thesupport of maternal Russia and fraternal Iran. He has to be seen tobe tough on Azerbaijan and to be as obstreperous as possible. Butultimately acceptance of these weapons is posturing. He knows that,sooner or later, and possibly not under his premiership, a peacedeal needs to be finalised, the journalist concluded.

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Deliveries of French lethal weapons to Armenia are contrary to ... - AzerNews.Az

In comments on Tuesday, Russias Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Galuzin said the US and NATO are trying to engage Central Asian countries in so-called partner programs and trainings and do not stop speaking about the resumption of joint exercises in the region and the deployment of their military infrastructure.

"These efforts obviously aim at containing Russia, separating the region from our country and gradually turning it into a springboard for threatening our southern borders," Galuzin said at Valdai Discussion Club, Sputnik reported.

In a recent interview with TASS, Russian Foreign Ministry ambassador-at-large Nikolay Korchunov warned that NATOs actions may lead to an escalation in the Arctic Region.

"We see no signs of improvement with regard to military security in the Arctic. NATO expansion continues in the region, the scope of the alliances military exercises there is on the rise, and its non-Arctic member states actively participate in them. Their military potential in high latitudes continues to grow," he said.

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US, NATO Trying to Turn Central Asia into Foothold to Threaten Russia: Diplomat - Tasnim News Agency

A trade union for those with business degrees wants the next government to abolish the country's 'solidarity tax.'

17.5 9:19Updated 17.5 10:11

As efforts to form Finland's next government continue, Suomen Ekonomit, a trade union for people with business degrees, says it wants to abolish Finland's solidarity tax.

The taxa two-percentage-point additional increase in the tax rate for the highest income bracketwas supposed to end in 2015, reports Kauppalehti (siirryt toiseen palveluun), citing a statement from Suomen Ekonomit.

"This year, the two-percentage-point additional tax is paid on income exceeding 85,800 euros, whereas ten years ago, the threshold was 100,000 euros," the group said.

The majority of parliamentarians recently voted into the Finnish legislature have meanwhile reported being more inclined to cut public services than increase borrowing to fund them.

Nato is a billion-euro opportunity for Finland, reports Helsingin Sanomat (siirryt toiseen palveluun), suggesting that Finland's accession into the alliance is opening up new opportunities for Finnish early-stage startups.

In addition to acquiring funding, Finnish companies now have the possibility of selling defence technology to the armies of other Nato members.

Nato is establishing a new billion-euro innovation fund for startups developing transformative technologies. HS reports that Finland is directly involved in the fund with a 35 million investment from Finnish Industry Investment (Tesi), the state's venture capital firm.

Space is one of the nine areas recognised by Nato for maintaining its technological competitiveness. Others include artificial intelligence, quantum technology as well as biotechnology and hypersonic technologies.

Can you make chocolate without cocoa beans? Finnish confectionery and food giant Fazer thinks so, creating a treat based on rye and blueberries that aims to be both vegan and locally sourced.

Hufvudstadsbladet (siirryt toiseen palveluun) reports that for the past two years, the company has been experimenting with the future of candy production. One result is a cake that looks like chocolate but doesn't contain any cocoa or milk. Instead, the grain-based cake is made from rye and sugar.

Climate change is driving Fazer to explore alternatives to traditional chocolate as the company anticipates cocoa farming areas shrinking in the future, Heli Anttila, a product development chief at the company, told the Swedish-language daily.

The verdict was mixed at Fazer's flagship Kluuvi caf in Helsinki on Tuesday.

"The malt flavour comes through. It's like eating a candy version of archipelago bread."

But it did appeal to some, "Yum, I could eat the whole bar in one sitting," exclaimed another taster.

Would you like a roundup of the week's top stories in your inbox every Thursday? Then sign up to receive our weekly email.

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Wednesday's papers: Tax breaks for the well-off, the business of ... - YLE News

Collages by Klawe Rzeczy. Source photographs: United States Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle on its way to Poland in support of NATO Operation 2022/Alamy; Independence Monument in Kyiv klug-photo/iStock; U.S. Marine Corps soldier Michele Ursi/iStock; U.S. Marine Corps soldier and vehicle Michele Ursi/iStock; Polish soldiers working with NATO allies APFootage/Alamy; A member of a pro-Russian troop in an armored vehicle Reuters/Alamy; An American soldier participates in a training exercise with NATO allies APFootage/Alamy; Pro-Russian troops Reuters/Alamy; Russian military leaders Kremlin Pool/Alamy

From Murmansk in the Arctic to Varna on the Black Sea, the armed camps of NATO and the Russian Federation menace each other across a new Iron Curtain. Unlike the long twilight struggle that characterized the Cold War, the current confrontation is running decidedly hot. As former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and former secretary of defense Robert Gates acknowledge approvingly, the United States is fighting a proxy war with Russia. Thanks to Washingtons efforts to arm and train the Ukrainian military and to integrate it into NATO systems, we are now witnessing the most intense and sustained military entanglement in the near-eighty-year history of global competition between the United States and Russia. Washingtons rocket launchers, missile systems, and drones are destroying Russias forces in the field; indirectly and otherwise, Washington and NATO are probably responsible for the preponderance of Russian casualties in Ukraine. The United States has reportedly provided real-time battlefield intelligence to Kyiv, enabling Ukraine to sink a Russian cruiser, fire on soldiers in their barracks, and kill as many as a dozen of Moscows generals. The United States may have already committed covert acts of war against Russia, but even if the report that blames the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines on a U.S. naval operation authorized by the Biden Administration is mistaken, Washington is edging close to direct conflict with Moscow. Assuredly, the nuclear forces of the United States and Russia, ever at the ready, are at a heightened state of vigilance. Save for the Cuban Missile Crisis, the risks of a swift and catastrophic escalation in the nuclear face-off between these superpowers is greater than at any point in history.

To most American policymakers, politicians, and punditsliberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicansthe reasons for this perilous situation are clear. Russias president, Vladimir Putin, an aging and bloodthirsty authoritarian, launched an unprovoked attack on a fragile democracy. To the extent that we can ascribe coherent motives for this action, they lie in Putins paranoid psychology, his misguided attempt to raise his domestic political standing, and his refusal to accept that Russia lost the Cold War. Putin is frequently described as mercurial, deluded, and irrationalsomeone who cannot be bargained with on the basis of national or political self-interest. Although the Russian leader speaks often of the security threat posed by potential NATO expansion, this is little more than a fig leaf for his naked and unaccountable will to power. To try to negotiate with Putin on Ukraine would therefore be an error on the order of attempts to appease Hitler at Munich, especially since, to quote President Biden, the invasion came after every good-faith effort by America and its allies to engage Putin in dialogue.

This conventional story is, in our view, both simplistic and self-serving. It fails to account for the well-documentedand perfectly comprehensibleobjections that Russians have expressed toward NATO expansion over the past three decades, and obscures the central responsibility that the architects of U.S. foreign policy bear for the impasse. Both the global role that Washington has assigned itself generally, and Americas specific policies toward NATO and Russia, have led inexorably to waras many foreign policy critics, ourselves among them, have long warned that they would.

As the Soviets quit Eastern and Central Europe at the end of the Cold War, they imagined that NATO might be dissolved alongside the Warsaw Pact. Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev insisted that Russia would never agree to assign [NATO] a leading role in building a new Europe. Recognizing that Moscow would view the continued existence of Americas primary mechanism for exercising hegemony as a threat, Frances president Francois Mitterrand and Germanys foreign minister Hans Dietrich Genscher aimed to build a new European security system that would transcend the U.S.- and Soviet-led alliances that had defined a divided continent.

Washington would have none of it, insisting, rather predictably, that NATO remain the dominant security organization beyond the Cold War, as the historian Mary Elise Sarotte has described American policy aims of the time. Indeed, a bipartisan foreign policy consensus within the United States soon embraced the idea that NATO, rather than going out of business, would instead go out of area. Although Washington had initially assured Moscow that NATO would advance not one inch east of a unified Germany, Sarotte explains, the slogan soon acquired a new meaning: not one inch of territory need be off limits to the alliance. In 1999, the Alliance added three former Warsaw Pact nations; in 2004, three more, in addition to three former Soviet republics and Slovenia. Since then, five more countriesthe latest being Finland, which joined as this article was being prepared for publicationhave been pulled beneath NATOs military, political, and nuclear umbrella.

Initiated by the Clinton Administration while Boris Yeltsin was serving as the first democratically elected leader in Russias history, NATO expansion has been pursued by every subsequent U.S.administration, regardless of the tenor of Russian leadership at any given moment. Justifying this radical expansion of NATO, the former senator Richard Lugar, once a leading Republican foreign policy spokesman, explained in 1994 that there can be no lasting security at the center without security at the periphery. From the very beginning, then, the policy of NATO expansion was dangerously open-ended. Not only did the United States cavalierly enlarge its nuclear and security commitments while creating ever-expanding frontiers of insecurity, but it did so knowing that Russiaa great power with a nuclear arsenal of its own and an understandable resistance to being absorbed into a global order on Americas termslay at that periphery. Thus did the United States recklessly embark on a policy that would restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, as the venerable American foreign policy expert, diplomat, and historian George F.Kennan had warned. Writing in 1997, Kennan predicted that this move would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era.

Russia repeatedly and unambiguously characterized NATO expansion as a perilous and provocative encirclement. Opposition to NATO expansion was the one constant in what we have heard from all Russian interlocutors, the U.S.ambassador to Moscow Thomas R.Pickering reported to Washington thirty years ago. Every leader in the Kremlin since Gorbachev and every Russian foreign policy official since the end of the Cold War has strenuously objectedpublicly as well as in private to Western diplomatsto NATO expansion, first into the former Soviet satellite states, and then into former Soviet republics. The entire Russian political classincluding liberal Westernizers and democratic reformershas steadily echoed the same. After Putin insisted at the 2007 Munich Security Conference that NATOs expansion plans were unrelated to ensuring security in Europe, but rather represented a serious provocation, Gorbachev reminded the West that for us Russians, by the way, Putin wasnt saying anything new.

From the early Nineties, when Washington first raised the idea of NATO expansion, until 2008, when the U.S.delegation at the NATO summit in Bucharest advocated alliance membership for Ukraine and Georgia, U.S.-Russian exchanges were monotonous. While Russians protested Washingtons NATO expansion plans, American officials shrugged off those protestsor pointed to them as evidence to justify still-further expansion. Washingtons message to Moscow could not have been clearer or more disquieting: Normal diplomacy among great powers, distinguished by the recognition and accommodation of clashing intereststhe approach that had defined the U.S.-Soviet rivalry during even the most intense stretches of the Cold Warwas obsolete. Russia was expected to acquiesce to a new world order created and dominated by the United States.

The radical expansion of NATOs writ reflected the overweening aims that the end of the Cold War enabled Washington to pursue. Historically, great powers tend to focus pragmatically on reducing conflict among themselves. By frankly recognizing the realities of power and acknowledging each others interests, they can usually relate to one another on a businesslike basis. This international give-and-take is bolstered by and helps engender a rough, contextual understanding of whats reasonable and legitimatenot in an abstract or absolute sense but in a way that permits fierce business rivals to moderate and accede to demands and to reach deals. By embracing what came to be called its unipolar moment, Washington demonstratedto Paris, Berlin, London, New Delhi, and Beijing, no less than to Moscowthat it would no longer be bound by the norms implicit in great power politics, norms that constrain the aims pursued as much as the means employed. Those who determine U.S.foreign policy hold that, as President George W.Bush declared in his second inaugural address, the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. They maintain, as President Bill Clinton averred in 1993, that the security of the United States demands a focus on relations within nations, on a nations form of governance, on its economic structure.

Whatever one thinks of this doctrine, which prompted Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to dub America the indispensable nationand which Gorbachev said defined Americas dangerous winners mentalityit lavishly expanded previously established conceptions of security and national interest. In its crusading universalism, it could be regarded by other states, with ample supporting evidence, as at best recklessly meddlesome and at worst messianically interventionist. Convinced that its national security depended on the domestic political and economic arrangements of ostensibly sovereign statesand therefore defining as a legitimate goal the alteration or eradication of those arrangements if they were not in accord with its professed ideals and valuesthe postCold War United States became a revolutionary force in world politics.

Source photographs: Flags of Ukraine, Lithuania, the European Union, and NATO Panther Media GmbH/Alamy; U.S. president Joe Biden Ukraine Presidents Office/Alamy; Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky Geopix/Alamy; Russian president Vladimir Putin Peter Cavanagh/Alamy

One early sign of this fundamental change was Washingtons covert, overt, and (perhaps most important) overtly covert interference in Russias affairs during the early and mid-Ninetiesa project of political, social, and economic engineering that included funneling some $1.8 billion to political movements, organizations, and individuals deemed ideologically compatible with U.S.interests and culminated in American meddling in Russias 1996 presidential election. Of course, great powers have always manipulated both their proxies and smaller neighboring states. But by so baldly intervening in Russias internal affairs, Washington signaled to Moscow that the sole superpower felt no obligation to follow the norms of great power politics and, perhaps more galling, no longer regarded Russia as a power with sensibilities that had to be considered.

Moscows alarm over the hegemonic role America had assigned itself was intensified by what could fairly be characterized as the bellicose utopianism demonstrated by Washingtons series of regime-change wars. In 1989, just as the U.S.-Soviet global rivalry was ending, the United States assumed its self-appointed role as the sole remaining superpower by launching its invasion of Panama. Moscow issued a statement criticizing the invasion as a violation of the sovereignty and honor of other nations, but neither Moscow nor any other great power took any explicit action to protest the United States exercising its sway in its own strategic backyard. Nonetheless, because no foreign power was using Panama as a foothold against the United Statesand thus Manuel Noriegas regime posed no conceivable threat to Americas securitythe invasion neatly established the postCold War ground rules: American force would be used, and international law contravened, not only in pursuit of tangible national interests, but also in order to depose governments that Washington deemed unsavory. Americas regime-change war in Iraqdeclared illegal by U.N. secretary general Kofi Annanand its wider ambitions to engender a democratic makeover in the Middle East demonstrated the range and lethality of its globalizing impulse. More immediately disquieting to Moscow, against the backdrop of NATOs steady eastward push, were the implications of the U.S.-led alliances regime-change wars in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1999 and, twelve years later, in Libya.

Although Washington presented the U.S.-led NATO bombing of Yugoslavia as an intervention to forestall human rights abuses in Kosovo, the reality was far murkier. American policymakers presented Belgrade with an ultimatum that imposed conditions no sovereign state could accept: relinquish sovereignty over the province of Kosovo and allow free reign to NATO forces throughout Yugoslavia. (As a senior State Department official reportedly said in an off-the-record briefing, [We] deliberately set the bar higher than the Serbs could accept.) Washington then intervened in a conflict between the brutal Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA)a force that had previously been denounced by the U.S.State Department as a terrorist organizationand the military forces of the equally brutal regime of Slobodan Miloević. The KLAs vicious campaignincluding the kidnapping and execution of Yugoslav officials, police, and their familiesprovoked Yugoslavias equally vicious response, including both murderous reprisals and indiscriminate military actions against civilian populations suspected of aiding the insurgents. Through a stenographic process in which ethnic-Albanian militants, humanitarian organizations, NATO and the news media fed off each other to give genocide rumors credibility, to quote a retrospective investigation by the Wall Street Journal in 2001, this typical insurgency was transformed into Washingtons righteous casus belli. (A similar process would soon unfold in the run-up to the Gulf War.)

It was not lost on Russia that Washington was bombing Belgrade in the name of universal humanitarian principles while giving friends and allies such as Croatia and Turkey a free pass for savage counterinsurgencies that included the usual war crimes, human rights abuses, and forced removals of civilian populations. President Yeltsin and Russian officials strenuously, if impotently, protested the Washington-led war on a country with which Russia traditionally had close political and cultural ties. Indeed, NATO and Russian troops nearly clashed at the airport in Kosovos provincial capital. (The confrontation was only averted when a British general defied the order of his superior, NATO supreme commander U.S.general Wesley Clark, to deploy troops to block the arrival of Russian paratroopers, telling him: Im not going to start World War III for you.) Ignoring Moscow, NATO waged its war against Yugoslavia without U.N. sanction and destroyed civilian targets, killing some five hundred non-combatants (actions that Washington considers violations of international norms when conducted by other powers). The operation not only toppled a sovereign government, but also forcibly altered a sovereign states borders (again, actions that Washington considers violations of international norms when conducted by other powers).

NATO similarly conducted its war in Libya in the face of valid Russian alarm. That war went beyond its defensive mandateas Moscow protestedwhen NATO transformed its mission from the ostensible protection of civilians to the overthrow of Muammar Qaddafis regime. The escalation, justified by a now-familiar process involving false and misleading stories pedaled by armed rebels and other interested parties, produced years of violent disorder in Libya and made it a haven for jihadis. Both wars were fought against states that, however distasteful, posed no threat to any NATO member. Their upshot was the recognition in both Moscow and Washington of NATOs new power, ambit, and purpose. The alliance had been transformed from a supposedly mutual defense pact designed to repel an attack on its members into the preeminent military instrument of American power in the postCold War world.

Russias growing concern over Washingtons hegemonic ambitions has been reinforced by the profound shift, since the Nineties, of the nuclear balance in Washingtons favor. The nuclear standoff between the United States and Russia is the dominant fact of their relationshipa fact not nearly conspicuous enough in the current conversations about the war in Ukraine. Long after Putin, and irrespective of whether Russia is converted to a market democracy, the preponderance of each countrys nuclear missiles will be aimed at the other; every day, the nuclear-armed submarines of one will be patrolling just off the coast of the other. If theyre lucky, both countries will be managing this situation forever.

Throughout the Cold War, Russia and the United States both knew that a nuclear war was unwinnablean attack by one would surely produce a cataclysmic riposte by the other. Both sides carefully monitored this delicate balance of terror, as the American nuclear strategist Albert Wohlstetter put it in 1959, devoting enormous intellectual resources and sums of money to recalibrating in response to even the slightest perceived alterations. Rather than attempting to maintain that stable nuclear balance, however, Washington has been pursuing nuclear dominance for the past thirty years.

Beginning in the early Aughts, a number of defense analystsmost prominently Keir A.Lieber, a professor at Georgetown, and Daryl G.Press, a professor at Dartmouth and a former consultant to both the Pentagon and the RAND Corporationexpressed concern about a convergence of strategic developments that have been under way since the dawn of Americas unipolar moment. The first was the precipitous qualitative erosion of Russian nuclear capabilities. Throughout the Nineties and Aughts, that decline primarily affected Russias monitoring of American ICBM fields, its missile-warning networks, and its nuclear submarine forcesall crucial elements to maintaining a viable deterrent. Meanwhile, as Russias nuclear capabilities decayed, Americas grew increasingly lethal. Reflecting the seemingly exponential progress of its so-called military-technological revolution, Americas arsenal became immensely more precise and powerful, even as it declined in size.

These improvements didnt fit with the aim of deterring an adversarys nuclear attackwhich requires only the nuclear capacity for a countervalue strike on enemy cities. They were, however, necessary for a disarming counterforce strike, capable of preempting a Russian retaliatory nuclear response. What the planned force appears best suited to provide, as a 2003 RAND report on the U.S.nuclear arsenal concluded, is a preemptive counterforce capability against Russia and China. Otherwise, the numbers and the operating procedures simply do not add up.

This new nuclear posture would obviously unsettle military planners in Moscow, who had undertaken similar studies. They no doubt perceived Washingtons 2002 withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treatyabout which Moscow repeatedly expressed its objectionsin light of these changes in the nuclear balance, grasping that Washingtons withdrawal and its concomitant pursuit of various missile defense schemes would enhance Americas offensive nuclear capabilities. Although no missile defense system could shield the United States from a full-scale nuclear attack, a system could plausibly defend against the very few missiles an adversary might have left after an effective U.S.counterforce strike.

To Russian strategists, Washingtons pursuit of nuclear primacy was presumably still further evidence of Americas effort to force Russia to accede to the U.S.-led global order. Moreover, the means that Washington employed to realize that ambition would justifiably strike Moscow as deeply reckless. The initiatives the United States has pursuedadvances in anti-submarine and anti-satellite warfare, in missile accuracy and potency, and in wide-area remote sensinghave rendered Russias nuclear forces all the more vulnerable. In such circumstances, Moscow would be sorely tempted to buy deterrence at the cost of dispersing its nuclear forces, decentralizing its command-and-control systems, and implementing launch on warning policies. All such countermeasures could cause crises to escalate uncontrollably and trigger the unauthorized or accidental use of nuclear weapons. Paradoxically, mutually assured destruction provided decades of peace and stability. To remove the mutuality by cultivating overwhelming counterforce (i.e., first-strike) capabilities isin another paradoxto court volatility and an increased likelihood of a grossly destructive nuclear exchange.

Since the nadir of Russian power in the decade and a half following the Soviet collapse, Russia has bolstered both its nuclear deterrent and, to a degree, its counterforce capabilities. Despite this, Americas counterforce lead has actually grown. And yet, U.S.leaders often act affronted when Russia makes moves to update its own nuclear capabilities. From the vantage point of Moscow... U.S. nuclear forces look truly fearsome and they are, Lieber and Press observe. The United States, they continue, is playing strategic hardball in the nuclear domain, and then acting like the Russians are paranoid for fearing U.S. actions.

Source photographs: NATO tank Callum Hamshere/Alamy; A tank participating in a training exercise APFootage/Alamy; NATO soldiers DPA Picture Alliance/Alamy; NATO flag Peter Probst/Alamy; Jets Dario Photography/Alamy; Soldiers after disembarking from a U.S. Air Force plane ZUMA Press/Alamy; NATO fighter jet Matthew Troke/iStock

The same solipsism defined Americas assessment of what it insisted was the Russian menace to NATO. Despite Moscows persistent warnings that it regarded NATO expansion as a threat, the swollen alliance intensified its provocations. Beginning in the Aughts, NATO conducted massive military exercises in Lithuania and Polandwhere it had established a permanent army headquartersand, on Russias border, in Latvia and Estonia. In 2015, it was reported that the Pentagon was reviewing and updating its contingency plans for armed conflict with Russia and, in likely contravention of a 1997 agreement between NATO and Moscow, the United States offered to station military equipment in the territories of its Eastern European NATO allies, a move that a Russian general called the most aggressive step by the Pentagon and NATO since the Cold War. The U.S.permanent representative to NATO explicitly identified Russia and the malign activities of Russia as NATOs major target. The United States justified these moves as necessary responses to Russian hostilities in Ukraine and to the need, as the New York Times editorial board declared in a revival of Cold War rhetoric in 2018, to contain the Russian threat. And what made the Russians a threat? According to a 2018 report by the Pentagon, it was their intention to shatter NATO, the military pact arrayed against them.

While Russians of every political stripe have judged Washingtons enfolding of Russias former Warsaw Pact allies and its former Baltic Soviet republics into NATO as a threat, they have viewed the prospect of the alliances expansion into Ukraine as basically apocalyptic. Indeed, because from the beginning Washington defined NATO expansion as an open-ended and limitless process, Russias general apprehension about NATOs push eastward was inextricably bound up with its specific fear that Ukraine would ultimately be drawn into the alliance.

That view certainly reflected Russians intense and fraught cultural, religious, economic, historical, and linguistic ties with Ukraine. But strategic concerns were paramount. Crimea (the majority of whose people are linguistically and culturally Russian, and have consistently demonstrated their wish to rejoin Russia) has been the home of Russias Black Sea Fleet, based in Sevastopol, since 1783. Since then, the peninsula has been Russias window onto the Mediterranean and the Middle East, and the key to its southern defenses. Shortly after the Soviet Unions breakup, Russia struck a deal with Ukraine to lease the base at Sevastopol. Up until its annexation of Crimea in 2014, Russia worried that, were Ukraine to join NATO, Moscow would not only have to surrender its largest naval base, but that base would perforce be incorporated into a hostile military pact, which happens to be the worlds most powerful military entity. The Black Sea would have become NATOs lake.

Western experts have long acknowledged the unanimity and intensity of Russians fear of Ukraine joining NATO. In his 1995 study of Russian views on NATO expansionwhich surveyed elite and popular opinion and incorporated off-the-record interviews with political, military, and diplomatic figures from across the political spectrumAnatol Lieven, the Russia scholar and then Moscow correspondent for the Times of London, concluded that moves toward NATO membership for Ukraine would trigger a really ferocious Russian response, and that NATO membership for Ukraine would be regarded by Russians as a catastrophe of epochal proportions. Quoting a Russian naval officer, he noted that preventing NATOs expansion into Ukraine and its consequent control of Crimea was something for which Russians will fight.

Given these views, Russias ground rules for Ukrainethe epitome of realpolitikwere plain. As Yeltsins 1999 diktat to Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma spelled out, Kyiv was not to enter into cooperative arrangements with, let alone join, NATO. Nor could Kyiv orient its foreign and economic relations toward the West in ways that disfavored Moscow. Yeltsin didnt require Kyiv to orient its foreign or defense policies toward Moscow either. Understanding that NATO expansion couldnt be reversed, Moscows vision of a lasting European security arrangement might have entailed varying degrees of arms limitations in the countries on NATOs eastern glacis and a permanently neutral, eastern- and western-oriented status for Ukraine (somewhat like Austrias Cold War status), including an agreement ruling out NATO membership. Washington fully grasped the cause and intensity of Moscows panic over the prospect of the Wests absorbing Ukraine into its orbit, as well as the diplomatic and security accommodations Russia required. But rather than attempting to reach a modus vivendi with Russia, U.S.officials continued to push for NATO expansion and supported color revolutions in Yugoslavia, Georgia, Ukraine, and other former Soviet republics as part of an apparent strategy to pull these areas out of Moscows orbit and embed them instead in Euro-Atlantic structures. By the second George W.Bush administration, Ukraine had emerged as the main arena of this competition.

Two critical events precipitated Russias war in Ukraine. First, at NATOs Bucharest summit in April 2008, the U.S.delegation, led by President Bush, urged the alliance to put Ukraine and Georgia on the immediate path to NATO membership. German chancellor Angela Merkel understood the implications of Washingtons proposal: I was very sure... that Putin was not going to just let that happen, she recalled in 2022. From his perspective, that would be a declaration of war. Americas ambassador to Moscow, William J.Burns, shared Merkels assessment. Burns had already warned Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in a classified email:

Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putins sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.

NATO would be seen as throwing down the strategic gauntlet, Burns concluded. Todays Russia will respond.

Appalled by Washingtons proposal, Merkel and French president Nicolas Sarkozy were able to derail it. But the alliances when, not if compromise, which promised that Ukraine and Georgia will become members of NATO, was provocative enough. Attending negotiations toward the close of the summit regarding cooperation in transporting supplies to NATOs forces in Afghanistan, Putin publicly warned that Russia would regard any effort to push NATO to its borders as a direct threat. Privately, he is reported to have advised Bush that if Ukraine joins NATO, it will do so without Crimea and the eastern regions. It will simply fall apart. Four months later, as Burns had forecast, Moscowhaving concluded that NATOs incorporation of Ukraine was inevitableresponded by launching a five-day war with Georgia. Moscows focus on securing the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, as opposed to embarking on a broader war of conquests, was consistent with Putins previous statements about what would happen if NATO threatened to expand farther east.

The second precipitating event came when Ukraine began talks about forming an association agreement with the European Union in September 2008 and, in October, applied for a loan from the International Monetary Fund to stabilize its economy after the global financial collapse. The association agreement, which eventually called for the gradual convergence on foreign and security matters with the aim of Ukraines ever deeper involvement in the European security area, would have precluded Ukraine from joining Moscows planned Eurasian Economic Uniona high priority for the Kremlinwhile drawing Ukraine closer to the West. Plainly, the E.U. was seizing an opportunity to incorporate Ukraine into the Wests orbit, an outcome that Moscow had long defined as intolerable.

Ukraines pro-Moscow, democratically electedthough corruptpresident Viktor Yanukovych initially favored both the agreement with the E.U. and the IMF loan. But after U.S. and E.U. leaders began to effectively link the two in 2013, Moscow offered Kyiv a more attractive assistance package worth some $15 billion (and without the onerous austerity measures that Western aid would have imposed), which Yanukovych accepted. This course reversal led to the Euromaidan protests and ultimately to Yanukovychs decision to flee Kyiv. Although much about these events remains unclear, circumstantial evidence points to the United States semi-covertly promoting regime change by destabilizing Yanukovych. A recording of a conversation between senior U.S.foreign policy official Victoria Nuland and the U.S.ambassador to Ukraine suggests that they even attempted to manipulate the composition of the post-coup Ukrainian cabinet. (A former adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney and longtime anti-Russia hawk, Nuland is now under-secretary of state for political affairs and a key architect of Washingtons response to the war in Ukraine.) To Moscow, these episodes of political interference further demonstrated Washingtons intent to bring Ukraine into the Western camp.

In response to Yanukovychs downfall, Russiajust as Putin had intimated at Bucharestannexed Crimea and stepped up its support for Russian-speaking separatist rebels in the Donbas. Washington in turn accelerated its efforts to pull Kyiv into the Western orbit. In 2014, NATO started training roughly ten thousand Ukrainian troops annually, inaugurating Washingtons program of arming, training, and reforming Kyivs military as part of a broader effort to achieveto quote the State Departments 2021 U.S.-Ukraine Charter on Strategic PartnershipUkraines full integration into European and Euro-Atlantic institutions. That aim, according to the charter, was linked to Americas unwavering commitment to the defense of Ukraine as well as to its eventual membership in NATO. The charter also asserted Kyivs claim to Crimea and its territorial waters.

By 2021, Ukraines and NATOs militaries had stepped up their coordination in joint exercises such as Rapid Trident 21, which was led by the Ukrainian army with the participation of fifteen militaries and heralded by the Ukrainian general who co-directed it as intending to improve the level of interoperability between units and headquarters of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the United States, and NATO partners. Given the weapons and training the Ukrainian military had absorbed, and given Washingtons and NATOs newly explicit diplomatic, military, and ideological commitments to Kyiv, andmost importantgiven NATOs sophisticated program to integrate Ukraines forces with its own, Ukraine could now justifiably be seen as a de facto member of the alliance. Thus Washington had demonstrated its willingness to cross what William J. Burnsnow Bidens CIA directorhad fifteen years ago called the brightest of all redlines.

Beginning in early 2021, Russia responded by amassing forces on Ukraines border with the intentionplainly and repeatedly statedof arresting Ukraines NATO integration. On December 17, 2021, Russias Ministry of Foreign Affairs conveyed to Washington a draft treaty that reflected Moscows long-standing security aims. A key provision of the draft stated: The United States of America shall undertake to prevent further eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and deny accession to the Alliance to the States of the former Unionof Soviet Socialist Republics. Other provisions proposed to bar Washington from establishing military bases in Ukraine and from engaging in bilateral military cooperation with Kyiv. A second draft treaty delivered to NATO called on the alliance to withdraw the troops and equipment it had been moving into Eastern Europe since 1997.

Far from expressing any ambition to conquer, occupy, and annex Ukraine (an impossible goal for the 190,000 troops that Russia eventually deployed in its initial attack on the country), all of Moscows demarches and demands during the run-up to the invasion made clear that the key to everything is the guarantee that NATO will not expand eastward, as Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov put it in a press conference on January 14, 2022. We are categorically opposed to Ukraine joining NATO, Putin elaborated two days before invading Ukraine, because this poses a threat to us, and we have arguments to support this. I have repeatedly spoken about it.

Even if Moscows avowals are taken at face value, Russias actions could be condemned as those of an aggressive and illegitimate state. At best those actions demonstrate Russias conviction that it has a claim to oversight of its smaller sovereign neighbors, a claim that accords with what Washington and the foreign policy cognoscenti condemn as a repellant concept: that of spheres of influence.

To be sure, any power imposing a sphere of influence is necessarily behaving in an implicitly aggressive manner. For a power to define an area outside its borders and impose limits on the sovereignty of the states within that area is contrary to the Wilsonian ideals that the United States has professed since 1917. In one of his last speeches as vice president, in 2017, Biden condemned Russia for working with every tool available to them to... return to a politics defined by spheres of influence and for seek[ing] a return to a world where the strong impose their will... while weaker neighbors fall in line. Because of Americas commitment to a just and moral world order, Biden insisted, quoting his own words from the Munich Security Conference in 2009, we will not recognize any nation having a sphere of influence. It will remain our view that sovereign states have the right to make their own decisions and choose their own alliances.

That straight-faced stance fails to recognize the spheres of influence, historically unprecedented in their sweep, that the United States claims for itself. Since promulgating the Monroe Doctrine two centuries ago, the United States has explicitly arrogated to itself a sphere of influence extending from the Canadian Arctic to Tierra del Fuego. But its globe-girdling sphere of influence also takes in the expanse, east to west, from Estonia to Australia and right up to the Asian mainland. Missing from the current discussion of the war in Ukraine, then, is any appreciation for how the United States would respondand has respondedto foreign powers incursions into its own sphere of influence.

What, after all, would be Americas reaction if Mexico were to invite China to station warships in Acapulco and bombers in Guadalajara? For the past several years a civilian military analyst who has worked on international security issues with the Pentagon has put this question to the rising leaders in the U.S.military and intelligence services to whom he regularly lectures. Their reactions, he told us, range from cutting economic ties and exerting maximal foreign policy pressure on Mexico to get them to change course to we need to start there, and then use military force if necessary, revealing just how reflexively these military and intelligence professionals would defend Americas own sphere of influence.

Typifying the egocentrism that governs the U.S.approach to the world in general and relations with Russia in particular, not one of these future military and intelligence leaders has thought to connect, even in this past year, what they believe would be Washingtons response to the hypothetical situation in Mexico with Moscows reaction to NATOs expansion and policy toward Ukraine. When the analyst has drawn those connections, the military and intelligence officers have been taken aback, in many cases admitting, as the analyst reports, Damn, I never thought out what were doing to Russia in that light.

But Americas determination to uphold its own sphere of influence is more than hypothetical, as the Cuban Missile Crisis demonstrated. Thanks to a misleading rendition of events that members of the Kennedy Administration fed to a credulous press and later reproduced in their memoirs, most Americans see that episode as an instance of Americas justified resolve when confronted by an unprovoked and unwarranted military threat. But Russias deployment of missiles in Cuba was hardly unprovoked. Washington had already deployed intermediate-range missiles in Britain, Italy, and, most provocatively, in a move that U.S.defense experts and congressional leaders had warned against, on Russias doorstep in Turkey. Moreover, during the crisis, it was American actionsnot Russian or Cuban onesthat would be considered aggressive and illegal under international law.

The parallels between Ukraine and Cuba run deep. Just as Moscow has justified its war in Ukraine as a response to a foreign military threat emanating from a neighboring country, so Washington justified its bellicose and potentially calamitous reaction to Soviet missiles in Cuba. Just as Ukraine, even before the Russian invasion, was well within its rights under international law to welcome NATOs military support, so Cuba, as a sovereign state, had every right to accept the Soviet Unions offer of missiles. Cubas acceptance was itself a legitimate response to aggression: The United States had been pursuing an illegal campaign of regime change against Cuba that included an attempted invasion, terrorist attacks, sabotage, paramilitary assaults, and a series of assassination attempts.

The United States may see Russias fear of NATO as unfounded and paranoid, and therefore incomparable to Washingtons reaction to the installation of intermediate- and medium-range nuclear missilesarmaments that President John F.Kennedy publicly declared were offensive weapons... constitut[ing] an explicit threat to the peace and security of all the Americas. But as Kennedy acknowledged to his special security advisory committee on the first day of the crisis, It doesnt make any difference if you get blown up by an ICBM flying from the Soviet Union or one that was ninety miles away. Geography doesnt mean that much. National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy and Secretary of Defense Robert S.McNamara likewise conceded that the missiles did nothing to alter the nuclear balance. Americas allies, Bundy elaborated, were appalled that the United States would threaten nuclear war over a strategically insignificant conditionthe presence of intermediate- and medium-range missiles in a neighboring countrywith which those allies (and, for that matter, the Soviets) had been living for years. Summarizing the views of the majority of the advisory committee, Special Counsel Theodore C. Sorensen noted:

It is generally agreed that these missiles, even when fully operational, do not significantly alter the balance of poweri.e., they do not significantly increase the potential megatonnage capable of being unleashed on American soil, even after a surprise American nuclear strike.

Nevertheless, the United States deemed the strategically insignificant missiles an unacceptable provocation that jeopardized its tough-guy standing with its allies and adversaries, not to mention the Kennedy Administrations electoral fortunes. (As McNamara acknowledged to the advisory committee on the very first day of the crisis: Ill be quite frank. I dont think there is a military problem here... This is a domestic, political problem.) Washington therefore embarked on an extreme, perilous course to force their removal, issuing an ultimatum to a nuclear superpoweran astonishingly provocative move, which immediately created a crisis that could easily have led to apocalyptic violence. Additionally, in imposing a blockade on Cubaa gambit that we now know brought the superpowers within a hairs breadth of nuclear confrontationthe administration initiated an act of war that contravened international law. The State Departments legal adviser later recalled, Our legal problem was that their action wasnt illegal.

So much for President Bidens avowal that the United States bases its policy on the conviction that sovereign states have the right to make their own decisions and choose their own alliances. In short, in a foreign policy episode celebrated for its righteousness and wisdom, the United States, within its self-defined sphere of influence, committed several acts of aggression and war against its neighbor, a sovereign state, and committed an act of war against its global rival in order to force both states to conform to its will. It did so because, justifiably or not, it deemed intolerable its neighbors internal arrangements and security relationship with a foreign great power. In the process, it brought the world closer to Armageddon than at any point in history.

At least until now. The point here is not to make arguments of moral equivalency. Rather, given that, historically, Washington has responded aggressively to situations similar to those in which it has placed Russia today, the motive for Russian aggression in Ukraine is likely not expansionist megalomania but exactly what Moscow declares it to bedefensive alarm over an expansive rivals military influence in a bordering and strategically essential neighbor. To acknowledge this is merely the first step U.S.officials must take if they wish to back away from the precipice of nuclear annihilation and move instead toward a negotiated settlement grounded in foreign policy realism.

To what degree would Washington even be interested in a negotiated resolution to the war in Ukraine? After all, a good deal of evidence suggests that the administrations realif only semi-acknowledgedobjective is to topple Russias government. The draconian sanctions that the United States imposed on Russia were designed to crash its economy. As the New York Times reported, these sanctions have

ignited questions in Washington and in European capitals over whether cascading events in Russia could lead to regime change, or rulership collapse, which President Biden and European leaders are careful to avoid mentioning.

By repeatedly labeling Putin a war criminal and a murderous dictator, President Biden (using the same febrile rhetoric that his predecessors deployed against Noriega, Miloević, Qaddafi, and Saddam Hussein) has circumscribed Washingtons diplomatic options, rendering regime change the wars only acceptable outcome. Diplomacy requires an understanding of an adversarys interests and motives and an ability to make judicious compromises. But by assuming a Manichaean view of world politics, as has become Washingtons reflexive posture, compromise, the virtue of the old diplomacy, becomes the treason of the new, as the foreign policy scholar Hans Morgenthau put it, for the mutual accommodation of conflicting claims... amounts to surrender when the moral standards themselves are the stakes of the conflict.

Washington, then, will not entertain an end to the conflict until Russia is handed a decisive defeat. Echoing previous comments by Biden, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin declared in April 2022 that the goal is to weaken Russia militarily. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has repeatedly dismissed the idea of negotiating, insisting that Moscow is not serious about peace. For its part, Kyiv has indicated that it will settle for nothing less than the return of all Ukrainian territory occupied by Russia, including Crimea. Ukraines foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba has endorsed the strategy of applying enough military pressure on Russia to induce its political collapse.

Of course, the same momentum pushing toward a war in pursuit of overweening ends catapults Washington into pursuing a war employing unlimited means, an impulse encapsulated in the formula, endlessly invoked by Washington policymakers and politicians: Whatever it takes, for as long as it takes. As the United States and its NATO allies pour ever more sophisticated weapons onto the battlefield, Moscow will likely be compelled (from military necessity, if not from popular domestic pressure) to interdict the lines of communication that convey these weapons shipments to Ukraines forces, which could lead to a direct clash with NATO forces. More importantly, as Russian casualties inevitably mount, animosity toward the West will intensify. A strategy guided by whatever it takes, for as long as it takes vastly increases the risk of accidents and escalation.

The proxy war embraced by Washington today would have been shunned by the Washington of the Cold War. And some of the very misapprehensions that have contributed to the start of this war make it far more dangerous than Washington acknowledges. Americas NATO expansion strategy and its pursuit of nuclear primacy both emerge from its self-appointed role as the indispensable nation. The menace Russia perceives in that roleand therefore what it sees as being at stake in this warfurther multiply the danger. Meanwhile, nuclear deterrencewhich demands careful, cool, and even cooperative monitoring and adjustment between potential adversarieshas been rendered wobbly both by U.S.strategy and by the hostility and suspicion created by this heated proxy war. Rarely have what Morgenthau praised as the virtues of the old diplomacy been more needed; rarely have they been more abjured.

Neither Moscow nor Kyiv appears capable of attaining its stated war aims in full. Notwithstanding its proclaimed annexation of the Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson administrative districts, Moscow is unlikely to establish complete control over them. Ukraine is similarly unlikely to recapture all of its pre-2014 territory lost to Moscow. Barring either sides complete collapse, the war can end only with compromise.

Reaching such an accord would be extremely difficult. Russia would need to disgorge its post-invasion gains in the Donbas and contribute significantly to an international fund to reconstruct Ukraine. For its part, Ukraine would need to accept the loss of some territory in Luhansk and Donetsk and perhaps submit to an arrangement, possibly supervised by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, that would grant a degree of cultural and local political autonomy to additional Russian-speaking areas of the Donbas. More painfully, Kyiv would need to concede Russias sovereignty over Crimea while ceding territory for a land bridge between the peninsula and Russia. A peace settlement would need to permit Ukraine simultaneously to conduct close economic relations with the Eurasian Economic Union and with the European Union (to allow for this arrangement, Brussels would need to adjust its rules). Most important of allgiven that the specter of Ukraines NATO membership was the precipitating cause of the warKyiv would need to forswear membership and accept permanent neutrality.

Washingtons endorsement of Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskys goal of recovering the entire territory occupied by Russia since 2014, and Washingtons pledge, held now for more than fifteen years, that Ukraine will become a NATO member, are major impediments to ending the war. Make no mistake, such an accord would need to make allowances for Russias security interests in what it has long called its near-abroad (that is, its sphere of influence)and, in so doing, would require the imposition of limits on Kyivs freedom of action in its foreign and defense policies (that is, on its sovereignty).

Such a compromise, guided by the ethos of the old diplomacy, would be anathema to Washingtons ambitions and professed values. Here, again, the lessons, real and otherwise, of the Cuban Missile Crisis apply. To enhance his reputation for toughness, Kennedy and his closest advisers spread the story that they forced Moscow to back down and unilaterally withdraw its missiles in the face of steely American resolve. In fact, Kennedyshaken by the apocalyptic potentialities of the crisis that he had largely provokedsecretly acceded to Moscows offer to withdraw its missiles from Cuba in exchange for Washingtons withdrawing its missiles from Turkey and Italy. The Cuban Missile Crisis was therefore resolved not by steadfastness but by compromise.

But because that quid pro quo was successfully hidden from a generation of foreign policy makers and strategists, from the American public, and even from Lyndon B.Johnson, Kennedys own vice president, JFK and his team reinforced the dangerous notion that firmness in the face of what the United States construes as aggression, together with the graduated escalation of military threats and action in countering that aggression, define a successful national security strategy. These false lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis were one of the main reasons that Johnson was impelled to confront supposed Communist aggression in Vietnam, regardless of the costs and risks. The same false lessons have informed a host of Washingtons interventions and regime-change wars ever sinceand now help frame the dichotomy of appeasement and resistance that defines Washingtons response to the war in Ukrainea response that, in its embrace of Wilsonian belligerence, eschews compromise and discrimination based on power, interest, and circumstance.

Even more repellent to Washingtons self-styling as the worlds sole superpower would be the conditions required to reach a comprehensive European settlement in the aftermath of the Ukraine war. That settlement, also guided by the old diplomacy, would need to resemble the vision, thwarted by Washington, that Genscher, Mitterrand, and Gorbachev sought to ratify at the end of the Cold War. It would need to resemble Gorbachevs notion of a common European home and Charles deGaulles vision of a European community from the Atlantic to the Urals. And it would have to recognize NATO for what it is (and for what deGaulle labeled it): an instrument to further the primacy of a superpower across the Atlantic.

That pact has made permanent what Kennan called, in 1948, the congealment of Europe along the line created by the U.S.-Russian standoff. Since the end of the Cold War, NATO has succeeded in pushing the borders of its own Iron Curtain smack up to those of Russia (as Kennan put it in 1997). By arousing Russian anxiety, it has heightened tension, conflict, and Russias most bellicose tendencies, thereby exposing both Europe and the United States to nuclear war. Depending on ones point of view, membership in NATO entails either the prospect of sacrificing New York for Berlin (as the Cold War shibboleth held) or the prospect of annihilation without representation (as deGaulle is reported to have put it). A new European security structure must therefore replace NATO.

This new system might embrace the notion of a community of Europe, but in reality the powerful states would exercise outsize influence (as they do in the E.U.and the U.N.). Such a system would in fundamental aspects resemble a modern Concert of Europe, in which the dominant states of the E.U., on the one hand, and Russia, on the other, acknowledge each others security interests, including their respective spheres of influence. In practice, this would mean, for example, that the Baltic states and Poland would enjoy the same large, but ultimately circumscribed, degree of sovereignty as, say, Canada does. It would also mean that, while Paris and Berlin wont find Moscows internal arrangements to their taste, they will resume economic and trade relations with Russia and build on myriad other areas of common interest.

As for the future position of states such as Ukraine and Georgia, Europes (and Washingtons) approach would need to be similar to the approach that the diplomat Helmut Sonnenfeldt, while serving as a counselor at the State Department in 1976, advocated be taken toward the Soviet Unions relations with its satellites:

a policy of responding to the clearly visible aspirations in Eastern Europe for a more autonomous existence within the context of a strong Soviet geopolitical influence.

Such an approach would reduce tension by recognizing Russias strategic interest in its sphere of influence, thereby inducing Moscow to exercise its claim of oversight in that sphere with as light a touch as possible.

Of course, whatever strategy Europeans work out regarding Moscow would and should be a matter entirely for Europeans to determine. Unavoidably, the pursuit of a new European security systemand the embrace of the old diplomacy that it would embodywould mean a substantially diminished global role for Washington. In allowing a Concert of Europe to act truly independently, Washington would effectively renounce the pursuit of global hegemony and the belief that its foreign policy should be guided by the conviction that, to quote President Clinton, it has a particular contribution to make in the march of human progress. In other words, the United States would accept that it would be what President Clinton promised it would not become, simply... another great power. Every postCold War president has recoiled from this role. But a more restrained and even pedestrian self-image might allow the United States at long last to pursue a more tolerant relationship with a recalcitrant world. A mature great power will make measured and limited use of its power, wrote the journalist and foreign policy critic Walter Lippmann in April 1965, three months before the United States committed itself to a ground war in Vietnam.

It will eschew the theory of a global and universal duty, which not only commits it to unending wars of intervention, but intoxicates its thinking with the illusion that it is a crusader for righteousness.

The policies that Washington has pursued toward Moscow and Kyiv, often under the banner of righteousness and duty, have created conditions that make the risk of nuclear war between the United States and Russia greater than it has ever been. Far from making the world safer by setting it in order, we have made it all the more dangerous.

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Why Are We in Ukraine?, by Benjamin Schwarz and Christopher ... - Harper's Magazine

San Francisco The U.S. State Departments top cybersecurity official said Thursday that countries are taking advantage of the differing views among NATO members on whether cyberattacks could trigger a collective military response.

Since the onset of Russias invasion of Ukraine last year, debate has raged about whether a damaging cyberattack could trigger Article 5 the foundational principle of NATO that an attack on any member would necessitate a military response from all.

Article 5 has only been triggered once after the 9/11 terrorist attacks but has been a topic of interest for several European countries facing a barrage of crippling cyberattacks since the start of Russias invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

At the RSA Conference this week, U.S. Ambassador at Large for Cyberspace & Digital Policy Nathaniel Fick said that NATOs adversaries seek to do things to us using digital means that they would never do to us using kinetic means because of the clarity of the response policies.

Nathalie Jaarsma, the Netherlands ambassador at-large for security policy and cyber, said during the same panel that in general, cyberattacks do fall below the threshold for triggering Article 5. But she mentioned that some countries have pushed for an accumulation of cyberattacks to be factored into Article 5 considerations.

Its really a case-by-case situation and about the impact. [We need] to have internal discussions about what we do see as the thresholds for our potential range, she said.

Fick said it would be to NATOs collective advantage to clarify and enforce how they respond to cyber incidents.

He echoed Jaarsmas comments in acknowledging that most cyberattacks fall far below the threshold for military response. But he wondered whether there is a middle between the nuisance attacks and serious incidents involving critical infrastructure or loss of life.

Fick referenced the ransomware attack allegedly launched by Iran against Albania as a situation that might live in that middle. Albanias status as a NATO member prompted the U.S. to offer significant financial and technical help, but Fick questioned whether tougher deterrence efforts were needed.

I think the implicit assumption is that we need to extend the full power of deterrence into the digital world, using not only cyber means but every ounce of economic, informational and diplomatic means necessary, he said.

Mandiant CEO Kevin Mandia noted that despite the fears referenced by NATO members, it appeared that Russia understands the level of cyberattack that would trigger Article 5.

While Ukraine has faced several damaging cyberattacks, many experts believe Russia has largely held back from causing the kind of digital destruction that was expected.

I think there is some evidence out of Russia in 2022 that maybe they were also trying to figure out what is the skirmish level below the threshold of Article 5 in cyber because we didnt see the new and novel innovation that they probably do have in Ukraine, he said.

It stretches credulity to think they're not sitting on at least one to five zero days right now. Theyre not using it so maybe they are saying were not sure about the collateral damage if we do these things.

Fick noted that after Russias devastating attack on satellite provider Viasat, several European countries on the eastern flank wanted a more assertive response.

But he said the U.S. was not in a hurry to invoke Article 5 and in the end, the bedrock of NATO is that the alliance speaks with one voice.

Jonathan Greig is a Breaking News Reporter at Recorded Future News. Jonathan has worked across the globe as a journalist since 2014. Before moving back to New York City, he worked for news outlets in South Africa, Jordan and Cambodia. He previously covered cybersecurity at ZDNet and TechRepublic.

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US cyber ambassador: NATO must extend 'deterrence into the ... - The Record by Recorded Future

The U.S. Army Cyber Command told defense contractors it planned to surveil global social media use to defend the NATO brand, according to a 2022 webinar recording reviewed by The Intercept.

The disclosure, made a month after Russias invasion of Ukraine, follows years of international debate over online free expression and the influence of governmental security agencies over the web. The Armys Cyber Command is tasked with both defending the countrys military networks as well as offensive operations, including propaganda campaigns.

The remarks came during a closed-door conference call hosted by the Cyber Fusion Innovation Center, a Pentagon-sponsored nonprofit that helps with military tech procurement, and provided an informal question-and-answer session for private-sector contractors interested in selling data to Army Cyber Command, commonly referred to as ARCYBER.

Though the office has many responsibilities, one of ARCYBERs key roles is to detect and thwart foreign influence operations, a military euphemism for propaganda and deception campaigns, while engaging in the practice itself. The March 24, 2022, webinar was organized to bring together vendors that might be able to help ARCYBER attack, defend, influence, and operate, in the words of co-host Lt. Col. David Beskowof the ARCYBER Technical Warfare Center.

While the event was light on specifics the ARCYBER hosts emphasized that they were keen to learn whatever the private sector thought was in the realm of possible a recurring topic was how the Army can morequickly funnel vast volumes of social media posts from around the world for rapid analysis.

At one point in the recording, a contractor who did not identify themselves asked if ARCYBER could share specific topics they plan to track across the web. NATO is one of our key brands that we are pushing, as far as our national security alliance, Beskow explained. Thats important to us. We should understand all conversations around NATO that has happened on social media.

He added, We would want to do that long term to understand how what is the NATO, for lack of a better word, whats the NATO brand, and how does the world view that brand across different places of the world?

Beskow said that ARCYBER wanted to track social media on various platforms used in places where the U.S. had an interest.

Twitter is still of interest, Beskow told the webinar audience, adding that those that have other penetration are of interest as well. Those include VK, Telegram, Sina Weibo, and others that may have penetration in other parts of the world, referring to foreign-owned chat and social media sites popular in Russia and China.(The Army did not respond to a request for comment.)

The mass social media surveillance appears to be just one component of a broader initiative to use private-sector data mining to advance the Armys information warfare efforts. Beskow expressed an interest in purchasing access to nonpublic commercial web data, corporate ownership records, supply chain data, and more, according to areporton the call by the researcher Jack Poulson.

Tracking a brands reputation is an extremely common marketing practice. But a crucial difference between a social media manager keeping tabs on Casper mattress mentions and ARCYBER is that the Army is authorized to, in Beskows words, influence-operate the network and, when necessary, attack. And NATO is an entity subject to intense global civilian scrutiny and debate.

While the webinar speakers didnt note whether badmouthing NATO or misrepresenting its positions would be merely monitored or actively countered, ARCYBERs umbrella includes seven different units dedicated to offense and propaganda. The 1st Information Operations Command provides Social Media Overwatch, and the Army Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command works to gain and maintain information dominance by conducting Information Warfare in the Information Environment, according to ARCYBERs website.

Related

Though these are opaque, jargon-heavy concepts, the term information operations encompasses activities the U.S. has been eager to decry when carried out by its geopolitical rivals the sort of thing typically labeled disinformation when emanating from abroad.

The Department of Defense defines information operations as those which influence, disrupt, corrupt or usurp adversarial human and automated decision making while protecting our own, while influence operations are the United States Government efforts to understand and engage key audiences to create, strengthen, or preserve conditions favorable for the advancement of United States Government interests, policies, and objectives through the use of coordinated programs, plans, themes, messages, and products synchronized with the actions of all instruments of national power.

ARCYBER is key to the U.S.s ability to do both.

While the U.S. national security establishment frequently warns against other countries weaponization of social media and the broader internet, recent reporting has shown the Pentagon engages in some of the very same conduct.

Last August, researchers from Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory uncovered a network of pro-U.S. Twitter and Facebook accounts covertly operated by U.S. Central Command, an embarrassing revelation that led to a sweeping audit of how it conducts clandestine information warfare, according to the Washington Post. Subsequent reportingby The Intercept showed Twitter had whitelisted the accounts in violation of its own policies.

Despite years of alarm in Washington over the threat posed by deepfake video fabrications to democratic societies, The Intercept reported last month that U.S. Special Operations Command is seeking vendors to help them make their own deepfakes to deceive foreign internet users.

Its unclear how the Army might go about conducting mass surveillance of social media platforms that prohibit automated data collection.

During the webinar, Beskow told vendors that the government would provide a list of publicly facing pages that we would like to be crawled at a specific times, specifically citing Facebook and the Russian Facebook clone VK. But Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, expressly prohibits the scraping of its pages.

Asked how the Army planned to get around this fact, Beskow demurred: Right now, were really interested in just understanding whats in the realm of the possible, while maintaining the authorities and legal guides that were bound by, he said. The goal is to see whats in the realm of possible in order to allow our, uh, leaders, once again, to understand the world a little bit better, specifically, that of the technical world that we live in today.

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Army Cyber Command: Surveil Social Media to Protect NATO Brand - The Intercept

Helicopters take part in NATO exercise Noble Jump in Romania in 2017. Noble Jump 23 kicked off April 26, 2023, in Sardinia, Italy, with elements of NATO's quick reaction spearhead force. Approximately 2,200 multinational troops will take part in the exercise being hosted by Italy. (Jasper Verolme/Mediacentrum Defensie)

Elements of NATOs quick-reaction spearhead force are being put through their paces this week in Sardinia, where a series of drills is intended to showcase its fighting capabilities.

The unit is part of the NATO Response Force and was activated for the first time in its history after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The roughly 2,200 troops participating in Noble Jump 23 will spend about two weeks drilling on ranges on the Mediterranean island, NATOs Joint Force Command in Naples said in a statement Wednesday.

The exercise is a statement of our resolve and our capabilities, Navy Capt. William Urban, spokesman for the command, said in the statement.

The exercise will involve personnel from several NATO countries militaries, the statement said.

The spearhead unit is a 5,000-strong force carved out of NATOs larger response force of some 40,000 troops.

The unit was formed in the aftermath of Russias initial 2014 military incursion in Ukraine, but in the years afterward was involved mainly in periodic training events. That changed one day after Russias Feb. 24, 2022, full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The decision to mobilize the so-called Very High Readiness Joint Task Force, led by the French at the time, amounted to a political victory for the NATO alliance, which had long faced questions about whether allies could muster unanimous support for such a deployment in a pinch, given varied threat perceptions of Russia in the alliance.

NATOs Naples command on Wednesday said its response force was drilling to ensure that it can respond to an array of crises, ranging from combat situations to peacekeeping missions.

The Noble Jump 23 exercise demonstrates that NATO is united, ready and willing to defend allies, Urban said.

The German army is currently leading the multinational task force. It took command in January amid uncertainty about its ability to carry out the mission.

At the time, reports emerged that armored vehicles to be assigned to the quick reaction force were in disrepair, with some unable to function.

Former Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht, in the days before the Germans were set to take command, called the developments a major setback but one the army could overcome to fulfill its NATO commitments.

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NATO's high-alert task force to test fighting mettle in Sardinia exercise - Stars and Stripes

In May 2008, victims families from Murino filed a lawsuit against the state of Montenegro, seeking compensation in individual amounts ranging from 13,000 to 20,000 euros.

They cited an article in the Law on Obligations which says that the state is liable for deaths, bodily injuries or damage caused by acts of violence or terror if state institutions were obliged under the countrys legislation to prevent them.

In the lawsuit, 28 victims relatives accused the Montenegrin authorities of failing to detect attacks by NATO aircraft over its territory and to warn the public of possible impending dangers. They claimed that the authorities had been informed by NATO about every target that would be attacked.

Velija Muric, a lawyer representing the families, argued that the Montenegrin authorities were obliged to warn villagers in Murino before the bomb attack by sounding alarms or issuing a public warning.

NATO forces announced every raid and overflight for humanitarian reasons, they claimed. Montenegro is to blame for the fact that neither the local authorities in Murino, nor the police or the army, made it known that people should take shelter. The state authorities are responsible for not doing it, both morally and in humanitarian terms because these victims were innocent, Muric told BIRN.

In August 2010, the Basic Court in Podgorica ruled that the state should pay 69,000 euros in compensation to five family members of Manojlo Komatina, one of those who was killed in the bombing. After the state appealed to the Higher Court in Podgorica and the case was heard again twice, the ruling was confirmed and the compensation was paid.

But in July 2015, the Supreme Court annulled the ruling, asking the victims relatives to return the compensation and pay court costs.

Another six cases for compensation were thrown out in September and October 2014 by the Higher Court, which ruled that the claims are out of date.

In February 2020, lawyer Velija Muric and the Human Rights Action NGO called on the government led by Dusko Markovic to come to a settlement with the victims families. This proposal was also put to subsequent governments led by Zdravko Krivokapic and Dritan Abazovic, but there was no response from any of the three administrations.

The head of Human Rights Action, Tea Gorjanc Prelevic, argued that Montenegro still has a moral obligation to pay compensation. The total amount claimed is around 500,000 euros.

The total amount of the compensation would represent a negligible burden on the state budget, especially compared to the importance that the settlement would have both for the victims and for Montenegro, Gorjanc Prelevic said.

NATO opponents use bombing as symbol

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LONDON, April 25 (Reuters) - NATO's largest ever air deployment exercise, set to take place in June, is unlikely to lead to commercial flight cancellations, Europe's lead air traffic manager said, after Germany's aviation industry expressed worries that it could cause disruption.

"We do not anticipate that there will be any need for air operators to make cancellations in order to accommodate the needs of the exercise," Eurocontrol told Reuters in a statement.

Air Defender 23 will be one of the largest air drills in NATO history, with 25 countries taking part in the joint exercise in German, Dutch and Czech airspace. It will use air corridors that have often been used for training purposes, according to the German air force.

Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year, the commercial airspace over Ukraine has been closed. That has led to less available commercial airspace in Europe, resulting in more traffic gathering over the south of the continent.

Air traffic control strikes in France and elsewhere have exacerbated that limited airspace, increasing fears of costly cancellations and delays across the continent.

Germany's aviation sector in particular was concerned about the exercise's detrimental impact on commercial aviation. German industry group BDLS has called for tight coordination around the drill to prevent disruption.

"Coordinated action will allow this major military event to take place while, at the same time, accommodating civil air traffic with the lowest possible impact in terms of air traffic delays and re-routing actions," Eurocontrol added.

Reporting by Joanna Plucinska, Ilona Wissenbach and Sabine Siebold; editing by Jonathan Oatis

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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No flight cancellations expected during largest NATO air drill in history - Reuters

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In late March, images of the first Polish Army live fire exercises involving South Korean-built K2 Black Panther tanks were released, demonstrating the tremendous speed with which these assets have been integrated into active service just eight months after they were ordered in July. The first tanks began to arrive in Poland in December 2022, six months after orders were placed, with the Polish Army expected to field over 1,000 of the vehicles. This will provide it with a tank force widely expected to be the most capable in Europe by a significant margin, in line with the ambitious new ground force goals outlined by Polish officials.

The K2s introduction to Europe is a potential game changer for the balance of power on the ground, and one that has potentially serious implications for Russian security amid high tensions with the West and with Warsaw in particular.

Although South Korea has for over a year resisted considerable Western pressure to begin arming Ukraine, its emergence as a major supplier of equipment to emerging military powers in Eastern Europe allows its industry to play a major role both in the broader conflict between Russia and NATO, as well as to influence the Russian-Ukrainian War indirectly. The Korean tanks deliveries will free up more of Polands old arsenals of T-72, PT-91, and Leopard 2 tanks for delivery to Ukraine, all of which have already been integrated into the Ukrainian Army from Polish stocks.

The speed with which the K2s have been supplied thus directly affects Polands capacity for bolstering its neighbors forces. This contrasts to the German Leopard II and American M1 Abrams, the only Western tanks in production, for which clients have to wait several years for deliveries to begin. South Koreas defense industrial base, particularly for ground equipment, is by several metrics the healthiest in the world producing NATO-compatible weaponry, which makes it particularly valuable to the Western blocs overall fighting strength.

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K2 orders are just one example of major arms orders from South Korea significantly increasing the Wests capacity to arm Ukraine, a more recent example being the American order earlier in April for large quantities of Korean munitions specifically to allow its ally to send more of the U.S. Armys stockpiles to Ukraine.

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The K2 began entering service in the mid 2010s, making it 35 years newer than its rivals the Leopard II and Abrams, which entered service in 1979 and 1980 respectively. This age gap is reflected in many aspects of its performance, despite modernization of the older Western tanks over the last four decades. They provide the Polish Army with not only the most capable tanks in Europe, but also with a significant advantage over Russian tanks for multiple reasons.

Russia has neglected to invest in ambitious modernization of its frontline armor since the Cold Wars end, and the bulk of its fleet consists of modernized Soviet built T-72s such as the T-72B3M. Although the Soviet Union had been developing a highly promising new generation of armor, such as the ambitious T-95 tank, Russia cancelled these. Even its T-14 Armata tank considered a toned down successor to the T-95 was never operationalized despite on paper having the potential to provide key advantages over the K2. The T-72 and other Cold War era designs were considered more than sufficient when modernized to counter the Abrams and Leopard 2, which similarly were upgraded Cold War era designs. The mass introduction of Korean vehicles into NATO armies rapidly overturns that calculus. Against a genuinely clean sheet 21st century tank from South Korea the older Russian vehicles face prospects of a tremendous disadvantage.

The K2 combines relatively modest operational costs and maintenance needs with high mobility, an autoloader providing a high rate of fire and reduced crew requirements, aswell as double the engagement range of its Western counterparts. It also integrates a range of advanced sensors including a millimeter band radar, which provides high situational awareness both to each individual vehicle and to the broader network, including early warning of potential threats from anti-tank assets. While a lack of serious Western investment in new tanks after the Cold Wars end allowed Russia to remain complacent, introducing more modern tanks from South Korea into NATO quickly and in very large numbers can quickly transform the balance of power on the ground.

Polands acquisition of K2 tanks is likely to be particularly concerning for Moscow because, far from being isolated, it represents part of a broader trend toward cutting edge South Korean armaments making NATO forces near Russian territory far more potent than they would have otherwise been if relying on Western equipment. Lookin at the K2 alone, Turkey is expected to acquire over 1,000 of the tanks in the form of the domestically produced Altay derivative, while Norway and Finland are considered leading potential clients.

The K9 artillery piece, which similarly boasts many advantages over both Russian and Western rivals, is already operated by Estonia, Finland, Norway, and Turkey with Poland expected to field close to 1,000. The K9 already holds around half of the global tracked howitzer market and the overwhelming majority of the market for NATO-compatible tracked howitzers. Later in 2023, Poland is also expected to begin receiving the first of 288 Chunmoo rocket artillery systems, with Norway and Romania both considered likely clients.

Acquiring tanks and artillery even on very large scales, as Poland is doing, remains considerably cheaper than modernizing aviation or surface navies. Large acquisitions even of costly equipment like the K2, K9, and Chunmoo are thus viable even for lower income European countries. This and the sheer speed with which they can be delivered, where Western tanks often take close to half a decade after orders to begin deliveries, will require a major calculus shift for Russian security on its eastern border. Where the Russian and Western defense industrial bases have declined considerably since the end of the Cold War, South Koreas has grown rapidly, making it a potential game changer for NATOs position against Russia particularly for its ground forces.

Where NATO can rely on South Korean industry, however, Russia appears to have no similar partners abroad that can supply its forces. China has refrained from exporting arms to Russia. North Korea, likely largely due to ongoing U.N. arms embargoes, appears not to have made any particularly significant equipment transfers despite the growing sophistication of its latest defense products and their compatibility with those Russia fields.

South Korean arms supplies highlight the contrasting trends between the countrys defense sector and broader industrial base and those across the Western world over the past 30 years. These trends could make Russia pay a high price for neglecting the modernization of its ground forces equipment since 1992. Beyond Russia, European defense manufacturers, and Germany in particular, which supplied the continents primary battle tanks in the last two generations, are expected to be major losers as the contrast between what they and South Korean industry can deliver, not only in armor but a broad range of asset types, becomes increasingly clear.

Korean competition is expected to accelerate the trend toward European defense industrial decline. Pressure is already coming from the United States, especially in fighter aviation where the F-35 has won every single tender on the continent when going up against local fighters. What the F-35 has done in aviation, the K2, K9, Chunmoo, and other Korean land systems are now well positioned to do on the ground.

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