Despite its well-armed 30 member states, NATO has been trapped by Russia’s blackmail.
President Joe Biden’s recent op-ed in which he insists that the United States does not want to “inflict pain” on Russia demonstrates how NATO has placed itself on the defensive against a much weaker Russian military and the failing regime that leads it. To gain an advantage against an aggressive but weaker opponent, Washington needs to turn the tables so that Russia fears provoking NATO.
Regardless of denials by some policymakers, the Kremlin has made it crystal clear that NATO is Russia’s main enemy because it is thwarting Moscow’s ambitions to restore its outer empire in Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, and elsewhere. While Ukraine fights against Russian occupiers, NATO must not only supply all essential weapons to make sure Kyiv is victorious, but it must also win the psychological war against Moscow. And such a war has three core elements: clarity of message, threat of escalation, and conviction of victory.
Clarity is sorely lacking. Instead of the constant clarifications from the White House on what America will not do, policy would be made more effective by asserting that nothing is off the table and that NATO will decide where and when it wants to escalate. Since the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the White House has bent over backward not to “provoke” Russia by limiting the supply of desperately needed weaponry to Kyiv and comforting Moscow that no U.S. troops will enter Ukraine. Officials seem to take the chest-beating machismo of Russian leaders at face value instead of viewing it as ritual posturing that Tsarist and Soviet officials engaged in even as their empires were collapsing.
To create confusion and hesitation in Russia’s military plans, the threat of NATO escalation must hang over the Kremlin. Whether it is the supply of increasingly effective weapons to Ukraine, more direct military assistance to Georgia and Moldova to reclaim their occupied territories, or military drills along Russia’s over-extended borders, Putin’s ruling clique cannot operate on the assumption that it can frighten NATO.
Paradoxically, it is the battlefield success of the Ukrainian military that has demonstrated the indecisiveness of Western policy. Russia has exposed itself as an expansionist colonial empire engaged in war crimes and potential genocide. And Kyiv is pushing Washington and other NATO capitals to acknowledge that vital Western security interests hinge on neutralizing Russia’s military expansion and preventing Moscow from pursuing its imperial agenda against any neighboring state.
Even with one hand tied behind its back, Ukraine has performed a major historical feat in stymieing what many analysts claimed to be the world’s second or third strongest military. Unfortunately, Washington inadvertently assists the imperial aggressor by refusing to provide Kyiv with munitions that could truly destroy the sources of bombardment on Russian territory that mass murder Ukrainian civilians. Longer-range munitions fired by multiple rocket launchers would shorten the war by inflicting more serious damage on Russian positions. Biden is only providing shorter-range rockets for those launchers.
NATO must also demonstrate its commitment to and conviction of strategic victory. This means stating that Russia faces a stark choice: either evacuate its forces from Ukraine or see its military decimated and its economy destroyed. And Moscow’s ultimate threat must be answered firmly by Washington — that any nuclear strike in Ukraine will lead to the elimination of the source of the strike, and any nuclear attack on NATO territory will result in Russia’s annihilation. Any ambiguity or hesitation regarding such a response is much more likely to tempt the Kremlin than an assertion of clear and deadly consequences.
Janusz Bugajski is a senior fellow at the Jamestown Foundation in Washington, D.C. He is the co-author of Eurasian Disunion: Russia’s Vulnerable Flanks with Margarita Assenova. His new book, Failed State: A Guide to Russia’s Rupture, will be published in July.
