For the first time in more than a decade, NATO has announced a new strategic concept. Hailed as a historic action, and adopted after a summit in Madrid, the concept provides much-needed strategic clarity by naming Russia the most important and immediate threat to transatlantic security. But it also reinvigorates misguided and potentially dangerous tendencies for small NATO member countries. The concept renews and strengthens dependence on external security guarantees, requires continued maintenance and development of unsustainable (and, in some local contexts, irrelevant) “mini-US” conventional militaries, and disincentivizes small members from finding alternative, affordable, and independently effective defense solutions.
The Madrid concept revitalizes the Cold War approach to conventional deterrence while ignoring twenty-first-century strategic realities. Other than Poland, every other Eastern European state is in a highly disadvantageous position when it comes to potential Russian aggression. They are in very close proximity to Russian forces, their populations are a fraction the size of the Russian population, they have little operational depth to mount a multilayered conventional defense, and their militaries are small, insufficiently equipped with modern weapons systems, and enjoy limited access to resupply routes. Any defense strategies grounded in these countries’ current conventional capabilities are doomed to fail and leave them wholly reliant on the whims of more powerful allies.
This Irregular Warfare Initiative article was originally posted through our partner organization, the Modern War Institute at West Point. Continue reading the full article here.
Image credit: North Atlantic Treaty Organization
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