Estonia is a country of under 1.4 million people with its capital in Tallinn.1 Now a member of NATO and of the EU since 2004, until 1991 it was a Soviet republic and part of the Soviet Union.
Kristi Raik, the director of the Estonian Foreign Policy Institute of the International Centre for Defence and Security (ICDS), published an article in January that gives a good glimpse of the polemical position that the eastern European members of NATO - what Donald Rumsfeld praised as the “new Europe” as a contrast to the undesirable “old Europe” of Germany and France - often take in their foreign policy rhetoric.2 Rummy famously said in 20 years ago in the runup to the disastrous Iraq War, which Germany and France very sensibly opposed, “You're thinking of Europe as Germany and France. I don't. I think that's 'old Europe.’ If you look at the entire NATO Europe today, the center of gravity is shifting to the East."3
This particular piece is specifically about German foreign policy, which Raik finds very inadequate even after what the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz called the Zeitenwende (change of the times) represented by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 22. It gives a good sample of what we could currently call the New Cold War hawk position on relations with Russia.
Raik invokes the following arguments:
Germany is increasing its military budget which she sees as good, though she also criticizes Germany in early January for not yet agreeing to provide Leopard tanks to Ukraine. “The most visible and concrete source of frustration toward Germany in Central and Eastern Europe has been its hesitance to give military aid to Ukraine.”
Germany has public discussions about the risks “of a nuclear war between NATO and Russia, which have exposed an almost paralyzing fear among parts of the German elite.”
“To be fair, the German concerns about escalation have been largely shared by the United States—while the latter has also caused frustration in Central and Eastern Europe.”
Since 1989, Germany “has quietly acknowledged Russia’s right to a sphere of influence and shown a tendency to subordinate the sovereignty of the smaller countries situated between Germany and Russia to great power interests.”
“For most of the 1990s, Germany had a negative view of the accession to the EU and NATO of the Baltic states due to its wish not to provoke Russia.”
“The timid Western reaction to the Russia-Georgia war in 2008 and the annexation of Crimea in 2014 confirmed the Russian perception of Western weakness.“
The core of her complaint is basically this:
[T]he EU and NATO left Ukraine (as well as other Eastern neighbours) in a position of geopolitical ambiguity and signaled to Russia their wish to limit Western engagement in the region. This was most likely read in Moscow as a tacit acknowledgement of its sphere of influence, which encouraged Russia to move ahead with its efforts to impose its vision of European security on Ukraine and other former Soviet states, if necessary by force. The timid Western reaction to the Russia-Georgia war in 2008 and the annexation of Crimea in 2014 confirmed the Russian perception of Western weakness. Against this backdrop, the strong Western response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was an unpleasant surprise to the Kremlin—but doubts remain as to whether the change of heart in Berlin and other Western capitals will endure as the costs of the war keep increasing. [my emphasis]
And the solution also seems obvious to her:
The question of Ukraine’s accession to NATO remains up in the air and will also have to be answered once the war ends, if not before. The example of the Baltic states suggests that a full integration of Russia’s European neighbors into Western structures, if and when this is the direction they choose, is the best way to ensure their stable development. By contrast, letting Russia violently impose its sphere of influence against the wishes of the countries concerned is no way to create sustainable security.
Good-cop/bad-cop roles
This takes place in the context of some well-established public postures within NATO. Prior to 2022, Germany and France have generally favored efforts to established cooperation with Russia on security affairs and encourage greater economic links between Russia and the EU nations. While Poland and the Baltic countries especially have taken the position of warning about the danger of military aggression from Russia.
It has functioned in practice as a good-cop/bad-cop act for the Western European allies in dealing with Russia. After the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, they have all been put in the “bad cop” role for the moment. But unless Russia suddenly decides on its own to vacate all Ukrainian territory including Crimea, ending the war will require negotiations with the Russians. Yes, Ukraine will play a decisive role. But it also won’t be calling all the shots. So the good-cop/bad-cop act role-playing isn’t over yet. (The negotiations this past winter about providing tanks to Ukraine also featured this good-cop/bad-cop act.)
However, the eastern European position arguing that Russia is extremely dangerous and perpetually expansionist is also a negotiating posture for Rummy’s “new Europe.” And that’s really sort of basic political horse-trading negotiations within NATO and the EU. If you really want to get X from your negotiating partners, you’re probably going to start with asking for X, Y, and Z, hoping to wind up getting X and maybe a little of Y.
However, the arguments for getting all of X, Y, and Z also function as talking points for military-industrial-complex lobbyists in all countries, who represent something more narrow than the general national interests of their respective countries.
NATO expansion
“Had the Baltic states not joined the EU and NATO in 2004, the security situation in the whole Baltic Sea region as well as the domestic situation in the three countries would undoubtedly be much more unstable today,” Raik argues.
The past is past. But looking back at the series of real-world events that resulted eventually in today’s situation, “undoubtedly” doesn’t really fit very well. The New Cold Warriors start spewing about Munich and appeasement when critics recall the actual debates over NATO enlargement, the very public opposition that Russia expressed, and the blustering arrogance of the Cheney-Bush Administration about the whole thing. Über-Realist John Mearsheimer continues in his provocative manner to make the points he made back in 2014 about the action-reaction process of NATO expansion and Russia response.4
NATO enlargement began with Germany united in 1990 and the former East Germany became new federal states in NATO member Germany. The expansion to former Moscow Pact countries and former republics of the Soviet Union began under the Clinton Administration. Czechia, Hungary and Poland became members in 1999. They were followed by: Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia (2004); Albania and Croatia; Montenegro (2017); North Macedonia (2019); and, just this week, Finland.5
Boris Jeltzin’s government in Russia was considered very US-friendly. But even he made his objections to the enlargement to Czechia, Hungary and Poland known. And the NATO countries from the start took practical account of Russian concerns. As Michael Rühle explains in this article available on the NATO website:
When the NATO enlargement debate started in earnest around 1993, due to mounting pressure from countries in Central and Eastern Europe, it did so with considerable controversy. Some academic observers in particular opposed admitting new members into NATO, as this would inevitably antagonise Russia and risk undermining the positive achievements since the end of the Cold War. Indeed, ever since the beginning of NATO’s post-Cold War enlargement process, the prime concern of the West was how to reconcile this process with Russian interests. Hence, NATO sought early on to create a cooperative environment that was conducive for enlargement while at the same time building special relations with Russia. In 1994 the “Partnership for Peace” programme established military cooperation with virtually all countries in the Euro-Atlantic area. In 1997 the NATO-Russia Founding Act established the Permanent Joint Council as a dedicated framework for consultation and cooperation. In 2002, as Allies were preparing the next major round of NATO enlargement, the NATO-Russia Council was established, giving the relationship more focus and structure. These steps were in line with other attempts by the international community to grant Russia its rightful place: Russia was admitted to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the G7 and the World Trade Organisation.
The need to avoid antagonising Russia was also evident in the way NATO enlargement took place in the military realm. As early as 1996, Allies declared that in the current circumstances they had “no intention, no plan, and no reason to deploy nuclear weapons on the territory of new members”. These statements were incorporated into the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act, together with similar references regarding substantial combat forces and infrastructure. This “soft” military approach to the enlargement process was supposed to signal to Russia that the goal of NATO enlargement was not Russia’s military “encirclement”, but the integration of Central and Eastern Europe into an Atlantic security space. In other words, the method was the message.6 [my emphasis]
In other words, it wasn’t just a few hippie pacifists in Germany and France who took notice of such concerns!
The consultations with Russia around the 1999 enlargement found the Russians unhappy with the action but responding by participating in the new diplomatic consultation mechanism, the Permanent Joint Council, later superseded by the NATO-Russia Council. But the Russian government was never happy about any of it:
The first round of enlargement took place in 1999 and brought in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. The second occurred in 2004; it included Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Moscow complained bitterly from the start. During NATO's 1995 bombing campaign against the Bosnian Serbs, for example, Russian President Boris Yeltsin said, "This is the first sign of what could happen when NATO comes right up to the Russian Federation's borders.... The flame of war could burst out across the whole of Europe." But the Russians were too weak at the time to derail NATO's eastward movement-which, at any rate, did not look so threatening, since none of the new members shared a border with Russia, save for the tiny Baltic countries.7
But the unilateralist-minded Administration of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney wasn’t worried about being cautious. In 2007, then-Russian President Vladimir Putin gave a truculent speech at the Munich Security Conference strongly expressing concerns about US and NATO foreign policy.8 It was Putin's debut outing at that annual conference.
Godfrey Hodgson described Putin’s presentation this way:
He sharply criticized the George W. Bush administration for maintaining a "unipolar" view of the world and relying too much on force in international relations. He said that the Iraq war had nothing to do with democracy. In an interview with Al Jazeera, the Arab television service, he went further, and said that the United Stares had clone more harm in Iraq than Saddam Hussein. He was particularly outspoken in his criticism of Washington's plans to establish anti-ballistic missile bases in Poland and the Czech Republic. He said he did not understand why the United States needs to expand NATO in eastern Europe, when the real dangers to the world are terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.9 [my emphasis]
He notes that then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates “passed the speech off diplomatically, remarking wryly that one Cold War was enough,” a reserved but dismissive immediate take.
But most American commentators, among them Charles Krauthammer, Anne Applebaum, and David Ignatius, all writing in the Washington Post, saw Putin's attitude as mere chutzpah. "How dare the bully of Chechnya lecture us," commented Ignatius, "about our efforts to bring democracy to the world?"
Then a year later, NATO upped the ante in a worst-of-both-worlds decision in its Bucharest Summit Declaration.10 The Bush Administration had pushed to have Georgia and Ukraine admitted as formal candidates for NATO accession under what is known as the Membership Action Plan (MAP). Germany, Britain, and France pushed hard against including such a commitment, and were partially successful. Georgia and Ukraine weren't offered a MAP. But the Declaration declared, “We agreed today that these countries [Georgia and Ukraine] will become members of NATO.”11
A MAP would have been the start of a process. But the agreement didn’t commit to the MAP process for Georgia and Ukraine. Yet it stated definitively that the two countries “will become members of NATO,“ which sounds an awful lot like a fixed decision. That made it a signal to Russia that NATO was definitely committed to adding those countries but not providing the countries the formal beginning of the accession process.
The Russo-Georgian War of 2008
Later that year, there was a small war between Russia and Georgia over the breakaway territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, one of the "frozen conflicts" left over from the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Russia wound up formerly recognizing the two areas as independent republics. The practical effect of this was to push back in a relatively small but real military way against NATO enlargement, and to preclude Georgian membership in NATO by occupying part of their national territory.
Thomas de Waal reported on the results of a study of the war commissioned by the EU:
The idea of the “Report of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Conflict in Georgia,” was to separate truth from fiction in the information war which both sides had waged and in particular to explain how the conflict started.
It would be wrong to simplify the report, but it did mostly achieve its goals. The report’s authors clarified an important point that anyone close to the event knew already—that the Georgian government of Mikheil Saakashvili government had indeed “fired the first shot” on the evening of August 7, 2008 when Georgian forces attacked the town of Tskhinvali and briefly captured much of South Ossetia.
That was the headline of the report, which of course the Russian government seized upon. But there was also the very damaging (for Russia) context of what happened before August 7 and what happened when Russian troops entered South Ossetia on August 8, threw out the Georgians and then marched on Gori. Dozens of pages set out in detail Russia’s multiple violations of international law before, during and after the conflict.12
As de Waal notes, after the 2014 annexation of Crimea by Russia, there were efforts to recall the Russo-Georgia War as being straightforward aggression by the Kremlin. But that particular situation was more complicated than that.
Michael Kofman wrote in 2018:
The story that Georgia’s President Mikheil Saakashvili was simply reckless in ordering an attack on South Ossetia, and the Russian peacekeeper contingent isn’t true, but he certainly miscalculated and bears considerable blame for the conflict. Neither is the prevailing simplistic narrative that “Russia invaded Georgia” as though Georgia, and its political leadership, were an empty outline on a map with no role to play in starting this war.13
The Russian seizure of Crimea and parts of the Donbas from Ukraine in 2014 and the full-scale 2022 invasion of course drastically altered the situation. Which is why the German Chancellor called the latter a Zeitenwende.
Are new Neville Chamberlains to blame for all this?
This is the situation which Kristi Raik and other New Cold Warriors try to depict as the failure of a feckless, cowardly West - symbolized for them especially by Germany. A couple of points are in order here.
One is that the conern about Russian reaction to NATO enlargement was anything but imaginary. On the contrary, it was recognized in very practical ways by the US and other NATO governments. But Raik gives an almost mirror-image of that process when she argues, as also quoted above, that NATO not moving faster to formally incorporate Georgia and Ukraine into the alliance more-or-less caused the war:
This was most likely read in Moscow as a tacit acknowledgement of its sphere of influence, which encouraged Russia to move ahead with its efforts to impose its vision of European security on Ukraine and other former Soviet states, if necessary by force. The timid Western reaction to the Russia-Georgia war in 2008 and the annexation of Crimea in 2014 confirmed the Russian perception of Western weakness. [my emphasis]
So: Russia said from the start it considered NATO enlargement a threat - so NATO should have scrambled even faster to incorporate Georgia and Ukraine into the alliance? But presumably, in this telling, Russian expansionism was inevitable, even though we’ve had many accounts since the start of the current war of how Russia’s public portrayal of Ukraine was evolved over the last three decades.
This is more an ontological than a historical argument. It essentially assumes that Russia in somehow by its nature compelled to try to conquer its neighbors. And therefore anything but unrelenting hawkishness against Russia causes it to commit aggression - though its not considered polite in New Cold War circles to talk about the effect of NATO expansion or the US wars like in Kosovo and Iraq on Russia’s threat perceptions. “All of this raises the question of what is Germany’s—and more broadly Western countries’—responsibility for Europe sliding into a major war,“ she writes. This is very similar to the neoconservative view of the world, in which it is always 1938 and Hitler (or the New Hitler of the day) is really to swallow up Czechoslovakia.
The vague criticism she makes about discussions in Germany over the threat of nuclear war strike me as superficial. Of course, in a conflict with any nuclear power (the US, Russia, China, Britain, France, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea - maybe soon Iran, too) the parties to the conflict have to take realistic account of that risk, both the direct war parties and the proxy participants.
The whole theory of nuclear deterrence is built around having a credible threat of using nuclear weapons while setting clear boundaries as to when they will be used. The New Cold War frivolity about how we should just brush off any threat of nuclear weapons usage with testosterone-fueled contempt is not just superficial, it’s reckless. Governments taking nuclear threats seriously may cause “frustration in Central and Eastern Europe,“ as Raik writes. But so what? Not taking them seriously would be irresponsible in the extreme.
Western response to Russia 2014-2022
Finally, the impression that Raik and others present that the West in general and Germany in particular just shrugged their shoulders and accepted Russia’s 2014 annexations/occupations in Ukraine is misleading at best. As for Georgia, when it comes to fighting wars - especially against nuclear powers - other countries can’t expect something like the “cakewalk” the neocons expected the Iraq War to be.
And alliances matter. Not defending a member of NATO that really was directly militarily attacked by Russia or some other power would have huge consequences. But part of the point of having the NATO alliance in the form it exists is that the members countries have to be prepared to fight an effective defensive war, including the country attacked. That’s why there are elaborate requirements for joining NATO, including required levels of governmental stability, military preparedness and a certain standard for intelligence functions.
Defending the borders of new NATO member Finland is one thing. Finland has actually met the NATO standards for a while. Dropping paratroopers into Abkhazia and South Ossetia, or mounting a ground intervention into Georgia from Türkiye, would be something else altogether. And, despite the New Cold Warriors’ faith that Russian foreign policy is directed solely by its insatiable expansionist instincts and not by anything any other country does, here in the real world such a NATO intervention in Georgia would very, very likely provoke a significant Russian response.
Neither Germany nor any of the other NATO members have diplomatically recognized Soviet annexations or territorial conquests in Georgia or Ukraine. And Germany was very supportive of the Minsk Process, which sought for years to resolve the situation in the Donbas areas the Russians actively contested since 2014.14 That process failed to produce positive results.15 But it’s not the case that Germany just ignored the whole situation.
A January 2023 presentation by Kristi Raik16:
Principles, countries, history: Estonia. EU website. <https://european-union.europa.eu/principles-countries-history/country-profiles/estonia_en> (Accessed: 2023-06-04).
Raik, Kristi (2023): Germany’s Zeitenwende Fails to Address Europe’s New Geopolitical Reality. Internationale Politik Quarterly 01/04/2023. <https://ip-quarterly.com/en/germanys-zeitenwende-fails-address-europes-new-geopolitical-reality> (Accessed: 2023-06-04).
Gordon, Philip H. & Shapiro, Jeremy (2004): Allies at War: America, Europe and the Crisis Over Iraq, 128. New York: MCGraw Hill.
Mearsheimer, John (2014): Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West's Fault. Foreign Affairs 93:5, 77-89.
Enlargement and Article 10. NATO website 04/05/2023. <https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/topics_49212.htm> (Accessed: 2023-06-04).
Rühle, Michael (2014): NATO enlargement and Russia: myths and realities. NATO Review 07/01/2014. <https://www.nato.int/docu/review/articles/2014/07/01/nato-enlargement-and-russia-myths-and-realities/index.html> (Accessed: 2023-06-04).
Mearsheimer, op. cit., 78.
Putin Says West Forcing Will On World. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty 02/10/2007. <https://www.rferl.org/a/1074621.html> (Accessed: 2023-06-04).
Hodgson, Godfrey (2007): Putin and Europe: A Media Sampler. World Policy Journal 24:1, 33-38. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/40210067> (Accessed: 2023-06-04).
Bucharest Summit Declaration. NATO website 04/03/2008. <https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/official_texts_8443.htm> (Accessed: 2023-06-04).
Gallis, Paul (2008): The NATO Summit at Bucharest, 2008. Congressional Research Service 05/05/2008. <https://sgp.fas.org/crs/row/RS22847.pdf> (Accessed: 2023-06-04).
De Wall, Thomas (2015): The Still-Topical Tagliavini Report. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace 09/30/2015. <https://carnegiemoscow.org/commentary/61451> (Accessed: 2023-06-04).
Kofman, Michael (2018): The August War, Ten Years On: A Retrospective on the Russo-Georgian War. War on the Rocks 08/17/2018. <https://warontherocks.com/2018/08/the-august-war-ten-years-on-a-retrospective-on-the-russo-georgian-war/> (Accessed: 2023-06-04).
Koshiw, Isobel (2022): Everyone is talking about Minsk but what does it mean for Ukraine? openDemocracy 02/04/2022. <https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/russia-ukraine-what-are-the-minsk-agreements/> (Accessed: 2023-06-04).
Miller, Bruce (2023): Prospects for peace negotiations in the Russia-Ukraine War as of the end of March. Contradicciones 03/30/2023.
"Building European Security Against Russia - Discussion with Kristi Raik" | #EuropeChats Episode 16. TEPSA-Trans European Policy Studies Association YouTube channel 01/27/2023. (Accessed: 2023-06-04).