NATO’s ability to deter Russia takes a hit

BRUSSELS

European allies and Canada are pouring billions of dollars into helping Ukraine, and they have pledged to massively boost their budgets to defend their territories.

But despite those efforts, NATO’s credibility as a unified force under U.S. leadership has taken a huge hit over the past year as trust within the 32-nation military organization dissolved.

The rift has been most glaring over U.S. President Donald Trump’s repeated threats to seize Greenland, a semiautonomous territory of NATO ally Denmark. More recently, Trump’s disparaging remarks about his NATO allies’ troops in Afghanistan drew another outcry.

While the heat on Greenland has subsided for now, the infighting has seriously undercut the ability of the world’s biggest security alliance to deter adversaries, analysts say.

“The episode matters because it crossed a line that cannot be uncrossed,” Sophia Besch from the Carnegie Europe think tank said in a report on the Greenland crisis. “Even without force or sanctions, that breach weakens the alliance in a lasting way.”

The tensions haven’t gone unnoticed in Russia, NATO’s biggest threat.

Any deterrence of Russia relies on ensuring that President Vladimir Putin is convinced that NATO will retaliate should he expand his war beyond Ukraine. Right now, that does not seem to be the case.

“It’s a major upheaval for Europe, and we are watching it,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov noted last week.

Criticized by U.S. leaders for decades over low defense spending, and lashed relentlessly under Trump, European allies and Canada agreed in July to significantly up their game and start investing 5 percent of their gross domestic product on defense.

The pledge was aimed at taking the whip out of Trump’s hand. The allies would spend as much of their economic output on core defense as the United States, around 3.5 percent of GDP, by 2035, plus a further 1.5 percent on security-related projects like upgrading bridges, air and seaports.

NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte has hailed those pledges as a sign of NATO’s robust health and military might. He recently said that “fundamentally thanks to Donald J. Trump, NATO is stronger than it ever was.”

Despite NATO’s talk of increased spending, Moscow seems undeterred. The EU’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said this week that “it has become painfully clear that Russia will remain a major security threat for the long term.”

“We are fending off cyberattacks, sabotage against critical infrastructure, foreign interference and information manipulation, military intimidation, territorial threats and political meddling,” she said last week.

In a year-end address, Rutte warned that Europe is at imminent risk.

“Russia has brought war back to Europe, and we must be prepared for the scale of war our grandparents or great-grandparents endured,” he said.