In 2019 Emmanuel Macron described the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) as ‘brain dead’, but in recent weeks it has resurrected itself. Long without a vocation — and even ‘without borders’ as it got lost in Afghanistan — the Atlantic Alliance has found a fitting new enemy, who bears a striking resemblance to its old enemy. It is mobilising along Russia’s perimeter. Nuclear arsenals, aerial bombing squadrons and war fleets have been put on high alert, while announcements of military aid to Ukraine and the countries of Eastern Europe are multiplying — as are all-out retaliatory measures and sanctions on an unprecedented scale. Many countries’ military budgets are ballooning.
On February 21, Moscow recognised the two eastern republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. Then came another shock — Russia’s February 24 announcement of a ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine, accompanied by a warning. ‘Whoever tries to hinder us, or threaten our country or our people, should know that Russia’s response will be immediate and will lead you to consequences that you have never faced in your history,’ Vladimir Putin said, as the first bombs hit Ukrainian military bases and tanks began to overrun the country, bringing to mind images of Soviet Warsaw Pact troops crushing popular uprisings in Budapest and Prague.
Also read Serge Halimi, “The paradox of the war in Ukraine”, Le Monde diplomatique, March 2022.
The Russian leader claimed that he did not want to occupy Ukraine — only to ‘denazify’ it, ‘demilitarise’ it, and prevent the ‘genocide’ of Russian-speaking populations — but nevertheless called on the Ukrainian army to overthrow its president. His attempts to demonise his adversary were quickly forgotten as his large-scale invasion encountered some disappointments.
Experts stunned
But it was another little phrase of Putin’s that grabbed international attention, as well as accelerating European and NATO drives: on Sunday February 27, Putin declared that he had ‘put the Russian army’s nuclear deterrent forces on a special regime of combat duty’. This was enough to send news channels into meltdown, as the usual experts expressed stupefaction, with talk of ‘playing with fire’, ‘breaking a taboo, ‘maximum risk’, ‘taking things to the extreme’, ‘a paradigm shift’ and ‘shuffling the deck’. It also provoked the ire of Western leaders: ‘Dangerous rhetoric’, ‘irresponsible’, ‘unacceptable’, ‘manufacturing threats that do not exist’...
Russia’s deterrents, according to its Ministry of Defence, are a suite of units whose purpose is to prevent an attack on Russia, ‘including in the event of war involving the use of nuclear weapons’. This suite is three-pronged: land-launched nuclear missiles, naval, and aircraft, sometimes referred to as the ‘nuclear triad’. These forces use types of weapons that are not necessarily nuclear-powered, and are equipped with missiles, bombers, submarines and surface ships. On the defensive side, they include an anti-missile shield, and anti-aircraft and anti-satellite defence systems.
Putting them on special alert is, however, one of the highest levels of combat readiness — number three out of five, according to some experts. It’s the one where submarines are raised to a depth at which they can be fired, networks and systems are activated, weapons carriers are taken out of their caches, lids are removed, etc. The phase is followed only by ‘full combat readiness’, which would then lead to opening fire. A controlled process of escalation and the security imparted by chains of command are supposed to protect those in possession of nuclear weapons from making irreversible decisions, in Moscow and elsewhere.
Although usual practice when it comes to nuclear deterrence is not to say too much — so as to establish or maintain a sufficient level of uncertainty and autonomy, and not preemptively scare populations — Vladimir Putin’s Russian regime did not hesitate in brandishing it as a threat, as he also did in 2014 during the annexation of Crimea; and at three other times in recent days: on February 8, 24 and 27.
Some have read the raised alert level as evidence of Putin’s weakness, having been met with more difficult circumstances than he expected:
• the very determined resistance of a large number of Ukrainians;
• the birth of a ‘Ukrainian Churchill’, in President Volodymyr Zelensky;
• an international outcry and almost universal opprobrium against this type of offensive and aggressive action against a neighbouring country;
• the accelerated delivery of European and American arms to Ukrainian resistance fighters;
• tougher sanctions against Russia, which already seem to be hitting the mark;
• the awakening of Europe and NATO and, along with it, a real Western military mobilisation on its borders;
• the awakening of dissent within Russia, which is growing as the concrete consequences of international sanctions become clearer and the country realises that what is presented to it as a simple ‘operation’ to help its ‘Ukrainian brother’ is a war.
No jubilation
For General Vincent Desportes, the former director of the École de guerre (a French military academy), time is against Putin and he is at an impasse. He will need to stop this war, and ‘we will have to let him leave with something’. But, in the meantime, ‘it could be Grozny (1) or it could be Stalingrad (2) — and Putin knows it’. Desportes describes himself as more ‘worried’ than before: ‘We changed worlds today [Sunday February 27] at 3 p.m. It is no longer about 100,000 lives and four cities, but about the destruction of the world. Are we going to repeat the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962? (3) Kennedy had difficulty holding back his generals, but Khrushchev was surrounded by advisers (4), whereas Putin is alone’. However, according to Desportes, ‘[Putin] showed relative restraint’, at least at the beginning of the intervention when his troops were an army of conscripts who expected to liberate the Ukrainians to jubilation...
Also read Michael T Klare, “With Russia at war in Ukraine, America is back (and never left)”, Le Monde diplomatique, March 2022.
Desportes is especially surprised by the ‘deafening silence of the Americans’, who were making more noises before the attack — while pledging that they themselves ‘would not go in’ — and who in their own way ‘pressed the button’ for the Russian operation as Alain Bauer, another specialist in security issues, points out. ‘Russia has been mistreated since 1991,’ admits Pierre Conesa, a former adviser to the French Ministry of Defence. ‘Vladimir Putin was well-disposed at first, and gave Russians their dignity back after the collapse of the USSR, but he eventually tensed up. He feels that NATO — which has not been dissolved, unlike the Warsaw Pact, and which has continued to expand — is encircling him again’. The solution, according to Conesa, would be a major security conference on Europe to design a new architecture for peace, and the acknowledgement, even partial, of some of Russia’s security claims.
Ressurance
Otherwise, where will Putin stop, many analysts ask? And, where will NATO stop, if Sweden and Finland join it, not to mention Ukraine, Bosnia and others?
Officially, NATO does not consider itself ‘at war’ with Russia, as Camille Grand, its assistant secretary general for defence investment, repeated on France Inter on February 27. It sticks to the phrase ‘proportionate defensive measures’, so-called ‘reassurance’ initiatives for Alliance countries feeling threatened on Russia’s borders. Believing that Moscow ‘created the developments of which it complains’, Grand notes that today Ukraine is ‘only a NATO partner, not an ally’ — which has not prevented the organisation from effectively coordinating Ukrainian arms requests, sending out a message across to its thirty member states. The organisation, founded in 1949, ‘is not limited to defending member states’, however, as Pierre Haroche, a researcher on European security at the Institute for Strategic Research at the Military School (Irsem), noted in Libération, citing operations in Kosovo in 1999, Afghanistan after 2001 and Libya in 2011 as examples (5).
In France, perhaps more than elsewhere, when you hear the word ‘deterrence’, you immediately think of nuclear power. The ‘force de frappe’ (‘strike force’) — as it has long been called — has existed since 1964, thanks to President Charles de Gaulle, who decided at the same time to leave NATO’s integrated military command (6). It has remained a weapon of ‘non-use’, considered a kind of life insurance: a possible enemy who threatens France’s ‘vital interests’ would expose himself to strikes causing damage at least equivalent to or greater than the aggression, and the possibility of a ‘second strike’.
Deterrence
As early as 1946, a year after the first atomic bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, American deterrence theorists began to explain that if until then we had sought to win wars, now we would have to avoid them, or prepare for them so we didn’t have to fight. Hence the notion of ‘non-use’ weapons that has been characteristic of nuclear armament until recently. During the Cold War, one spoke of a ‘balance of terror’, everyone betting on the rationality of an adversary who would not risk suffering unacceptable damage.
Also read Cécile Marin, “North Korea: a nuclear world”, Le Monde diplomatique, October 2017.
In such matters, much depends on what is considered a ‘vital interest’ by the aggressor and the attacked, and the credibility of the person in possession of the nuclear weapon, his composure and his capacity for discernment. On November 16 1983, during the Euromissile crisis already that already faced Russia, François Mitterrand noted on Antenne 2 the overwhelming power the president had in France: ‘The centrepiece of the deterrence strategy is the head of state, it’s me: everything depends on his determination. The other pieces are inert materials, right up until the decision which must consist precisely in ensuring that we do not use them’ (quoted in Le Monde, February 28 2022). In France, nuclear deterrence continues to draw consensus from one end of the political spectrum to the other. The party most unhappy with it — La France insoumise (LFI) — is only moderate in its criticism, recognising the effectiveness of the strategy until now but wondering about its limitations and future, as it becomes undermined by advances in aircraft carrier speeds, underwater vessel detection, etc. We would then need to replace it with other means of deterrence, for example in space.
In the fallout of the last few days, in addition to a ‘revived’ NATO we should note the boost to European defence budgets, as evidenced by Germany’s spectacular injection of €100bn into its military; the country could eventually have the largest army on the continent. Also the contortions of some of the candidates in the French presidential election, to avoid accusations of complacency toward the Russian regime and its leader. And the radiant complexion of the incumbent president, Emmanuel Macron, who was certainly taken for a ride by Vladimir Putin, as others have before him, but who — after performing the diplomacy of a ‘petit télégraphiste’ [as Marine Le Pen called him] — has donned the garb of a commander-in-chief, while French soldiers set off for Romania and the French army ensures the permanent presence of NATO’s response force. This is how far the Russian Tsar’s ‘rush of blood to the head’ has led, at time of publication.
