NATO’s deterrence is not working because it did not prevent Moscow from attacking Ukraine, and statements by Joe Biden and other leaders that the alliance would not intervene directly were an absolute mistake, argues Dr Stefanie Babst, who worked for NATO for 20 years and served as assistant secretary general for public diplomacy from 2006-2012.
Instead, NATO leaders should have maintained “strategic ambiguity” about what their response to Russia’s military actions in Ukraine would be, keeping President Vladimir Putin on his toes, she says in an interview with LRT.lt.
Dr Babst has recently published a book, The Seeing Eye. Courage to Change Strategic Course (Sehenden Auges – Mut zum strategischen Kurswechsel), where she criticises NATO’s indecisiveness and proposes tough changes in the alliance’s relations with Russia, Ukraine, and China.
You open your book with a story of how you were asked, on February 14, 2022, to give your opinion about the security situation to German politicians. Nobody in Germany or in Europe was expecting that Russia would attack Ukraine, even though they were amassing their troops on the border. Why did you expect that the war was going to break out?
I’ve been following President Putin’s foreign and domestic policy course for 20 plus years. I belong to those who believe that Russia’s war against Ukraine started back in 2014, that was the first time he crossed the red line big time.
I think he was waiting for an opportunity to prevent Ukraine from really marching “westwards”. If you look at a number of indicators, like Russian military exercises, they’re increased, the rhetoric in Moscow itself hardened especially on Volodymyr Zelensky’s election. In 2021, President Putin wrote his famous historical “analysis”, in which he was quite openly saying that Ukraine would not have the right to basically exist. He laid the ground from an intellectual political propaganda point of view.
Coming back to autumn and winter of 2021, by that time I had already left NATO, but I was well aware about the intel briefings Americans were sharing with friends and allies. What they saw and what I saw pretty much overlapped. I didn’t have all the details, but what I saw that was not just a show of force, it was really something to press ahead with military preparations. If you start building pontoon bridges, bring in the equipment to cross rivers, big time blood reserves, this is nothing you do for a military exercise.
From a broader perspective, I think he just thought that it was a good and appropriate moment because we were politically so weak. Biden’s election, who I don’t think actually impressed [Putin]. Chancellor Scholtz was just elected [in Germany] and started with a completely different agenda. I would argue he is still not really up to par for a strategic confrontation. And then there was Afghanistan, where we collectively really left a disastrous impression.
President Putin must have come to the conclusion that we collectively, as the West, would not step in militarily for Ukraine. This rationale really came to the fore. And I studied him, I followed him, I saw him plenty of times at NATO summits – to me that it was getting serious.
Did NATO officials underestimate Russia’s threat, perhaps more global than just eastern Ukraine?
NATO ambassadors and countries are fed by intelligence: their own, US, British and other intelligence. I’m absolutely sure that they had the full picture.
However, having a picture doesn’t mean you have a strategy or a policy how to respond. Germany or France were pretty surprised that President Putin went to war. There was absolutely no cohesive political discussion prior to that, what would the alliance do in case of an attack.
I think everybody waited for President Biden to actually take the decision, which he then did by saying: we will stand with and support Ukraine, but we will not get into a fight with Russia. And once he said so, all the other European countries followed. And I think that was a mistake.
There is the principle of strategic ambiguity: you leave the other side a bit in limbo, leave President Putin guessing what our response would be. But the allies collectively said: we will not be ready to proactively, with military means, defend Ukraine was. I’m sorry to say, but it was in a way an open invitation for President Putin to advance his own military campaign. And it still the case as we speak today.
I think there have been other windows of opportunity where NATO could at least have left it open, left President Putin guessing, for instance, as far as the no fly zone was concerned. But it was clear from the very beginning the allies said: we are ready to defend every inch of our own territory, but I’m sorry, Ukraine, you stand outside. I find this a pretty fatal decision because the price paid by the Ukrainians is colossal.
Do you think that came down to America’s reluctance to engage in a direct conflict with Russia, start world war three, and escalate the war beyond Ukraine’s territory?
This very term, world war three, in my understanding is crap. We have different players, they play through strategic messages. Here is one player who plays through strategic messages, including nuclear blackmail. And here is the other side who has at least as many conventional and nuclear capabilities but simply says: don’t hit us, don’t do it, we will not get involved.
This is just strategic messaging. Verbal strategic messages could have been augmented, reinforced by other forms of messages. For instance, if the US had already early in the game deployed strategic bombers – they would have have signalled to Moscow, we are ready. You want to get into fights, we are here we are right on your border, we are in Romania, in the Black Sea, we are in Sweden, in Finland, we are in Poland, in the Baltic countries. But there was nothing of that sort, there was no strategy, no false posturing. There was nothing and there still is nothing.
Would have all this prevented President Putin from doing what he has done? I don’t know. But I would have given it a try to see how the situation evolved.
The same is true for our naval presence in the Black Sea. There is hardly any and this is because of this problem with Turkey who so openly sides with Russia. The fifth or the sixth US Fleet could have gone into the Black Sea and made a force posture, but there was no political will.
Putin uses all of his instruments and he is acting on a strategic level, he uses in particular the nuclear card. And we don’t do anything of that. We leave it to the Ukrainians to do the fighting and to pay the price. And you have seen over the past 18 months that Putin is constantly escalating.
Do you suggest that the Western countries should have signaled willingness to use nuclear weapons?
I’m just saying this is verbal messaging, not immediately deploying them.
Now 18 months have passed and we are approaching the Vilnius summit. We need to alter the strategic dynamic in order to regain the initiative which we don’t have.
But we made the same mistake. Whenever the debate about [Ukraine’s NATO membership] popped up, at least here in Germany, 2.5 seconds later an official said: no, no, no, this is not the time for Ukraine to join. We constantly lay out what we are not prepared to do. This is what President Putin hears and listens to. He simply waits us out.
Do you think that’s also because there are many leaders in the West who think that it’s possible to return to the status quo ante, before Russia invaded, if Ukraine defeats them?
Just take the official language of NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. He was recently in Germany and said: the first thing that Ukrainians must do, they must secure they remain a viable state and only if they will survive as a state, can they come back to us and we’ll discuss membership. So the issue is not even on the table. I find this a completely wrong strategic message to Russia.
And why does he say so? Because there is simply no consensus in NATO. You have these 22 countries, including yours, who have signed up through various instruments and on various platforms to advocate for a fast-track approach. At least let’s give the Ukrainians a clear roadmap, a timetable, let’s announce in Vilnius that Ukraine will join, say, by the next summit in Washington. And we’ll start preparing, we do away with the MAP, it doesn’t make any sense any longer to ask Ukraine to undergo all these different steps. That would have really surprised Putin, he would not expect that.
So you have these 22 countries and the United States with President Biden, who is not even prepared to do away with the MAP, and France and Germany who are through their back door thinking that there will be some type of ceasefire at some point and then they will be the first offering to host the peace conference. I doubt that they really stand so fully behind Ukraine’s territorial fight as they say in public.
And then you have the southern countries, Italy, Spain, they provide support for Ukraine, but their strategic interests are somewhere else. They are looking south, they are looking at Africa, they are looking at migration. They also are not really completely on board. And then on top you have two NATO allies who openly side with this terrorist regime, Turkey and Hungary.
It’s nice to go to a summit and say, oh we are completely on the same page here, NATO’s unity is stronger than ever. I’m sorry to say but this is bullshit. Everybody can see that they are on different avenues. And if we see it, President Putin sees it too, and China sees it and Iran sees it.
So I’m strongly arguing – and have done so also in my book – for a game changer. We need to alter the strategic dynamic. If we don’t do it, Ukraine will. Perhaps they’ll make some territorial gains, but they will not be able to reconquer all of their territories within the next couple of months, that’s clear.
And President Putin, I don’t know what he will do next, he ordered the explosion of the Kakhovka Dam – no reaction, no punishment, nothing other than verbal condemnation. If I were him, I’d go for the next step. He will escalate below the level of using nuclear weapons. He has lots of other instruments at his disposal, including Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.
What do you expect from the NATO summit in Vilnius with regards to Ukraine? Apparently, there’s not going to be any membership plan, just some guarantees.
It starts with the language. There is no such thing as a guarantee unless it’s membership, Article Five. I find it almost immoral to always mix up these words, membership and security guarantees. No, a credible security guarantee for Ukraine would only be countries or a country saying, I’ll join you in the fight with boots on the ground. That’s the security guarantee. The rest is support.
I think what we’re going to see in Vilnius will be a package for Ukraine which will look at the longer-term requirements from a military point of view. There will certainly be trust funds. This is nothing new, we have had trust funds for Ukraine in the past ten years, I even administered one. But they will put a new label on it.
And they will come up with this new NATO-Ukraine council, which I think is a joke, just another label. Yes, they say that Ukraine will sit as an equal on the table. No, it will not, because it will remain a partner. There will be a discussion forum. But what would be the difference other than a different seating order.
I know that they have a hard time coming up with what they call deliverables to present in Vilnius. If you really look at the substance, I don’t think that – other than more military support, longer-term military support – there’s anything in it for the Ukrainians other than 22 making a big fuss.
What we often hear is that, oh, we must not put at risk NATO’s unity so we must avoid having a public disagreement. But I’m making my point one more time: everyone who studies NATO can see that there is a disagreement about how much NATO should help Ukraine. So I hope that they will remain steadfast.
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