Memorandum from Dr Roy Allison
1. NATO foreign ministers agreed on 5 March
2009 to restore high-level diplomatic ties with Russia, including
ministerial level meetings of the NATO-Russia Council (NRC), which
were suspended after Russia's Russian military campaign in Georgia
in September 2009. However, restoring formal dialogue is not equivalent
to a normalisation of Russia-NATO relations. It also leaves aside
the key question whether the NRC can serve as a substantive and
productive channel for those relations in the future.
2. The break in NATO-Russia relations during
2008-09 may be compared to the longer freeze in formal relations
between the two parties after the NATO campaign against Serbia
in 1999. In the latter case the revival of serious dialogue depended
first on jettisoning the previous format for this dialogue (the
NATO-Russia Permanent Joint Council and replacing it with one
that gave Russia a more influential voice (the NRC in 2002). But
the new dialogue crucially depended also on a joint recognition
of the need to respond to the imperatives of the new post 9/11 security
agenda of global counter-terrorism, around which common proposals
could be formulated, joint threat assessments be developed and
perhaps even a spirit of "cooperative security" be developed.
3. The present challenge is to overcome
the grave deterioration of NATO-Russia relations since autumn
2008. Russia argues that the NRC is not fit for purpose. Contrary
to their initial positive assessments of the NRC Russian officials
now tend to belittle its achievements and to argue that it operates
not as twenty six countries plus Russia. Moscow claims that a
consolidated NATO bloc of states prepares its position on policies
in advance, at the expense of Russia. Yet a shift away from the
NRC to a new structure of cooperation (as happened previously
from the PJC to the NRC) is not in prospect and anyway it simply
may not be possible to accommodate Russian demands through such
an institutional fix. Russia would be likely to call for a mechanism
that can respond to major East-West controversies, in which Moscow
could have some kind of veto rights.
4. Russia still presents itself as committed
to global counter-terrorism (though for long it has focused mainly
on challenges in the North Caucasus and Central Asia). However,
while formally signed up to this agenda, the polarization between
NATO and Russia since autumn 2008, as well as the expressions
of vulnerability to potential Russian military threats by some
NATO member states, especially the Baltic States, make it difficult
to conceive of a way to recapture the cooperative promise of the
NRC in 2002.
5. It is unlikely that a new NATO-Russia
collaborative dynamic can be achieved through a security agenda
focused on stabilizing Afghanistan, countering global nuclear
proliferation and preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear capability.
These key security concerns will be the subject of serious and
quite competitive negotiation. But Moscow will wish to use them
to position itself as an "equal" and indispensable negotiating
party on global issues in bilateral talks with the United States
rather than to use them to breathe life into the NRC.
6. Since its inception the effectiveness
of the NRC and its various working groups has depended on the
wider Russian-Western political climate. At the same time various
"goodwill initiatives" under the NRC seemed to be motivated
primarily by the pragmatic effort to identify and kick-start common
projects to foster cooperative midsets and the political will
that might allow more ambitious forms of collaboration to follow.
But Moscow is now disparaging of this kind of "public diplomacy
of partnership" of the NRC and does not seem to wish a continuation
of project activity that has had little practical output. Moscow
may place the joint anti-terrorist naval patrols of Operation
Active Endeavour in this category. Alternatively, naval cooperation,
as against piracy, may be approved as a minimalist and low profile
form of military to military contact.
7. The military dimension of NRC cooperation
is at odds with the characterisation of NATO as an adversary in
Russian state controlled media, especially since September 2008.
It is difficult to envisage the further development of NATO-Russia
interoperability exercises, given Moscow's characterisation of
its war with Georgia effectively as a proxy war with the United
States and its current effort to draw lessons from that war for
reforming its own armed forces.
8. Russian officials continue to present
NATO objectives and the processes of enlargement as driven by
an offensive strategy of geopolitical containment of Russia which
has to be resisted. They have begun to describe the Arctic region
as a new zone of confrontation and they present tentative NATO
discussions on the protection of energy supply routes and pipelines
as part of a wide geopolitical front to weaken Russia economically
and even threaten its infrastructure. More specifically the Georgian
president Mikheil Saakashvili and sometimes parts of the Ukrainian
leadership are presented as a Western "fourth column"
within Russia's legitimate CIS zone of influence.
9. President Medvedev has extended this
geopolitical assessment in referring to neighbour states as within
Russia's traditional sphere of interests and in proclaimed that
"there are regions in which Russia has privileged interests".
He aroused further controversy by asserting that "protecting
the lives and dignity of our citizens, wherever they may be, is
an unquestionable priority for our country". On one level
such language was probably intended to influence the attitude
of traditional NATO member states over the risks of further NATO
enlargement or granting Membership Action Plans to Georgia or
Ukraine.
10. Russian intervention in South Ossetia
in support of Russian "citizens" in September 2008 has
raised the question whether Moscow seeks to tactically exploit
the provision of Russian passports for strategic purposes in CIS
states. Attention has focused on Russian passport-holders in Ukrainian
Crimea. In fact if Russia seeks to influence Ukraine's commitment
to NATO it can do this more easily by working on politicians in
Kiev, by playing on Ukraine's persistent inability to sustain
firm ruling coalitions, as well as by leveraging energy policy,
than by fomenting opposition in Crimea among Russian passport-holders.
11. Russia has sought to present its favoured
regional structure of CIS states, the Collective Security Treaty
Organisation (CSTO), as a natural institutional counterpart to
NATO and has persistently called on NATO to establish direct relations
with the CSTO to manage security problems in the Eurasian region.
Moscow and CSTO officials call not only for NATO-CSTO cooperation
over Afghan drug trafficking and counterterrorism, but now also
for wider joint NATO-CSTO stabilisation activities in Afghanistan.
12. These overtures have made little progress.
NATO is concerned that the multilateral framework of the CSTO
could be used by Russia as a blocking mechanism against NATO activities
in Central Asia. Russia's loose concept of a "zone of CSTO
responsibility" suggests indeed that Moscow seeks to insert
itself between the Western alliance system and CSTO member countries,
to force the latter to deal with the West via Russia and not directly.
This issue is particularly sensitive because of the pressing need
to determine how to best secure supply routes to Afghanistan.
13. The agreement by Russia and Uzbekistan
to provide logistical transit routes to Afghanistan on a commercial
basis for non-lethal supplies is presented by Moscow as a central
plank of cooperation with NATO, as reflecting a common interest
to prevent the resurgence of the Taliban, which transcends the
antagonism generated by the crisis over Georgia or other major
Russia-NATO disputes.
14. However, there are indications that
Russia is seeking wider security policy trade-offs if this supply
route is to be firmly established and broadened to cover military
goods. Russian leaders seem to believe that NATO is becoming critically
reliant on this new access route and may be exploring the broader
foreign policy leverage this could offer. The Russian NATO representative,
Dmitry Rogozin, indicated in autumn 2008 that the agreement
on transit previously reached could be frozen if NATO support
for Georgia continued on its current course.
15. Given the importance to NATO of predictability
and reliability of logistical access to Afghanistan NATO should
try to ensure that any transit arrangements are not hostage to
fluctuations in Russian-Western relations or conditional on Western
acceptance of Russian dominance under the guise of "privileged
interests" in Central Asia or elsewhere in the CIS region.
9 March 2009
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