Nato split highlights the confusion lying at its heart

The National

13 hours ago

But the US, then on the cusp of its unipolar moment, was in no mood to compromise. If the Soviets wanted cash, president George Bush Senior declared at the time, they would have to embrace economic pain – Thatcherite shock therapy, in fact: deregulation, spending cuts, privatisation and the abolition of consumer price controls. Of course, shock therapy is precisely what Russia got. Throughout the 1990s, Russian living standards slumped as the IMF asset-stripped the country and oligarchs annexed its natural resources. Out of such chaos, Putin and Putinism emerged.
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The West, however, had been warned. According to Zubok, in response to Bush's demands, Eduard Shevardnadze, Gorbachev's then-foreign minister, wrote to the US secretary of state James Baker. In the absence of financial assistance, Shevardnadze said, Russia would fail, and if Russia failed, Western governments would soon find themselves confronted by 'some beastly dictator' whose actions forced them to spend 'more on defence than what Gorbachev is asking from you now'. Baker was unmoved and Gorbachev's dream of a Soviet Marshall Plan never materialised.
I found it hard not to think about that anecdote as this week's Nato summit, held at The Hague, unfolded across my TV screen. The central theme of the summit was deterrence – bigger weapons, deeper intel and smarter tech to counter the threat posed by Vladimir Putin. Nato's secretary general, Mark Rutte, worked hard to convey an image of Western consensus. 'Across the alliance, we have opened hundreds of new production lines and expanded existing ones,' he said during his opening remarks on Tuesday afternoon. 'We are now on course to produce more ships, planes and ammunition than we have done in decades.'
But the facade began to crack even before the summit got under way. On Monday, Rutte announced that all Nato allies had agreed to raise their defence budgets to a record-breaking 5% of GDP, in line with commands issued by Donald Trump. Hours later, Rutte's announcement was contradicted by Pedro Sanchez, the socialist prime minister of Spain, who said that Madrid would meet its defence obligations by spending just 2.1% of GDP. Sanchez's reasoning was sound. The 5% target was 'incompatible' with Spain's domestic welfare commitments.
Plus, for all the talk of European 'strategic autonomy', the target would only broaden Europe's dependence on Washington by incentivising 'off-the-shelf' purchases of US military hardware.
Rutte's spat with Sanchez highlights the confusion at the heart of Nato's post-Soviet existence. Is the alliance a mechanism for the projection of US hard power abroad, a containment structure for Russian nationalism or the nucleus of an independent European defence system?
Europeans themselves can't decide. In Finland, Poland and the Baltic states, support for Nato is strong because the immediate sense of Russian menace runs deep. But in Hungary and Slovakia – Nato members since 1999 and 2004, respectively – populist governments with pro-Moscow sympathies are more eager to placate Putin than to provoke him.
Meanwhile, here in the UK, a Labour prime minister simultaneously slashes social security payments while green-lighting the purchase of new nuclear-capable war planes. Our leaders could have listened to Gorbachev and Shevardnadze. Instead, we are still living in the rubble of 1991.