NATO - The largest military alliance in the world | DW Documentary

NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, was formed 75 years ago and its goal was to prevent war between sovereign countries. 75 years of European history without war, which is the maximum expression of a successful Alliance. Then, on February 24, 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The war had returned. For Europe Ukraine is not a member of NATO, but Russia's actions have raised the question: is the Western

military

alliance

capable of defending itself? How strong is NATO among European members? 27 armies that cannot handle medium-sized missions on their own could not in this

documentary

we will hear from people who know NATO from the inside we cannot guarantee that we can protect Munich Frankfurt Berlin cannot do so founded in the After World War II, the NATO achieved the unimaginable;

Over time, former enemies became partners. I think this is fascinating. There were also German officers who were part of the NATO command structure and who had been fighting the Americans and British in World War II for 75 years. After its founding, NATO's importance is now greater than it has been since the Cold War. Around the

world

there is an increasing focus on

military

power and it is not just Russia but also China and the Middle East. I think Saudi Arabia has tripled its ground forces since 2010 and what about NATO? We took a vacation from reality and now we're dealing with the consequences of that.

This is Monday in Belgium is a city of about 100,000 inhabitants 70 km from the capital, Brussels, it houses one of the best protected buildings of the NATO military headquarters the supreme headquarters of the Allied powers in Europe or, for short , is a central hub for vital security information 24 hours a day, from movements near defense

alliance

borders to suspicious activity around the

world

Admiral Rob Bower chairs NATO's military committee and acts as a liaison between the political world and the military, the alliances have existed for 75 years and we went from 12 to almost 32 members, so in itself I would say that it is proof that this Alliance adds value, otherwise so many nations would not have joined When it was founded after World War II, NATO was made up of 12 countries.

Its goal during the Cold War was to contain communism and prevent the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc from expanding their influence over time. 20 more countries have joined NATO, including the states of the former Eastern bloc, today the alliance is expanding. from the Arctic Ocean in the north to Turkey's border with Syria in the southeast and from the Baltic states on Russia's border across the Atlantic to the US and Canada, it is the world's

largest

defense alliance that provides security for a billion people and yet NATO itself has no troops of its own, the way it's built is that, uh, NATO is basically three things: it's command and control, it's standardization, uh, and it's the sizes of the exercises and the troops come from the Nations, the sovereign states, the 31 will soon be 32 and so on once.

Nations hand over their troops to NATO for a collective operation or defense exercise. Once this is done, the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, General Cavoli, is in command of those forces and can use them within the mission for which the traumatic effects have been given. Military conflicts were a key factor in the establishment of NATO. I think it is essential to recognize that NATO was created and founded after World War II, and therefore the war and its destruction have loomed over everyone involved in these decisions for so many years. of these men and almost all of them are men in this story at the beginning of NATO's history had fought in the first or second world war or played a role and therefore part of the founding of NATO is about making sure that war does not happen again, so many people believe that what they are doing by creating NATO is preventing a return to war in Europe when the alliance was founded it had no military structure or command center above all NATO was a promise.

I think it's important to recognize that when the treaty was signed in 1949 it was a symbolic treaty it was a political symbol that these 12 states were going to protect each other and work side by side on April 4, 1949 heads of government, ministers of foreign affairs foreigners and high-ranking diplomats from 12 countries met to sign the North Atlantic Treaty in Washington DC the agreement had only 14 articles for us if there is something certain today if there is something inevitable in the future it is the will of the people of the world to freedom and peace just a few months later, in August 1949, the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb, so the United States no longer had the monopoly on nuclear weapons and the arms race accelerated.

The Soviet Union became enemy number one of the West with nuclear weapons in use any provocation could have meant the end of the world as we knew it And yet, at that time the greatest fear of the founders of NATO was not a direct attack from the Soviet Union, but what Canadian historian Timothy Andrew Sale calls the weakness of democracy; The particular concern in the late 1940s was that the experience of the Second World War had been so devastating and so traumatic for the people of Europe that they would not be willing to fight for their state or national interests in the future. concern was that if the Soviet Union mobilized its forces or organized exercises or somehow displayed its military strength, then perhaps the citizens of the European countries would ask their leaders to give in to whatever the Soviet demands, the millions of deaths during World War II were in mind and, according to the historian's theory, democracies abandon themselves. open to blackmail because they try to keep the peace and at any cost they tend to offer compromises and give in to pressure being part of NATO and being part of the alliance the leaders felt they could go to their people and say: We are part of something more big, um, and after the war, when the leaders did not think that their people would ever be willing to fight again, it was very important to show the strength of this group today, 75 years after the founding of NATO, the war is being once again. fought in Europe, the world's

largest

military alliance has had to ask itself if things were worse, how well it could defend itself.

All nations have to make sure they can defend themselves; that's item three and we've basically neglected it for many years. For example, Britain has significantly reduced its ground forces. Germany has ground forces, but they are not necessarily compatible with other Armed Forces. France has nuclear weapons, but they are very few compared to Russia's nuclear arsenal. After the Cold War, the emphasis on collective defense faded. Increasingly, NATO's focus turned to operations in Afghanistan and Libya and the so-called war on terrorism. We had overseas missions that required small, mobile armed units for these, they were sent overseas for very, very specific tasks in crisis response operations.

On our side we decide if and when we go to Afghanistan and with how many forces and for how long, but in joint defense an adversary could attack you and then you are ready or not. The alliance's weaknesses are now becoming apparent. It includes 32 countries, that is, 32 sovereign states, which means a lot of bureaucracy. Being able to deploy and move troops quickly can be decisive in war, but in Europe that is a big job despite the EU and the Shenen Free Movement Zone from 2014 to 2017. Lieutenant General Ben Hajes was the overall commanding officer of US troops in Europe.

Europe. I told him that he could take a truckload of apples from Poland to Portugal and they would never stop him. He could drive all the way. I can't do that with the military and I had troops. that were in the Baltics in Poland, in small numbers and um and I noticed that my U aviation helicopter unit had their maintenance readiness level was going down and I asked my communicator, my brigade commander Ansbach aviation. I said, why aren't they fixed? taking so much time and said sir, we can't take the maintenance parts from Ansbach to Larda, it takes weeks.

I told him he was naive. I just assumed that driving from Ansbach to Larda would be like being on Interstate 95 in the US from Florida to Virginia. I mean, it's all NATO countries, all EU countries, what's the problem and that's when we realized there was a problem moving military equipment across borders across different nations. You had to have permission. NATO has been aware of the problem since 2021. It has been operating. What it calls Joint Support and Enabling Command or JSAC Based in the southern German city of JX, its main function is to eliminate bureaucracy when it comes to troop deployments.

Your commander is Lieutenant General Alexander Zran, looking forward to 2024, looking back towards 2023, we have a federal structure which means you have to get states with different governments to work together, there are forms that need to be filled out, which are very comprehensive, but they vary from nation to nation, that's something we're working on, then you have to consider things like customs regulations, for example. or the prevention of animal diseases, but to move tanks around Germany you have to get them on a train quickly or put them in the back of one of these big trucks. We don't have enough trucks to transport tanks so you need Doan, but in peacetime Doan isn't going to stop, they shouldn't stop and take tanks, so having to work through this process is very tedious, it's not sexy, This is the Obal barracks in Bavaria, southeastern Germany.

Tomorrow the soldiers will travel to Lithuania. On behalf of NATO, the tanks will be transported to Lithuania by train. Even the trip to the train station requires meticulous coordination. The route is along along the highway they have a precise window to make the trip from the barracks to the train station everything must happen before rush hour Throughout Europe there are bridges that were built in the last decades of peacetime, so it was thought little in themselves could support the weight of heavy military equipment. Tanks must cross this bridge one at a time, all Germans of our time remember it and can still see it. in West Germany the yellow sign that says the weight this bridge will hold and I mean everywhere in West Germany there were these signs but you don't have them, as you move east every unit that is sent to the eastern flank of NATO in Lithuania takes its own equipment that way you can practice and internalize procedures and movements I know my vehicle I know what faults it has or doesn't have and our maintenance partner Hill can do things like send us spare parts the tanks from the previous rotation belong to other colleagues it's like having A car you drive alone, you don't trade it for someone else's.

JC's goal is to create a kind of common military zone similar to Europe's borderless shenen zone in the future. NATO wants to be able to deploy. 100,000 soldiers in 10 days right now it takes 15 days to deploy less than half that number and it's not just the soldiers themselves, we just saw this with the war in Ukraine, a land. War consumes incredible amounts of resources. Ukraine's supporters are really struggling just to produce enough ammunition, they have gone through all existing PS stocks and exhausted everything, according to calculations, an average of 50,000 artillery rounds are currently being fired per day in the war between Russia and Ukraine .

Those munitions must be produced. They have to be on. On the other hand, the German ammunition must also fit into the Dutch barrels and must be distributed to a depot somewhere in Europe in a logical manner. Hopefully we never need them, but it's part of having a credible deterrent. JC is also responsible for ensuring sufficient ammunition supplies in the event of a direct attack. Lt. Gen. Zran and his international team use simulations to practice for that eventuality how much equipment is available to troops at a given location where their deficits are how much fuel is needed what roads and bridges they can use and where the equipment could be we have to improvise where the most strategic places are for the weapons depot here at the JC headquarters every imaginable conflict scenario unfolds most importantly everything that is planned here has to be achievable at any time deterrence only works if our plans and preparations are credible in other words, it has to work in case we have to defend ourselves to do what we all want to do, that is, avoid war.

I have to, for example, be able to manage this redeployment of large bodies of troops in peacetime, before the first shot is fired. I can make it clear to the opponent that they are going to fail at the beginning everything goes according to plan for the Bavarian soldiers on their way toLithuania the loading process is complete but then there is an unexpected delay due to a railway strike the train is only able to travel a few kilometers 3 days later it is still in Bavaria, NATO headquarters in Brussels where crucial political decisions are made In the event of an attack on a NATO Member State, this is where leaders would decide whether to invoke Article 5 in the NATO process. 5, of course, is the best-known Washington treaty article.

An armed attack on one will be considered an armed attack on all. Everyone knows Article 5, but that's not a laser beam like if you go to a store and the door opens automatically. there is no automatic trigger for Article 5; there must be a consultation in which all NATO member states would have to agree to officially consider Article 5, accept it and put it into force; such decisions must be made unanimously by all members in countries such as Germany and United States military operations also have to be approved by Parliament or Congress. Do you remember that last year there was a missile that landed inside Poland and killed two poles and if this was an automatic thing, someone could have done it? he said missile hits It's a Russian missile hits inside Poland Article 5 well, of course , the people involved in the process involved are mature enough to say wait a minute, we need to check and see what happened in the beginning that idea that Article 5 Forcing other allies to fight to defend an ally was the hope of the The British, the French and the Canadians said that was what they wanted Article 5 to say, but the United States wouldn't have that because it took away Congress's power to declare war.

The problem is that the more countries there are, the more individual interests come into play, if a single State refuses to give its consent, Article 5 fails, we have 3.2 million soldiers who need to know what to do, so it is not enough say no, and in a war in a crisis, if they attack you you can say no, but they still attack us, so we need a solution, so if someone says no, then we expect from that nation that says not an alternative, yes. NATO allows what is called constructive extension, this means that the alliance can be invoked even if not everyone agrees, but a negative vote would be a problem in the event of an attack if a nation says we do not support it being Article 5.

Then the other nations can still act together. multilaterally, but it will not be under a NATO structure, so this will be a problem, and yet the fundamental ideas behind NATO are community and solidarity. In the 1950s and 1960s there was a real effort to try to connect the people of the NATO countries with each other, so things like educational exchanges, study tours and professional associations were considered very important. to develop that solidarity within the alliance, which is why many American officials spend a lot of time thinking about how to build those relationships not only between leaders but between people.

At that time, such exchanges often began with the presentation of the typical customs of a given country: milk, butter, eggs and cheese, made with special formulas and skills passed down through generations of cheese farmers who produced delicacies like the world-famous Paul LEC and Kam Bear, archival footage like this shows the early years of NATO, educational films from a pre-globalized era made by the organization's own press office, the focus was not on weapons or military maneuvers, but rather individual member states were presented through their traditions and culture. The films were not intended for the public. They showed them to the soldiers before they were posted to a different country.

Part of pre-employment training to help answer questions like: What are they like there? What can we expect? And I think this is fascinating. Also German officers who were part of the NATO command structure and who had been fighting against the Americans and the British in World War II, so these men had fought side by side, in some cases they had fought against each other. yes and then they had worked together to build this Alliance during the Cold War NATO bases already existed in federal Germany and in one of them an international school of jet pilots, men from the United Kingdom, from West Germany, from the United States and aviators from France and Italy work and train together in 1955, just 10 years.

After the end of World War II, West Germany was admitted to NATO, but despite the emphasis on community, the fear of being abandoned by one's own allies is as old as NATO itself. This idea that maybe some of the allies would just sit back in a war. was constantly on the minds of leaders throughout the Cold War: Would the United States really defend Western Europe if the Soviet Union fired nuclear missiles at the United States in response? And it is from the late 1950s that this Law of Balance becomes extremely difficult. The same year that the Federal Republic of Germany joined NATO, Chancellor Kad Adwa asked experts for a legal opinion.

He wanted to know to what extent Article 5 was actually binding. In other words, what was Washington's obligation if Germany were attacked? The question of whether an attack has occurred and the question of the nature and extent of assistance to be provided are left to the discretion of the United States, suggesting that any country is free to decide whether or not to support an ally to first glance. Article 5 makes you think, "Oh, if I attack one NATO member state, the other 31 will come and beat me up, but if you actually read it in detail, what it says is that each member promises to witness an attack on another member." of NATO".

They claim it as an attack on themselves, it doesn't say they will send tanks or warplanes later, they could just say yes. I see it as an attack on me, but I still won't do anything. Then Chancellor Kad Adenauer did not want to trust. In Article 5 he opted for a different kind of guarantee: the stationing of American soldiers on West German soil because they were the real Safeguard. One of the reasons it was so important to have American, British and Canadian forces in Europe was that they served. as a kind of trap for Article 5 or for other allies to come to the aid of the Europeans or Germany, especially if the federal republic was attacked, it is a very important political signal because no American political leader is going to allow some American troops to remain caught in a war or a small conflict without the entirety of American power coming to join that fight this is rukla in Lithuania soldiers from several nations have been stationed here since 2017 are part of NATO multinational battle groups after Russia annexed Ukraine's Crimea in 2014.

These small mobile units were established under the permanent command of NATO. They are stationed along NATO's eastern border in Estonia, Lithuania and Poland. The strength of each battle group is 1,000 to 2,000 soldiers and more battle groups have been added. Since the large-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 in Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, Germany is responsible for a battle group in Lithuania near the Suaki Gap, a 100 km stretch of the Lithuanian-Polish border between Bellarus and the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad. NATO believes this is where a Russian attack is most likely to occur. Colonel House Paba is in command of the German contingent stationed here in Lithuania. objectively speaking, the forces of Russia and Belarus are no longer present with the kind of force that we saw before the war in Ukraine, many forces have been withdrawn and deployed in Ukraine we can say so objectively that we are not currently under any serious threat.

The German soldiers from the Bavarian barracks have now arrived by plane, but their tanks are still in transit. At night there is a flag ceremony that symbolizes the change of troops. While some return home after 6 months, others are left with an important task that demonstrates loud and clear that NATO will not abandon Lithuania in case of armed conflict, so if Lithuania is attacked, not only Lithuania but also our soldiers they are working. there and therefore, maybe people don't see it as Dutch, Dutch or German soil, but it is our soldiers who work there and they are going to be attacked.

It is the same principle that Conrad Adow RI in matters of security is not guaranteed by the famous Article 5, but due to the international composition of a military presence, the German Armed Forces here are ready for action, but at the same time show the Lithuanian people look, we are here standing next to you, shoulder to shoulder, we cannot forget it. It was not only the Americans who guaranteed our security during the Cold War, but several allied countries. You could say that we are now returning the favor in that we are helping to convey what we experienced in the past in terms of safety and security. ensure that our comrades here in Lithuania and in the other Baltic States are supported to protect NATO's eastern flank.

NATO's defense policy is rarely popular before Russia's war in Ukraine. NATO approval in the United Kingdom was 59%, in Germany it was 54% and in France only 39%. Even more dramatic were the results of the polls on Article 5 and the obligation to defend allies before the war in Ukraine. Only 32% of French respondents were in favor of providing military support to NATO member Romania if it were attacked by Russia. and only 14% of Germans said they would want to support NATO member Turkey in the event of a Russian attack, but the truth is that support for NATO has always fluctuated even during the Cold War in West Germany, so For example, in the 1980s there was a large peace movement.

That led other NATO countries to question how trustworthy the Germans were as allies. The leaders who built NATO and then the leaders who maintain NATO often talk behind closed doors about Germany and her concerns about what Germany will do in the world and this. takes one of two paths, so one argument at the beginning of the cold war is that Germany is going to try to establish itself as a strong and independent power in Europe and that this will mean a return to the first half of the 20th century, and that motivates a a lot of fears in the 1950s and 1960s and then there is a change, starting in the 1960s there is fear and concern that maybe the Germans no longer want to be powerful at all.

This is a period in which there are great demonizations in Germany against nuclear weapons. against NATO against US forces in Germany and that sentiment still persists in parts of the population today. I think many people in Germany have been very happily in an intellectual, political and economic comfort zone. The motto has been whatever Russia is doing in Syria. o Georgia or Ukraine is not nice, but it has nothing to do with us, lack of solidarity and lack of common vision in 2019, the year of the 70th anniversary of the alliance, the French president, Emmanuel Macon, even said that the NATO was experiencing brain death.

The problem of France. with NATO it has always been that they want more of it and not less, that is how France's comment should be understood. France has always been one of the allies saying that we must all do more than we are doing and criticized what she saw as a complete lack. of common strategy within NATO for a long time Germany had a kind of myopic attitude towards anything that involved conflict. I think that's why Mong gave a wake-up call. It's not just about money or soldiers, it's about asking: can you even imagine the worst case scenario? because if not, you will be really helpless if it happens two days later than planned.

The tanks arrive in Lithuania, but before they finally reach the barracks, there is one more obstacle to overcome. A few kilometers from their destination, the tanks must be refilled on another train. The roads in some Eastern European countries have different widths and are not compatible with those in Western Europe. In a defense situation, the trains would have arrived on time, the strike would not have happened and the German rail operator would have brought them here on time. It is not until the next morning that the tanks finally make their way to the place where they will be parked for the next 6 months.

They travel the last kilometers on rural roads. German kindergartens, schools and supermarkets will soon be built in the region. That's because a new German brigade will be permanently stationed in Lithuania and will be operational in 2027. Around 5,000 soldiers and their families will live here. The move is part of NATO's defense strategy to prevent Russia from attacking other former Soviet countries after Ukraine, which is especially worrying in the Baltic states, as opposed to Ukraine here.would constitute a direct attack on NATO territory there are also conflicts between Russia and NATO at the cyber level an investigation published in 2020 23 revealed the leak of Vulcan files and the existence of hacking centers that work for the Russian government the revelations showed how Moscow was trying to destabilize the West through the Internet NATO's response to this new threat can be found in the Estonian capital, Talon, near the border with Russia, this is the center of excellence for cooperative cyber defense, so which has generally recognized the meaning and importance of cyberattacks. and stated in 2021 that in certain cases, the cumulative effects of cyber effects, cyber attacks against NATO nations may trigger NATO Article 5, meaning that collective defense and response may not be limited to cyberspace SP, only the best cyber professionals in the alliance gather here.

To practice regularly in emergency situations, the annual Lock Shield simulation involves defending a fictional country from a cyber attack, so it can be called like a world championship or a cyber defender Olympiad every year and the purpose is to have this multinational environment. where the most complex and advanced simulation environment is used, as in the real case, when a nation is under a cyber attack, another annual Crossed Swords simulation was held in December 2023 which involved responding to a threat with a counterattack which the participants had to deactivate. For each server hacked, points were awarded to a power plant that hacked surveillance cameras and jammed a railway network, and in the end a winner was determined.

Ukrainian experts also participated in the simulation, while just over a thousand kilometers to the south of Russia, hackers shut down Ukraine's largest server. telecommunications operator for several days after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Eastern European countries left the Eastern bloc and gradually joined NATO in 1999. Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary became members five years later . Estonia lvia Lithuania Bulgaria Romania Slovakia and Slovenia followed Albania and Croatia joined in 2009 in In 2017 Montenegro arrived and in 2020 North Macedonia became the last country to join NATO before the war in Ukraine. Why so many nations that were former Soviet republics like Estonia, Ivia and Lithuania or former members of Warsaw like Poland?

Why did they seek to join NATO as soon as they could? Why does Ukraine want to do it now and is it because they know what it's like to be under Russian control? Some people say that by expanding NATO into Russia we were committing a form of aggression that we were threatening Russia. I can tell you because I was there in George HW Bush's administration when the Warsaw package collapsed and then when the Soviet Union. The disintegrated countries of Central and Eastern Europe were knocking on NATO's door asking for admission that they had been dominated by the Soviet Union since the end of World War II, they wanted to be free, and they wanted to be with what they considered like-minded countries.

In the West we did not do any recruitment to increase NATO membership, all the countries that joined opened the process themselves. Russian President Vladimir Putin saw NATO's eastern expansion as a threat and a betrayal of a supposed promise; in Putin's eyes, it was a breach of trust that justified Russia's attack on another country, he made clear in a speech to the nation 3 days before Russian troops invaded Ukraine for nothing in the East; that is the much-questioned promise NATO is said to have made to Russia and the West has also betrayed it. Russian historian Mary E. Sarati has spent most of her academic life focusing on that exact question;

She has conducted more than 100 interviews and examined countless transcripts of letters and documents and finally found a clear answer: what I would really like would be if the Russians surrendered. their weapons and return home. I can't make that happen, but in a sense Putin is trying to use history as a weapon to justify what he is doing and I am a historian, so in my way it is very small compared to what the Los Ukrainians are doing it, but in my own way maybe I can take that weapon away by showing in a serious and reproducible academic way the true narrative the real narrative of what happened the story begins shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall Germany was on the brink of reunification, but there was a challenge: Germany had surrendered unconditionally after World War II, so the four victorious powers (the United States, France, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union) still had undisputed legal rights over divided Germany. and, in particular, about divided Berlin. unify the four had to renounce those powers the three victorious Western powers wondered what the fourth power would demand what the last leader of the Soviet Union, Mik Gorbachev, would want in exchange for allowing the reunification of Germany the former German foreign minister West, Hans dietr genscher, was certain that Gorbachev would want the security of knowing, in Gard's words, that neither Poland nor Hungary would join NATO.

Therefore, he thought it was reasonable and felt strongly that the Western allies, as well as the United States, Britain, France and West Germany, should offer that to Gorbachev. the idea to the US Secretary of State, James Baker, he also thought it was reasonable. On February 9, 1990, Baker visited Gorbachev in the Kremlin and said approximately the following: how about you let go of your part of Germany and tell him that NATO and its jurisdiction will not move an inch eastwards. After the meeting Baker flew back to the US to report to his boss and good friend, President George HW Bush.

However, Bush was not at all impressed with the proposal. Bush says: I'm disappointed in you. I don't think we should negotiate about the future of NATO. I think NATO just won the Cold War. I think NATO is great the way it is so we're not going to do that and we need to let people know that, so one of my most interesting discoveries was a letter that Baker wrote to the West German Foreign Ministry late February saying: "I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said that I have caused confusion, we have to stop talking about this and after that this offer disappears from the American negotiations." Two weeks later, Bush invited West German Chancellor Helmut Cole and his wife to Camp David.

Residents in the country of the president of the United States, Bush told Cole more or less the same thing that he had told James Baker: we are not going to negotiate about the future of NATO, to hell with that right, that is a direct quote to the devil. with that and Cole responded well but Gorbachev is going to want something in exchange for his negotiating chips and come on Cole thought about it and said maybe it will be a question of money and Bush responded you have Deep Pockets and later defense minister Bob Gates, who I was basically taking notes at the time.

Bob Gates later wrote in Memoirs of him. At that moment the strategy became clear: we were going to bribe the Soviets, but with money, not with promises about NATO. extension the 2+4 negotiations lasted until September 12, 1990 so nothing stood in the way of German reunification and line No 1 in the East was not in any treaty this was not an amateur hour these were professionals negotiating this It was a team like we would say in the United States and in the end what was really in the contract explicitly allows NATO to expand across the old Cold War Front Line, which I think is the most important thing and the Union Soviet not only signed that Agreement, not only ratified it but also cashed the associated check for billions of marks which Putin does not mention, so what Putin does is mention the initial phase of the negotiations where that was a possibility, but then ignore what really happened in the end, months later, the Soviet Union collapsed, the Warsaw Pact was The Soviet flag over the Kremlin was officially dissolved, NATO was lowered and the West had won, suddenly the question arose of what should I do NATO then, so there are a number of reasons for keeping NATO in place, one is the idea that geopolitical realities had not evaporated simply because When the Cold War ended there was no guarantee that the Soviet Union or Russia later became a peaceful state after 1990.

There was the idea of ​​the peace dividend. All Western European states, but also Russia and other former Soviet states reduced their weapons. The idea was that if everyone had P weapons it would mean that no one wanted conflict and at least for a few years the idea seemed to work. Relations between Russia and the West improved in 1997 the leaders of the NATO countries and Russian President Boris Yelson signed a cooperation agreement called the Founding Act of NATO Russia The German diplomat Vulang Isingo was in the negotiations in the first half of the 1990s the relationship was not in no way confrontational or hostile Russia needed cooperation with the West Russia was later admitted to the G7 so suddenly we were the G8 Russia of NATO founding act literally States NATO and Russia are not considered adversaries in the founding act West made concessions to Russia we agreed that nuclear weapons would not be deployed on the territory of future eastern NATO member states no period but we also accepted that the deployment of troops by NATO member states to those countries would only be permitted on a very limited basis and NATO honored that agreement, says Andre Kortunov, academic director of the Russian Council for International Affairs in Moscow.

I agree that between 2014 and 2022 the North Atlantic Treaty Organization showed some restraint in deploying new troops and heavy weapons to its eastern flank. This was evidently done to avoid any accusation of violating the provisions of NATO's founding act. Russia. The ACT does not allow the parties to station large quantities of weapons along the Russian border, on the other hand Russia is doing things very differently, we have to assume that there are nuclear capable missile systems at Kenrad, which I wouldn't give much warning to us sitting here in Berlin, there's a lot going on there, we haven't.

We have not done anything like that in this area that did not exist before reunification or during the Cold War, even when Putin came to power in 1999, the relationship between Russia and NATO was peaceful, the old enemy seemed to have become a While Therefore, friend, while a new adversary had emerged, terrorism to this day, Article 5 of the alliance has only been invoked once after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, today our fellow citizens, our way of Our lives, our very freedom, were attacked in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist attacks, the images of planes crashing into buildings, fires, burning enormous collapsing structures, filled us with disbelief at the time Stephanie Bobst was NATO security advisor at the Brussels headquarters and watched events unfold during the attacks, but also afterwards there was a feeling that we should expect more attacks and we didn't know where.

I remember very well how uneasy we felt as employees at NATO headquarters. We thought we were also targets in a very short time. A meeting of the North Atlantic Council was convened. The US ambassador departed. Describing the events that had occurred before our very eyes, he tried to explain how the government had understood in those few hours after the attack what they knew, especially in terms of intelligence, and then the Secretary General, George Robertson, said that there was a consensus among the allies, so to speak, that we stood in solidarity with the United States, the affected country, and that was happening under Article Five of the Washington treaty, the council agreed that if so, it is determined that this attack was targeted from abroad against the United States will be considered an action covered by article five of the Washington Treaty;

In that sense, invoking Article 5 carried considerable risk because no one knew what the situation would be like a week from now and whether the Americans would suddenly demand immediate military support from their allies no one could know that 48 hours after the attacks, in response to After the attacks, US President George W. Bush declared war on terrorism in 2001, 70 nations participated in the subsequent war in Afghanistan, including all NATO countries and some Russia. Days after the attacks, Putin spoke in German before the German Parliament in Berlin. Putin was one of the first to express his condolences and willingness to help after 911.

Relations were still stable back then for politicians Putin supported NATO in Afghanistan in the fight against Part of NATO's logisticsAl-Qaeda was rerouted through Russia at the time when Putin even considered the prospect of Russia joining NATO. Both Russia and NATO member states benefited from economic and political cooperation. There was very good cooperation between the West and Russia, especially in the early 2000s, the best example being probably the transport options that Russia offered to NATO during the war in Afghanistan. The so-called Northern Transport Corridor worked well for several years and proved to be very effective. Starting in 2002, representatives of Russia and NATO met periodically at NATO.

Council of Russia the mood among the leaders was cheerful and optimistic the slippery slope up and down with the United States' decision to intervene in Iraq, if not sooner, because Moscow, of course, had the feeling that a crossroads had been crossed. red line if the Americans were going to intervene. start that kind of war with thousands of tanks and soldiers and, as it turned out, based on false information, then where would it end? It was the beginning of the end of good relations between Russia and the West. Russia, like China and France, voted against the invasion. of Iraq in the UN Security Council The United States invaded anyway without a UN mandate in 2007 4 years after the United States invaded Iraq with its Coalition of the Willing Putin spoke at the Munich security conference criticized The United States and its allies for their policies In the West, the fact that contacts were maintained between Moscow and Brussels was often seen as a kind of favor from NATO towards Russia; the Council was seen almost exclusively as a mechanism for information exchange, but one that had no serious decision-making functions and of course those two approaches were bound to clash sooner or later because we probably reacted recklessly, the reaction was to basically assume that he just needed to vent and that the next morning everything would be back to normal, which turned out to be a miscalculation.

I found out no later than 2008 when Russia responded to the Georgian uprisings with a massive army, after that things really went downhill in 2014. Russian forces occupied Crimea. Pro-Russian insurgents in eastern Ukraine were supported with weapons supplies. Logistics and irregular forces, the official line was that Moscow was protecting the Russian language and culture, in reality it was probably also about preventing Ukraine from joining NATO, after all, no country involved in a conflict can join the alliance. Russia's full-scale attack on Ukraine would continue in 2022, a week before the Foreign Minister essentially declared that NATO's Russia Council no longer existed.

They want to return to the borders of 1997. They sent a conceptual treaty text to NATO in December 2021 and that means that basically all members since 1997 have become members. of NATO would become a second-class member, of course, that is unacceptable. Putin wants less from NATO, instead he is getting more. Finland joined the alliance in 2023. Sweden applied for membership in 2022, but was initially not admitted for 20 months. President Reb Terdogan blocked Sweden's membership application. Hungary objected even more. All NATO members have a veto, for example when it comes to new member states. Sweden had been preparing for more than a year.

They had made an incredibly important and truly historic decision. They had to pass it in Parliament, which was a difficult political feat, since they were more or less dependent on two people, Mr. Orban and Mr. Erdogan, so they were on the doorstep and basically had to beg him. Erdogan's objection was that Sweden was doing too little beyond its own borders against groups associated with the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, which is banned in Turkey and which the EU considers a terrorist organization. My former boss, NATO Secretary General Yen Stenberg, made frequent trips to Anchora with a view to expanding the alliance to include Finland. and Sweden to convince Mr.

Erdogan works based on appeals, persuasion, to some extent also agreements Researcher Yazar Iden says that Erdogan has deliberately used NATO to make profitable deals for years in his role at the German Institute for International and Political Affairs. Security Iden has observed Turkey's foreign policy there is also a tactical reason for the Turkish position, Turkey wants to extort the US for more benefits, if you want to say so, it is about acquiring F-16 fighter jets, For example, Turkey is not going to make it easy for them, the country is negotiating while NATO faces off once again. an old question: how united would the alliance be in the event of an attack?

Polls suggest that almost three-quarters of Turks now see their NATO partner, the United States, as their biggest threat. NATO itself now has only 23% support in Turkey, meanwhile Erdogan has fostered a friendly relationship with Russia for years while the West imposes sanctions. Anara and Moscow have traded extensively in 2023 after the invasion of Ukraine. Erdogan said he considered Russia as trustworthy as the West. The relationship between Türkiye and Russia is characterized by cooperation. on the one hand, and the conflict, on the other, Turkey does not support sanctions on Russia, it holds talks with Russia, which is also very important, on the other hand, Turkey did not recognize the annexation of Crimea, for example, Turkey has supported and continues to support Ukraine.

Years ago, Russia began to intensify its strategic partnership with Türkiye. Countries coordinate on energy policy and economy. They have a close exchange when it comes to military affairs and also intelligence. None of that is good for the alliance. I have not heard of any nation or The government is seriously considering threatening to expel Turkey, in other words, it is trying to find its own leverage and indicates to Anchor that NATO membership is not set in stone. The problem is that NATO needs Turkey more than Turkey needs NATO geographically. It offers the alliance access to the Black Sea. and it is a gateway to the Islamic world, but above all NATO relies on it militarily to commemorate the centenary of the Turkish Republic.

The country has been demonstrating its military strength in terms of troop numbers. The Turkish military is the second strongest in the alliance after the United States by a wide margin, France is in third place with less than half the number that Turkey has, meaning that Turkey is not actually dependent on NATO in military terms and yet there has been no debate in Turkey either then or now about leaving the NATO government. has not engaged in talks like that, my guess is that strategically it is much more advantageous for Turkey to have a foot in the West and at the same time be a regional power that gives them double the security, they project their own power regionally, for example by playing against Ukraine and Russia. against each other they focused on their position Visa the Black Sea and Syria and at the same time have the security of NATO and the West.

It is a strategic advantage for Türkiye to give up that would give them less room to maneuver. The balance is very slick right now, so I don't think it's a realistic option for Turkey right now or at least for Adan, who plays that game very well. Erdogan is a sober and calculating person, as part of NATO, he can give his opinion on global issues. That gives it influence against Russia and also against Europe. He is sitting next to the strongest countries in the world. Why give that up? The most important member of NATO is the United States.

It is key to the strength of the alliance and its future. We meet here today to issue a new decree. heard in every city in every foreign capital and in every hall of power from this day forward a new vision will govern our land from this day forward it will be only America first, first America first, America plays an extremely important coordinating role in NATO. the president is the most important person in the alliance and without an American president and all that means in terms of American military and nuclear power, the alliance itself would be just a shadow of itself, it would be very different if, for example, Italy decided not get involved.

It really is a dramatic turn of events that the biggest fear of a NATO member leaving in recent years has been that the United States in July 2018 poached NATO Secretary General Yen and that the president of the The United States, Donald Trump, will face on camera at a NATO Summit in Brussels differences over different opinions Germany is paying only a little more than 1% while the United States in real figures is paying 4.2% of a GDP much higher, so I think that's inappropriate and you also know that we are protecting Germany. By protecting France, we are protecting everyone, and yet we are paying a lot of money to protect.

This has been going on for decades and then many of the countries go out and make a deal on a pipeline with Russia, where they are paying billions of dollars. in the coffers of Russia and I think that is very inappropriate and the former chancellor of Germany is the head of the pipeline company that supplies the gas in 2014 the NATO member states agreed to spend 2% of GDP on defense but, apart of the United States, almost nothing The country stood its ground John Bolton was US National Security Advisor for about 18 months under Donald Trump until the president forced him to resign when I took the job as National Security Advisor, I believe than the weight of the decisions that the president had to make.

In the field of national security, the gravity of responsibility would weigh on Donald Trump and discipline him in the same way it did with 44 American presidents before him. Bolton was there on the second day of the NATO Summit when Trump almost caused a major incident. I was in a car to our embassy, ​​residents in Brussels, where the president was staying, and he called me in the car and said, I think we should do something historic today, I think we should withdraw from NATO, and I said, somewhat surprised. With that I said, well, let's talk about it.

I'm almost there. As soon as I got off the phone with the president, I called Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State. I called John Kelly, the White House chief of staff. I tried to contact Jim Mattis, the Secretary of State. Defense, basically saying all hands on deck. I think this is very serious, for the first time in NATO history, a US withdrawal seemed a real possibility. Well, I was very worried that Trump would announce the withdrawal right then and there, even though we hadn't considered it. Not that we discussed it at the NSC, but because Trump, once he started talking about something, often just went ahead and did it, and at one point Trump told me that he was basically going to replace me with someone who didn't. did.

I don't argue with him, but whoever just said yes when he said things like I want to get out of NATO, the last conversation I had with him, he was literally sitting at the big table in the NATO meeting room, he called me and said , Ok let's go? do it and I said, uh, go straight to the line but don't step over the line and then I went and sat down again and when I sat down I didn't have any predictions of what I would do, I think with a normal president they would have been seen as a bluff because people know that the United States needs NATO as much as NATO needs the United States, so no one would have taken it seriously.

You get the impression that you don't really appreciate the importance of the alliance or what it means. or understand history or why we do what we do because he understands the world in a transactional sense quid proquo if I give you security what do I get in return why do I get worse treatment when it comes to NATO he didn't I appreciate that NATO was important for the US to create global stability and security for it. It's just a deal. Give me this and I'll tell you that's not what NATO is about. Nothing came from Trump's threats, but from NATO allies, especially those in Europe are worried Berlin July 2019 Simulation carried out by the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London and the KBA Foundation Security experts from Germany, France, United Kingdom, Poland and the United States.

Everything happened in secret, neither the place nor the participants were revealed. Mula, executive director of International Affairs of the kba foundation, is not known. For these scenario exercises we invited government officials but also people from the academic world and think tanks that come from various countries that are relevant to the scenario we are developing and a very important requirement. in the simulation game is that the list of participants remains absolutely confidential the fictitious scenario was this during a second Trump presidency the US announces its withdrawal from NATO it was not a military scenario but a political one what concessions would the remaining member states make prepared to make NATO even collapse under the pressure of an American threat the German team was quite preparedTo bring the issue of trade policy into the equation the Polish team was relatively quick to engage in "hey, what can happen?" conversations with the Americans.

What we do beyond NATO in terms of a bilateral security policy agreement and that, of course, was a big concern for the other actors because if we start making bilateral security agreements with the US, the structure of NATO will be undermined. The simulation ruthlessly exposed the alliance's weaknesses. A US withdrawal would greatly weaken NATO and trigger a race for bilateral treaties. Considerations about the consequences of a US withdrawal can also be found in the history of NATO and what they expected to happen was a return to a series of bilateral alliances, alliances between two states perhaps. three states in Europe and what they saw was a return to a shaky system of alliances like those that had existed in Europe before the Second World War and in some cases also before the First World War and they were concerned that this was a very unstable. and dangerous situation in which States would have a number of different security obligations that could trigger a whole series of dominoes, so to speak, if a conflict began.

The scenario secretly played out in Berlin in 2019 became relevant again in 20124. Trump has repeatedly made NATO an election issue in his campaign appearances and we don't get much out of it and you know I hate to tell you this about NATO. If we ever needed their help, let's say they attacked us, I don't think they would. There I am very afraid that if he becomes president again he will withdraw from NATO. He will probably also leave Ukraine and who knows what else he will do. I think he will be very destructive, very counterproductive. I think Trump will withdraw from NATO because he has felt for so long that it was something he wanted to do.

I think he feels frustrated at not having been able to do it in his first term. He probably blames people like me and several others. And in a second Trump term. he will not be burdened by people like me, I can tell you that I was asked that question, one of the presidents of a big country stood up and said well sir, uh, if we don't pay and we are attacked by Russia, will you protect us? He said you didn't pay you're a criminal he said yes let's say that happened no I wouldn't protect you in fact I would encourage them to do whatever they want you have to pay you have to pay your bills and the money came flowing we were like the stupid country in the world and We are no longer going to be the stupid country in the world, we are not going to be the real danger is not an official withdrawal of the United States from NATO, that is something that Congress made clear again in 2019 with legislation that the president does not have the power to tear up the North Atlantic Treaty treaties that must pass through Congress.

The real danger is the lack of political will to do anything if an ally is attacked, whether the president in the White House is Trump or someone else, even if Trump is re-elected and does not officially withdraw from NATO because the US Congress does not allow it, it can still decide to do nothing if an attack occurs, the US Congress would still have to do it. the power to declare war, but the US president, as a military commander, simply couldn't send troops, could a single person undermine the world's largest military alliance and his famous Article 5? And that is not the only threat to NATO.

Global power dynamics have been changing for years. On the one hand, American society is changing, but also in recent years there has been a dramatic increase in the perception that China is a threat, the only global player that could take on the United States and Russia in a completely different category when is about that, according to Global. Firepower Index China is ranked just after the United States and Russia when it comes to military strength. Beijing's global military modernization will be completed in 2035. In addition, China already has the largest Navy in the world. Satellite images from recent years show how China has built. is building huge military bases on small, underdeveloped atols in the South China Sea.

China is taking an increasingly aggressive stance toward Taiwan and other Asian states. These states, in turn, also expect help from the US and NATO. We are also seeing this with Ukraine, increasingly. The question is: can we be equally active in both theaters in both regions? What we now spend in Ukraine in terms of weapons and support, shouldn't we also be supplying that to Taiwan in the event of a conflict? That debate is taking place in the US. I was part of a delegation to the US in 2019 during our discussions, the Americans told us that Russia is their problem, it is a European problem, now it is no longer ours. , they have to deal with it, that's not going to change, even if in 10 or 20 years we have.

Better relations with Russia Until then Europeans have to accept the idea that the United States may simply not be able to act in a conflict because they may be busy elsewhere The fundamental challenge for Europeans in the future will be to show how they can also be useful and not only a beneficiary of American security or is a plan B necessary as a unified systemAfter all, the European Army, Article 4 two of the Treaty on the European Union contains its own guarantee of mutual assistance similar to Article 5 of NATO . It goes without saying that the United States would not be the military power it is today if it were not centralized and that is exactly why a European army under a unified command structure is very unlikely because we are not a country like the United States, the European Union is made up of 27 countries and they will never allow a Central Command in Brussels, for example, to take military decision-making out of their hands in February. 2024 European Commission President Osa Felion supported a proposal to appoint an EU defense commissioner in the future, but the idea of ​​a European army would have to be addressed in the long term.

That's European. What the Europeans can do is align their militaries so that they are complementary so that they work together, they would still not achieve the necessary level of deterrence against Russia, but they would at least have a base on which they could carry out small and medium-sized missions on their own. . Small and medium-sized missions are unlikely to deter Russia. Longer term, in January 2024, NATO began its largest troop exercise since the end of the Cold War, called Stefast Defender. 990,000 soldiers practiced their reaction to a simulated attack for several months. The hypothetical opponent Russia, the United Kingdom, the diplomat had said essentially every time NATO comes into action. problems, the Russians come and save him.

NATO is now, in fact, returning to the reason the North Atlantic bloc was founded in 1949, keeping Moscow at bay, whether Putin likes it or not. Russia's war in Ukraine has revitalized NATO. Let's think like Europeans and, of course, like Germany. It is the greatest test we have faced since the end of World War II. This is not a minor crisis that we can manage from outside. Regardless of external pressure, the looming rift between Europe and the United States is unmistakable. Europeans are facing completely new situations. challenges because the military power of all European states together is simply too small compared to that of the United States.

Creating a European defense policy that could work without NATO would take decades, not to mention requiring much more than the 2% of GDP required today. Providing money is not enough. You have to produce things. Weapon systems of the type that Europe can only dream of today would have to be manufactured. The post-Cold War peace dividend appears to have run out. Defense is once again part of everyday political discourse. We have a family, many of us here are fathers and mothers, we do not want war, it is precisely what we want to prevent, so how can we prevent it by preparing for something like this and sending a message to someone who has been there for just over a year?

A while ago he attacked a neighbor saying he won't work here after 75 years. NATO is once again faced with the task it faced when it was founded: preventing war.