Laird / Delaporte The Return of Direct Defense in Europe

Meeting the 21st Century Authoritarian Challenge
1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-1-0983-3032-3
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet/DL/kein Kopierschutz

E-Book, Englisch, 330 Seiten

'The Return of Direct Defense in Europe' catalogs the rise of the 21st century authoritarian powers. Putin's Russia and Chinese global reach pose new challenges for the direct defense of liberal democracies. The focus is upon Europe and its response to the twin shocks of Crimea and the migration influxes from the war-torn Middle East, a migration dynamic aided and abetted by the Russian intervention in the Syrian Civil War.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Laird, Robbin

Delaporte, Murielle

Leseproben

Introduction The strategic shock of Russian actions in 2014 in Crimea, which logically followed from their actions against Georgia in 2008, sent shock waves throughout Europe. But those shock waves were impacting on an evolving West and the global rise of 21st century authoritarian states. This combination has meant that reshaping, rethinking, and reframing European defense is not a repeat of the period prior to the fall of the Wall, but is something quite different. Crafting a strategic response to the Russian challenges in Europe will itself need to be quite different, even different from what was done before the coming of President Trump and the various European crises of the past few years. Our focus is primarily upon Europe and its response to the twin shocks of Crimea and the migration influxes from the war-torn Middle East, a migration dynamic certainly aided and abetted by the Russian intervention in the Syrian Civil War. We have added comments on the Western response to the COVID-19 crisis throughout where relevant to the basic assessment of shaping a way ahead. We highlight the North–South divide on defense and security, or more accurately, the very different natures of the defense and security challenges as seen and acted upon from the North as compared to the South of Europe. There are very different tiers of defense within Europe today, which shapes how the twin alliances, NATO and the European Union (EU), really work. This is not a book about NATO, or upon the transatlantic relationship, although both are key elements of the response. We are focused on the dynamics of change in Europe triggered by the return of direct defense in Europe, rather than a primary focus upon the role of Washington or the future of the transatlantic relationship. The independence of Europe has progressed to the point where the future of shaping an effective direct defense in Europe is primarily in the hands of Europeans and supported, or not, by their North Atlantic partners as well as other liberal democratic states interested in the region, such as the globally engaged Australians. The return of Russia has occurred in the context of a very different geography than the Soviet Union governed with the Warsaw Pact. In those days, there was a clear Central Front, and the flanks that served the battle anticipated if war came to the Central Front. The Soviet leadership planned an air–ground assault against Germany, combined with an amphibious assault along the lines of what the Germans did against the Northern Flank in the Second World War along with holding actions in the Southern Flank, the weakest part of any anticipated Soviet assault. And large numbers of nuclear weapons with fairly clear distinctions between long- and short-range were woven into the coming battle, with significant uncertainties with regard to nuclear use within the context of any projected European battle. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russians faced a new geography. But even with this change in Euro-geography, the Russians remained an immense geographical landmass from Europe to Asia. Remember the last U.S. Administration’s strategic mistake of referring to them as a regional power? Which region were they referring to? But now Russia had its famous Window to the West, now again St. Petersburg, directly facing newly independent states, and Moscow now facing an independent Poland, with Ukraine and Belarus as buffer states. If you think in classic geopolitical terms, and that is both the strength and weakness of the approach of the current President of Russia, any further movements West by the EU and NATO would put a dagger at the heart of Moscow. From the West’s point of view, the kind of EU and NATO expansion is to be understood in terms of a greater inclusion of states within the two drivers eastward, the German-led EU and the American-led European alliance. Striking into Crimea clearly made sense to Putin in terms of halting any move eastward. But Russian actions came at a time when both the American and German systems of alliances were in the process of fundamental change and significant pressures which were changing both the EU and NATO. The resurgence of Russia comes as well accompanied by the rise of new broader authoritarian challenges. Rather than some inexplicable return to the 19th century suggested by the former Secretary of State, John Kerry, we are seeing the rise of a fundamental set of challenges posed by authoritarian states, which are combining a diverse set of tools to challenge the viability and strategic direction of the liberal democracies. There are viable 21st century authoritarian alternatives, rather than the “end of history.” The Russians are economically weak but are engaged in an ongoing judo match with the West. In this match they are inventing new approaches for the use of military power with leveraging new tools of the digital age. The term “hybrid war” has been coined to highlight the approach, but this really is a statement that the liberal democracies are facing a new strategic calculus, and new strategic contest.1 The Russians are allied with the Chinese who have a growing global presence and are buying their way into liberal democratic societies, finding new ways to use military power in what analysts call the “gray zone” and are clearly reshaping the nature of Western infrastructure necessary for the security and defense of the liberal democracies. But the gray zone is an ambiguous term itself. The goal is to reshape the external environment in ways that are favorable without the need to engage in kinetic military combat operations. In the hybrid war concept, lethal operations are the supporting and not the tip-of-the-spear element to achieve what the state actor is hoping to achieve tactically or strategically. Both gray zone ops and hybrid war ops are part of a broader strategic reality, namely, the challenge of mastering crisis management, where the liberal democracies need to deal with the authoritarian states in an ongoing peer-to-peer competition. And then we have the Turkey of President Erdogan. Here we have a formerly secular state now becoming aggressively Islamic and directly intervening in the internal politics of Europe and importing Russian equipment in a defiant gesture to all of NATO. This is the context within which the West or the liberal democracies must reshape their capabilities to provide for their direct defense; to do so will not look like a legacy NATO approach, but will require significant innovation. How can we recast the direct defense of Europe in ways that would not simply be a badly resourced replay of the Cold War? How will the United States and the very different sets of allies within Europe address the strategic challenges? And how will the inevitable inability to have a coherent consensus on what to do be managed? What tools are available now and how can they be worked in an interactive interoperable way credibly to deter Russia? And how do we handle the inevitable clash of approaches and differences within Europe in which neither the German nor American approach will determine what states do in a crisis? What might a more realistic approach to the direct defense look like and one which allows the United States and its allies to deal with the global challenge of a China which is clearly seeking to reshape the global order in ways which are not in any way liberal democratic? We finished our book as the coronavirus crisis washes over the world. As the liberal democracies and the authoritarian states shape their ways ahead through their management of the crisis, the importance of the security aspect of direct defense clearly is going up. The over-dependence of the West on the Chinese supply chains has been made very clear to the West, and most pointedly so with regard to medical manufacturing and supplies. How will a focus on supply chain security fold into a broader response to the challenges of direct defense? In short, the subtitle to a book on the return of direct defense in Europe is a challenge. For as we have argued, the shift from the 1980s to now clearly shows the return of Russia, but not of the Soviet Union. But it is a Russia operating in a very different strategic environment than did the Soviet leaders of the last decade of the life of the Soviet Union. Notably, there is a core continuity—the Putin thread. The title of our book is the easy part: The Return of Direct Defense in Europe. The subtitle: Meeting the Challenge of the 21st Century Authoritarians is more difficult, for the challenge is occurring in a very different strategic context than when Western Europe was dealing with the Soviet Union. It is clear that the challenges posed by the Russians share both commonalities but significant differences to those posed by the Soviet Union. This is one theme of the book. But the scope of our book is designed to deal with the question of the direct defense in Europe today, which is broader than that of the Russian challenge alone. The Russians are clearly playing off of the dynamics of change within Europe and the transatlantic relationships, and those dynamics are not generated by the Russians themselves but provide a rich environment in which to shape enhanced influence and capabilities to provide both direct and indirect threats to individual states as well as to deepen fissures within NATO and the EU, the two collaborative organizations most central to direct defense. These alliances provide broader ways for the nations to work together, and that achievement is a key one; because...