Eurasia Press & News
What the War in Ukraine Has Revealed About Alliances
NATO was created to prevent a major war in Europe, a task it accomplished well for many decades. Apart from the brief Kosovo war in 1999, its members never had to fight together or coordinate a joint response to aggression—until a year ago, when Russia invaded Ukraine. NATO’s response thus offers fresh, real-world evidence about how contemporary alliances work in practice.
The recent behavior of Russia and the West confirms that states form alliances not to balance against power but to balance against threats. The way NATO has done so has also revealed much about both the alliance’s virtues and its enduring pathologies. The war may have given NATO a new lease on life and shown the value of its well-established procedures, but it also underscores the degree to which its European members remain dangerously dependent on the United States.
As the world moves toward multipolarity, alliances will only matter more. In an age when no single country stands unchallenged atop the international system, success will depend on rival powers’ ability to form a coherent and capable grouping and exercise power collectively. Above all, the invasion of Ukraine and its aftermath show that leaders court disaster if they fail to understand why alliances form and how they work.
STRIKE A BALANCE
The concept of a balance of power—the idea that countries typically join forces to check powerful rivals—has been around for centuries, but in reality, countries more commonly seek allies in response to threats. Powerful states can be more threatening than weaker ones, of course, but where they are located and how their intentions are perceived can be equally important. Strong states are usually more worrisome to their immediate neighbors, especially when they appear willing to use force to change the status quo.
This tendency explains why Moscow saw NATO enlargement as a threat: a powerful alliance of wealthy democracies was inching toward Russian borders. Moreover, the strongest member of that alliance, the United States, was openly committed to spreading liberal institutions and had used force to do so on several recent occasions. Feeling threatened, Moscow responded by drawing closer to China and by trying to stop NATO from moving farther east, but it could not convince Ukraine to abandon the goal of joining the West or persuade NATO to suspend its “open door” policy, whereby any European country meeting its requirements can apply to join.
Unfortunately for Russia, its reaction to NATO enlargement merely reinforced the sense of threat felt by the United States and Europe, leading the West to draw even closer to Ukraine. When Russia seized Crimea after the 2014 Maidan revolution, which ousted Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, the United States and its allies imposed new sanctions and began to arm and train Ukraine’s military. Russian efforts to interfere in U.S. and European elections and its attempts to poison Russian exiles and other political opponents exacerbated Western concerns. U.S. President Donald Trump’s reservations about NATO did not stop the United States from deploying additional troops in Europe, and support for Ukraine increased further under U.S. President Joe Biden.
A powerful alliance of wealthy democracies was inching toward Russia.
The invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 removed any lingering doubts about Moscow’s revisionist aims and prompted a swift and far-reaching reaction. NATO and EU members imposed unprecedented economic sanctions on Russia, and the United Kingdom, the United States, and other countries began sending Kyiv sophisticated weapons, military training, financial support, and intelligence. Germany reversed course completely, backing European efforts to curtail energy imports from Russia and committing itself to a major military buildup. Not to be outdone, Sweden and Finland applied for NATO membership.
These reactions should not surprise anyone. Although its military has performed poorly throughout the war, Russia is still a major industrial power with a sizable stockpile of nuclear weapons, a large army, and considerable military potential. It borders several NATO members, including vulnerable Baltic states. Perhaps most important, the invasion of Ukraine showed that Russian President Vladimir Putin is willing to use armed force to alter the European status quo. Were that effort to succeed, other states in the region would have reason to wonder whether they might be next.
From Moscow’s perspective, of course, it was the United States and its allies that were trying to alter the status quo in Europe, and in ways inimical to its interests. NATO had done so, however, without resorting to military force. Because Ukraine wanted to join NATO and the alliance still supported this goal in principle, Russia could only hope to halt Ukraine’s accession by first threatening to use force and then launching an invasion, which in turn raised Western perceptions of threat to new heights.
PICKING TEAMS
For further evidence that states balance against threats, not power, consider Sweden and Finland’s revealing behavior after the invasion. Not only did each state abandon a policy of neutrality that had worked well for decades, and in Sweden’s case for centuries, they did so after Russia’s invasion had stalled and its military inadequacies had been exposed. Russia in 2022 was significantly weaker than the former Soviet Union, but Putin was more willing to wield military power than Soviet leaders had been, making Russia more threatening to the Swedes and Finns, causing them to seek the additional protection of NATO membership.
The tendency for states to balance against threats also explains why some states have remained on the sidelines. Russia’s assault on Ukraine poses no threat to Israel or some prominent members of the global South, including India and Saudi Arabia, and taking a firmer stance against Russia would jeopardize these states’ interests. U.S. and NATO leaders have been disappointed by such self-interested behavior, but they should not be surprised.
Putin’s failure to recognize that states ally to balance threats—and that violating existing norms against conquest would be particularly alarming to the West—was a major blunder. He appears to have assumed either that Kyiv would fall before NATO could act or that its members would limit their response to verbal protests and sanctions. He was wrong on both counts, and Russia now finds itself fighting an opponent backed by partners with a total GDP of more than $40 trillion (compared with Russia’s $1.8 trillion) and whose defense industries produce the world’s most lethal weapons. This disparity in overall resources does not guarantee a Ukrainian victory, but it has transformed what Putin expected would be a cinch into a costly war of attrition.
Europe can defend itself against Russia on its own.
Russia has acted in other ways that helped unify the opposing coalition. Unlike Otto von Bismarck, the first leader of the German empire, who cleverly manipulated France into attacking Prussia in 1870, Putin placed the onus for aggression firmly on his own shoulders. Russia had legitimate reasons to be concerned about efforts to incorporate Ukraine into Western economic and security institutions. But its prewar demand that NATO permanently guarantee Ukrainian neutrality and remove all military forces from the territory of members admitted after 1997 appeared to be a pretext for invasion rather than a serious negotiating position. To be fair, Western officials had done little to address Russia’s legitimate concerns, but Moscow’s unrealistic demands obscured that failure and made Russia appear uninterested in a political settlement.
Furthermore, although Putin’s speeches and writings (including his July 2021 essay, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”) are not as dismissive of Ukrainian independence as his critics contend, his insistence that Russians and Ukrainians were “one people” and that Ukraine was under the sway of outside forces and “Nazis” reinforced suspicions that his true goal was restoring, and maybe expanding, a revived Russian empire. Instead of going to great lengths to persuade others that his aims were limited and defensive—a posture that might have undermined Western unity to some degree—Putin’s rhetoric and Russia’s defiant diplomatic stance made it much easier to hold the alliance together.
Equally important, the war crimes and atrocities committed by Russian forces during the war itself—including deliberate attacks on civilian targets and infrastructure—have reinforced outside sympathy for Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has also waged a masterful public relations effort to keep Western aid flowing, but Russia’s conduct of the war made his task much easier.
NO “I” IN NATO
The war has also underscored that institutions matter. Shared norms and well-established decision-making procedures help allies reach and implement collective decisions more rapidly and effectively. NATO is the most heavily institutionalized alliance in history, and its members have nearly 75 years of experience coordinating responses despite occasional disagreements. If NATO did not exist and its members had to devise a collective response to the war in Ukraine from scratch, it is hard to imagine them reacting as efficiently as they did.
To be sure, NATO’s consensus-based procedures can also create problems, as Turkey has illustrated by extracting concessions from Sweden through blocking its entry into NATO. On balance, however, NATO’s rapid decision to support Ukraine and its ability to deliver that support confirm that well-institutionalized alliances work better than ad hoc coalitions of the sort that Russia has formed with Iran and North Korea.
Despite NATO’s swift response, the war in Ukraine has demonstrated the need for a new transatlantic division of labor. Alliances provide collective goods; if joining forces helps a group of states deter or win a war, all its members benefit regardless of how much each contributed. As a result, the strongest members of an alliance typically bear a disproportionate share of the burdens and make the key decisions, whereas weaker members are prone to free-ride and (mostly) do as they’re told. The Ukraine war confirms that pattern: the United States has done more for Ukraine than any other NATO member, and Washington has largely defined NATO’s overall strategy toward the conflict.
Aggression rarely works unless a powerful state can fight its victims one-on-one.
Having one country in the driver’s seat made it easier to orchestrate a rapid response, but the United States’ preeminent role has a serious downside. Because Washington has long guaranteed its wealthy allies’ security, the latter let their armed forces erode and become dangerously dependent on U.S. protection. Had the United States not responded to Russia’s invasion—as it might have done under a different president—there is little that NATO’s European members could have done to help Ukraine. Russia’s prospects for victory would have been brighter.
Some see this episode as proof that U.S. leadership is still indispensable, but the real lesson of this war is that a new division of labor between the United States and Europe is both feasible and long overdue. Russia may seem threatening now, but it is not as powerful as many experts believed, and it will be even weaker in the future. NATO’s European members have more than three times as many people as Russia does and more than ten times Russia’s GDP, and they spend three to four times what Russia spends on defense every single year. If properly organized and led, Europe can defend itself against Russia on its own.
It follows that Europe should rebuild its forces and gradually take over primary responsibility for its own defense, while the United States shifts from being Europe’s first responder to being its ally of last resort. Sharing burdens within NATO would allow the United States to focus on balancing China in Asia, a task Europe is neither willing nor able to perform. Gradually reducing the U.S. commitment would also ensure that European states do not abandon their pledges to rearm and pass the buck back to Washington when the war in Ukraine is over.
In an emerging multipolar world, states that can attract and retain allies are more likely to succeed than those whose actions cause others to join forces against them. This is not a new lesson: Napoleonic France, Wilhelmine Germany, Nazi Germany, and imperial Japan all suffered catastrophic defeats at the hands of powerful balancing coalitions. Aggression sometimes pays, but usually only when a powerful state can arrange to fight its victims one-on-one. The Ukraine war shows that favorable circumstances of this kind are hard to arrange, because overt acts of aggression tend to unite other states in opposition. If any heads of state are pondering whether to launch a war to change the status quo, taking this lesson to heart will spare them a great deal of trouble and make for a more peaceful and prosperous world.
