At NATO and the European Union, and at the State Department, the Pentagon and allied ministries, blueprints are being drawn up to enshrine new policies across virtually every aspect of the West’s posture toward Moscow, from defense and finance to trade and international diplomacy.
Outrage is most immediately directed at Putin himself, who President Biden said last month “can’t remain in power.” While “we don’t say regime change,” said a senior E.U. diplomat, “it is difficult to imagine a stable scenario with Putin acting the way he is.”
But the nascent new strategy goes far beyond the Kremlin leader, as planners are continuing to revise seminal documents that are to be presented in the coming months. Biden’s first National Security Strategy, legally required last year but still uncompleted, is likely to be significantly altered from initial expectations it would concentrate almost exclusively on China and domestic renewal. The Pentagon’s new National Defense Strategy, sent last month in classified form to Congress, prioritizes what a brief Pentagon summary called “the Russia challenge in Europe,” as well as the China threat.
NATO’s first Strategic Concept document since 2010, when it sought a “true strategic partnership” with Russia, will be unveiled at the alliance summit in June. “Meaningful dialogue, as we strived for before, is not an option for Russia,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said at a news conference early this month.
The European Union has drawn up plans to cut its heavy dependency on Russian gas by two-thirds by the end of this year, and end all fossil fuel imports from Russia before 2030. “It is not so much about sanctions, but it is about articulating a path to zero, making sure that we become independent of Russian gas and oil,” Dutch Foreign Minister Wopke Hoekstra said in a forum Thursday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
“For some, that will be a trajectory of months. For others, it might be years. But the Netherlands and other countries are dead serious about this,” Hoekstra said. “Never again the same mistake.”
Allies have announced major defense budget increases stretching far into the future. Finland and Sweden are expected to apply for NATO membership ahead of the June summit in Madrid, a significant shift in the balance of European security that would also sharply increase the alliance’s military presence near Russia.
A week ago, Biden signed bills ending normal trade relations with Russia and codifying his U.S. ban on Russian oil imports. Last week, the United Nations General Assembly voted to suspend Russia’s membership from the U.N. Human Rights Council, and a long-simmering movement to revise the membership and powers of the Security Council, where Russia freely uses its veto power, gained new impetus.
Few Western leaders are willing to venture a guess as to when, and how, the Ukraine crisis will play out. Many of the proposed changes “can’t be fully decided until we know how this conflict ends,” said Alexander Vershbow, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia, senior Pentagon official and deputy NATO secretary general. “Does it end?” Or does it drag on with an uneasy cease-fire, with “no war, no peace, for several years?”
But the long-term strategy is being drawn up even as the allies address the immediate crisis with escalating sanctions against Moscow, weapons aid to Ukraine, and the deployment of tens of thousands of their own troops to NATO’s eastern border. Many of those measures and more are now expected to stay permanently in place, according to public leader statements and conversations with eight senior U.S. and foreign officials, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss closed-door planning.
“At the end of the day, what we want to see is a free and independent Ukraine, a weakened and isolated Russia and a stronger, more unified, more determined West,” Biden national security adviser Jake Sullivan said last Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “We believe that all three of those objectives are in sight.”
Some have questioned both the wisdom of the plans and the staying power of the West, advising against a return to the “containment” policy that governed relations with the Soviet Union. Others have said the Ukraine crisis, and its profound effect on Europe, offer an opportunity for the United States to withdraw from at least some of its expensive, self-assumed responsibilities to defend the free world.
“If anything,” historian Stephen Wertheim argued this month in Foreign Affairs magazine, “the war has strengthened the case for strategic discipline, by offering a chance to encourage Europe to balance against Russia while the United States concentrates on security in Asia and renewal at home.”
Not everyone favors the long-term isolation of Moscow. In France, where President Emmanuel Macron is locked in a surprisingly close reelection race with the surging candidacy of Marine Le Pen, she has called for reconciliation between NATO and Russia and has reiterated a pledge to pull France out of the alliance’s integrated command. And there are voices in Germany in favor of keeping the door open to dialogue with the Kremlin to facilitate an eventual rapprochement.
In the United States, the issue is one of the few in which Biden has strong bipartisan support. Backing for a tough line against Russia appears also to have subdued Republican disdain for NATO, a hallmark of the Trump administration, as alliance members from Washington to Russia’s western border insist that the need for, and the reality of, a common stand is higher than ever before.
But if the immediacy of Ukraine dissipates, along with daily images of new horrors there, disagreements inevitably will arise over increased defense spending, the need to engage with Russia on issues such as nonproliferation, charges that attention is being pulled away from China, and disruptions of trade that bring rising prices at home that disrupt the president’s domestic agenda.
“We must commit now to be in this fight for the long haul,” Biden said during a visit to Warsaw last month, outlining the fight as one between democracy and autocracy. “We must remain unified today and tomorrow and the day after and for the years and decades to come. It will not be easy. There will be costs.”
The last major overhaul of relations with Russia, guiding hopes after the collapse of the Soviet Union, came in 1997, when NATO leaders and Moscow approved the “Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Security.” Reflecting “the changing security environment in Europe, … in which the confrontation of the Cold War has been replaced with the promise of closer cooperation among former adversaries,” it said they would act together to build “a lasting and inclusive peace in the Euro-Atlantic Area.”