Europe, battlefield in the fight for a new world order

A Russian tank fires during military exercises in the Rostov area, near UkraineAP

Three decades after the end of the Cold War, Europe is once again the preeminent battleground in a great struggle to define the world order.

Both Russia and China are increasingly seeking to assert their interests and reduce Western hegemony.

The continent is fully affected in that struggle.

The Russian challenge is obviously the most immediate and dramatic. The drums of war resound in the East with 100,000 soldiers deployed on the border with Ukraine, the Kremlin declaring itself prepared for “military-technical” actions, large-scale cyberattacks underway against Kiev and agents infiltrated in Ukraine —according to Washington reports— ready to propitiate a

. The specter of a major energy crisis due to a potential abrupt cut in Russian supplies completes the grim picture.

The panorama is, therefore, the most unstable in a long time. It is configured as a true "moment of truth", using the expression used this week by the Russian envoy to the OSCE in one of the many diplomatic meetings held to defuse the crisis. It is so because Moscow, which has been raising its demands for years and acting to strengthen them, has this time taken its challenge to an unusual extreme, both in setting maximalist demands in terms of impassable red lines, and in the unprecedented military deployment comparable in so far this century. And because the West has promised a punitive retaliation unparalleled in recent times.

Meanwhile, in the background, albeit attenuated by distance, the wave of Beijing's iron determination also reaches the European shores, posing transcendental challenges and dilemmas for Europeans, as the crisis with Lithuania over the status of Taiwan and China's retaliatory trade boycott against all products with components from the Baltic country.

The “moment of truth” puts many to the test. Russia, which must decide how far to take its challenge. The West, which must maintain unity in the response, both negotiating and, eventually, sanctioning. The EU, which faces the urgent reconsideration of its place in the world: to what extent, with this perspective, seek strategic autonomy, a voice of its own and even European integration in Defense? Or is it time for an unequivocal closing of ranks with Washington and within NATO? And also the United States, which must measure how far to get involved in Europe against Russia when its absolute priority is China.

The risk of the crisis precipitating is high. The Kremlin makes demands that the West considers unaffordable. Moscow demands that NATO undertake not to expand further to the East, that its main allies do not deploy military resources in the countries that joined the alliance after 1997 and that the US does not cooperate militarily with Ukraine. Substantially, Putin seeks to move the hands of the clock back to the 20th century.

NATO, although it has no real intention of integrating Ukraine as far as the eye can see, considers it unacceptable to assume external vetoes and to prevent independent countries from freely choosing their foreign policy. Instead, the Alliance shows willingness to offer security guarantees by negotiating new arms control treaties, after the collapse of the architecture of agreements that emerged in the final phase of the Cold War.

“If he really cared about security issues, as he claims, Putin would have an interest in negotiating arms control treaties. It would make sense and Russia could obtain better conditions today than in the 1990s, ”says Ivo Daalder, former US ambassador to NATO and now president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, in a telephone conversation. “But the problem is that that is not their objective. What interests him is to control neighboring countries for political reasons. He doesn't want them to be truly independent countries, because this would pose a threat to his power."

Many in the US and the EU share the idea that Putin is not only seeking to prevent a turn to the West by countries of the former USSR, but also the rooting of successful democratic experiences that show the Russian population that paths different from authoritarian regimes such as the that he heads are possible.

Faced with such insurmountable divergences and with thinly veiled threats on the table, everyone scrutinizes the dark horizon trying to see how much it will rain.

The Kremlin recurrently uses the ambiguous concept of a "military-technical" response if its requests are not met.

Maxim Suchkov, director of the Institute of International Studies at Moscow's MGIMO University, believes that the most credible option is an intermediate action between the extremes of an invasion and inaction. “In my opinion, 'technical-military' suggests that it is not an invasion. Probably, the first step would be the deployment of new weapons, in Donbas, who knows if in Kaliningrad”, he points out by telephone.

Kadri Liik, a researcher at the European Council on Foreign Relations who is an expert on the relationship between Russia and the West, also considers an invasion by all means unlikely, an offensive of such magnitude that it would lead to a total rupture of relations with the West, an isolation with harsh sanctions. , the risk of getting bogged down in a guerrilla war, for which Washington is contemplating whether and how to supply weapons. “I don't see the logic of going there. At that point, Russia would become very dependent on China, which is also not an attractive option. It makes more sense for them to keep increasing the pressure without reaching breaking points,” he says.

“It is a language with which they deliberately want to keep all options open.

But clearly we are talking about offensive options,” says Daalder.

"This can be deploying new weapons, increasing support for the insurgency in Donbas, a military action to annex that area, creating a land connection with Crimea, or a cyber offensive," he says.

Even intermediate actions such as those described would precipitate the crisis into a well of unpredictability.

The West would respond, with sanctions, possibly delivering arms to Ukraine and repositioning NATO forces.

A dangerous spiral, which can get out of control, with Europe as the battlefield and with China observing, from afar, how to take advantage of the turbulence that the West may suffer.

Panoramic vision is essential to decipher the situation. In fact, when asked why Putin has decided to escalate Ukraine now, both Suchkov and Liik point to Washington's global strategy. “I think the withdrawal from Afghanistan was a message that Putin interpreted to mean a White House determined to pick its battles, to drop the non-essential ones. In Moscow they have thought that Biden is pragmatic and that he can speak on behalf of the West. Trump would not be the voice of Europe”, comments the analyst. Suchkov notes that the Kremlin probably reckons that Washington "doesn't want any distractions" in its China effort. All this constitutes a favorable scenario to obtain results. A Europe focused on the pandemic challenge can also be an enabling factor.

Russia maintains that its escalation responds to military movements on the Ukrainian side, for example with the delivery of weapons. It is true that Turkey has supplied drones and the US has supplied small anti-tank missiles, but it is not material with an unbalancing capacity.

As for the EU, the panoramic vision, of perspective, indicates that the crisis fully affects its plans in terms of strategic autonomy. This is one of the great lines of work of the Union, and one of the priorities of the semester of the French presidency that began last day 1. However, in its facet of greater integration of Defense - another thing is the non-weapons industrial plane —, the debate is now clearly altered by a crisis that restores NATO to a position of absolute pre-eminence, as the central bulwark of security. Gone are the days when President Emmanuel Macron defined it as an organization in a state of "brain death."

"After the withdrawal from Afghanistan, there was a moment of opportunity to create a sentiment in the EU for strategic autonomy," says Daalder. “But this crisis erodes that foundation. Now there are no doubts, everyone looks at Washington, NATO shows its centrality and a certain emptiness is evident in the approaches that advocate an autonomous, unmarked European position”, he points out.

Faced with the traditional French push for a strong degree of autonomy in Defense, the consensus had already been moving towards taking steps towards European military integration clearly framed within the NATO umbrella.

Now it is likely that the current circumstances revive the suspicions that many EU members, especially in the east, have towards these plans, feeling safer in a framework such as the current one, in which NATO plays an undisputed superior role.

Europe is an important battleground in a world of shifting balances and it urges you to prepare and position yourself.

Time will tell how and with what degree of cohesion.

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