In today’s Cold War, Europe is mostly a geographic notion

Some 125 years ago, German statesman Otto von Bismarck observed in his memoirs that there was no such thing as Europe, merely a geographical notion. As 31 NATO members convene in Vilnius this week, despite the inevitable self-congratulatory talk about its political, economic and military support, the fact remains that NATO is a house divided. 

Indeed for all the genuine and serious support for Ukraine’s war-fighting efforts proclaimed, the fact remains that the conference communique publicly admitted that members were divided over the question of Ukrainian membership in NATO with Washington and Berlin as the main holdouts. 

Its members could not even agree on appointing a new secretary-general let alone giving truly credible and binding security guarantees to Ukraine. Until Tuesday, Sweden’s membership was blocked by Turkish intransigence and Hungary’s covert support throughout this war for Moscow’s viewpoint and its own manufactured irredentism about sub-Carpathian (i.e. Western) Ukraine, which once was part of the Habsburg and then Austro-Hungarian empire. 

Neither is Washington able or ready to give Ukraine the air defense and long-range artillery systems like the ATACMs that it clearly needs to defeat Russia’s invasion sooner rather than later at an infinitely greater cost. 

Nor are many European states ready, despite 18 months of the Russo-Ukrainian war, to even begin the process of defense reconstruction. Thus, all talk of strategic autonomy or of a truly European defense component remains talk. As a result, the administration will not commit itself either to a timetable for Ukraine’s membership in NATO or even to membership in the future.  

Thus, despite his own major crises, it appears that the only head of state to take home something positive from this meeting will be Russian President Vladimir Putin. This is because NATO’s failure to provide a coherent front on Russia’s aggression in Ukraine will give him an opportunity to find solace in the pastime of validating his conviction of the West’s inner weakness and lack of resolve.

This failure will justify his belief that all he has to do is play for time, count on growing Western dissension, energy shortages, the well-developed Russian apparatus for subverting foreign governments and the hope that Donald Trump or similarly inclined “Putinversteher” (understanders of Putin) come to power in 2024. 

Western European statesmen continue to find it difficult to understand Eastern Europeans’ demand for security against Russia and that credible Western support for those states is necessary for the peace of Europe. We need only remember how well the Anglo-French guarantees of Poland and Czechoslovakia in the 1930s met the test of credibility to recognize the equivocations concerning genuine action rather than the rhetoric of support in regard to Ukraine.   

As the governments come together in Vilnius, it still remains the truth that too often Western states harbor the belief that defending their own interests in Central and Eastern Europe represents a provocation to Russia because of, as Neville Chamberlain famously called, a “quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing.”  

Indeed, the revelation last week of former U.S. officials launching a private diplomatic initiative unsupported by Washington to find a basis for a negotiated settlement in Ukraine is also not surprising. Neither is it surprising that these gambits failed because Russia will not conduct negotiations about Ukraine with Ukraine in the room, not unlike Hitler in 1938. Thus, Moscow’s starting point is that it will only negotiate if the West acknowledges the new realities, i.e. Russian annexations of Ukraine. After all, given the signs of the Western lack of cohesion, why should Putin make any concessions, especially if they put his domestic position at risk? 

In other words, negotiations are not in sight and the only answer is to provide Ukraine with the weapons and credible guarantees it needs. As written in a recent story in the journal 1945, “the arguments to support Ukraine are very strong, whereas the arguments to cut it off are so logically inconsistent and protean that they smack of Russian talking points.” 

Yet, unless Western officials and governments confront the risks they are running by pulling their punches and refusing to face the fact of implacable Russian imperialism and aggression, Europe will revert to being a more or less permanent theater of war. In that case, Bismarck’s observation will be truer than ever, and despite years of loose talk about a new Cold War, that is exactly what we will be facing. 

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the Cold War went with it because that system could only survive in a Cold War environment. Likewise, Putin’s system, if not his survival, depends on making European disunion and the attendant state of a Cold War permanent. The Europe that emerged following the Cold War was as close to a peaceable kingdom as we have ever seen. Thus, it was the basis for healing the rift between East and West through the free choice of the new states to join the European Union and NATO on the basis of the genuine indivisibility of security in Europe. Russia has consistently sought to tear that fabric apart to the point where, as one observer has written, “the issue is not how much support is given but whether the West is determined to do what is necessary to enable Ukraine to prevail.”  

If we are genuinely determined to prevail, we will give Ukraine the weapons and guarantees it needs to prevail. Failure to do so will merely prolong the war, Putin’s ambitions, and the ongoing division of Europe. This can hardly be our bequest to the future.

Stephen Blank, Ph.D., is a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He is a former professor of Russian national security studies and national security affairs at the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College and a former MacArthur fellow at the U.S. Army War College. Blank is an independent consultant focused on the geopolitics and geostrategy of the former Soviet Union, Russia and Eurasia.