Tornado Alley (PROG)

[StephanieVanbryce]

Tanks and troops from the U.S. 3rd Armored Brigade deploy to Poland in January to stand watch against Russia. Timothy Fadek—Redux

As Moscow Advances, U.S. Allies Look Warily to Trump for Clarity

Massimo Calabresi / Washington,Simon
Shuster / Podgorica, Montenegro
Feb 16, 2017

The coup was planned for election day. Wearing fake police uniforms and armed with assault rifles, more than a dozen Kremlin-linked plotters were allegedly preparing to storm the parliament of the tiny Balkan nation of Montenegro and assassinate its Prime Minister. Their goal, according to the government's investigators, was to stop the country of 620,000 from joining NATO, which would give the U.S.-led alliance control of nearly every northern Mediterranean port from Gibraltar to the Bosporus. On a tip from an informant, real Montenegrin police rounded up the plotters as polls opened for the vote in October. Two ringleaders, both suspected agents of the Russian intelligence services, are now back in Russia.

The aborted coup was a reminder that a new battle for Europe has begun. From the Baltics to the Balkans and the Black Sea to Great Britain, Vladimir Putin is seeking to rebuild Russia's empire more than 25 years after the fall of the Soviet Union. From Jan. 29 to Feb. 3, Russian-backed forces launched thousands of strikes in renewed attacks on pro-European government positions deep inside Ukraine. Using propaganda, agents provocateurs and overt military threats in Estonia, Serbia, Moldova and other East European countries, Putin is attempting to undermine the democratic governments of former communist countries, threatening the security of millions of people. Farther west, he is pursuing alliances with nationalist, anti-E.U. forces in France, Germany, Hungary and other major democracies.

Perhaps the most important front in this new conflict has been unfolding in the West Wing. Over the course of the past three months, according to senior Trump Administration officials and others who have participated, quiet but consequential talks have taken place there over whether the U.S. should resist Putin in his new campaign or cede to Russia a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. In return for the latter, the theory goes, Russia would join the U.S. in an alliance against ISIS, work to reduce nuclear-weapon stockpiles and help constrain China.

Donald Trump has publicly annunciated parts of such a grand bargain, as have top advisers Steve Bannon and National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who was forced to resign on Feb. 13 for his back-channel conversations with a Russian diplomat. The White House officials who have advocated such a deal in whole or part see nationalism as the basis for all-important fights against Islamic extremism and China's rise.

Opposing a Russia deal are such Cabinet secretaries as Defense Secretary James Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who, backed by virtually the entire Washington foreign policy establishment, view multilateral alliances as crucial to maintaining hard-won stability in Europe and beyond.

Flynn's ouster makes it politically more difficult for those who would like to advance a pro-Moscow strategy. They were further set back on Feb. 14, when the New York Times reported that Trump's aides had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the U.S. presidential election. As multiple law-enforcement, intelligence and congressional investigations advance, the room for rapprochement with Russia is shrinking, but within the White House, that has not quelled the appetite for a deal.

Those who have spoken with Trump about a grand bargain with Russia say it appeals to the businessman in him. "The President really desires to do deals, and he wants to be seen as someone who's able to change the way the U.S. approaches the world," says Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, the Republican head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who argued against big deals with Russia in detailed conversations with Trump on Nov. 29 in New York City, when he was being interviewed for Secretary of State. "But doing deals for deals' sake without knowing what direction [they take us], that could be hugely harmful to our nation and to the rest of the Western world," Corker says.

It is unclear if the grand bargain was originally an American notion or one floated by Moscow. Critics wonder what benefit such a trade could have for Washington. Russia, they argue, is weak. Its economy has been in recession for two years and is smaller than that of Italy. Moscow's only aircraft carrier, a Soviet-era diesel clunker, barely coughed its way back and forth to Syria over the past six months, losing two planes to accidents along the way. Russia has been begging the U.S. to form an anti-ISIS alliance, no strings attached, and Putin has already expressed a desire, in his first post-Inauguration phone call with Trump, to pursue renewed arms-control measures. Ceding Eastern Europe to Moscow--something that has been close to heretical in Western diplomacy since Yalta--in exchange for freebies "would be both stupid and immoral and would reverse every fundamental tenet of American foreign policy since World War II," says Eliot Cohen of Johns Hopkins University, one of America's foremost conservative foreign policy experts.

No decisions on a deal with Russia are imminent, but lingering uncertainty over U.S. commitment to East European democracies is helping to redraw the lines in the meantime. Leaders in Bulgaria and Moldova are listing back toward Moscow. And anti-E.U. candidates in France and Germany are finding common cause with Moscow ahead of elections later this year, sowing concern among traditional U.S. allies. "The liberal international order that the United States and its European allies have upheld since the end of World War II is in danger of unraveling," a recent Carnegie Endowment report on the breakdown in U.S.-Russia relations warns, "and there is mounting concern that the United States may abandon its commitment to preserving this order."

Montenegro, a nation with fewer inhabitants than San Francisco and a military of only about 2,000 members, has been conquered by one great power after another for most of its history, from ancient Rome to the Third Reich. After 10 years of talks and trial runs, the country is now on the cusp of joining the world's most powerful military alliance‚ this time voluntarily. Its leaders signed accession documents with NATO in May, and 24 of the alliance's 28 members have already ratified its membership. Only Spain, Canada, the Netherlands and the U.S. are left. Trump has Montenegrins worrying whether they'll make it. "If Putin asks Trump not to admit Montenegro and really gives him something in return, we don't know what will happen," says Nebojsa Medojevic, a Montenegrin lawmaker who backs NATO membership. Trump has yet to say whether he supports the country's accession to the alliance.

It is Montenegro's warm, deep-water port in the Mediterranean that makes it especially valuable to Putin, and he is known to push hard when he thinks his strategic interests are at stake. With its assault against Crimea in 2014, the Kremlin undertook the first territorial land grab by a major power in Europe since World War II. Russian special forces disguised as local self-defense units took control of the Crimean parliament in the course of one day that year. They installed a loyal Prime Minister, Sergei Aksyonov, who set the stage for Russia to annex the peninsula outright.

Some of those same commandos, who became known as the "little green men," then appeared in Ukraine's eastern regions. As the West moved to isolate Russia with sanctions harsher than those imposed against the Soviets during the Cold War, the Russian gunmen continued seizing government buildings around the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk and installing warlords to rule them. The result has been a separatist conflict that has so far killed more than 10,000 people and displaced more than 2 million.Dozens died during the latest flare-up in fighting, which began after Putin and Trump had their first post-Inauguration phone call on Jan. 28.

Putin has tested the West before, in Estonia, one of the five NATO members that directly border Russia. In September 2014, a group of Russian troops allegedly stormed across that border with the help of smoke grenades and radio jammers, kidnapped an Estonian security officer and took him back to Moscow to stand trial for espionage. The raid, which came two days after President Obama visited the country, was intended to show that "Russia does what it wants in this part of the world," Urmas Reinsalu, an Estonian lawmaker and former Minister of Defense, told the newspaper Postimees at the time.

Such provocations, along with persistent Russian cyberattacks and violations of NATO airspace, have forced the alliance to confront its own weakness in dealing with Moscow's new approach to warfare. Under Article 5 of NATO's founding treaty, all of its members are obliged to defend one another in case of an attack. But what constitutes an attack is not so clearly defined. Could a cyberattack require a NATO response? And what if the attackers were disguised to look like local paramilitaries?

The U.S. has been pushing back with more traditional measures. A week before Trump's Inauguration, a rotation of some 4,000 U.S. troops arrived in Poland. But Putin hasn't limited his efforts to Central and Eastern Europe. The project of European integration is fraying, with Britain's vote to leave the E.U. and the rise of anti-E.U. parties. Right on cue, Putin has stepped up to offer an alternative: a muscular brand of nationalism that defines itself in opposition to the liberal values of the West. He's found plenty of admirers. During his first official trip to Europe since Trump took office, Putin chose to visit his friend Viktor Orban, the Prime Minister of Hungary, who has pledged to turn his country into an "illiberal democracy" modeled largely on Putin's Russia. "It's in the air," Orban said after a meeting with Putin in Budapest on Feb. 2. "The world is in the process of a substantial realignment."

Within a week of Trump's victory, elections in two of Moscow's former satellite states brought pro-Russian leaders to power. In Bulgaria, a member of NATO and the E.U., a retired air force commander and political novice named Rumen Radev was elected President on a promise to balance out his country's alliances with the West. Speaking to reporters on election day, Nov. 13, he said he took comfort in Trump's pledge to "work for a better dialogue" with Russia. "That gives us hope, a big hope," Radev said. Much the same message came that day from the newly elected President of Moldova, Igor Dodon, whose campaign urged the country to tear up its integration deal with the E.U. "We gained nothing from this agreement," Dodon told a smiling Putin when they appeared in the Kremlin on Jan. 17.


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