NATO's Futures Through Russian and Chinese Beholders' Eyes
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HCSS SECURITY NATO’s Futures through Russian and Chinese Beholders’ Eyes HCSS helps governments, non-governmental organizations and the private sector to understand the fast-changing environment and seeks to anticipate the challenges of the future with practical policy solutions and advice. NATO’s Futures through Russian and Chinese Beholders’ Eyes HCSS Security The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies ISBN/EAN: 9789492102720 Authors: Yar Batoh, Stephan De Spiegeleire, Daria Goriacheva, Yevhen Sapolovych, Marijn de Wolff and Frank Bekkers. Project Team: Yar Batoh, Stephan De Spiegeleire, Daria Goriacheva, Yevhen Sapolovych, Marijn de Wolff, Patrick Bolder, Frank Bekkers. 2019 © The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies. All rights reserved. No part of this report may be reproduced and/or published in any form by print, photo print, microfilm or any other means without prior written permission from HCSS. All images are subject to the licenses of their respective owners. DISCLAIMER: The research for and production of this report has been conducted within the PROGRESS research framework agreement. Responsibility for the contents and for the opinions expressed, rests solely with the authors and does not constitute, nor should it be construed as, an endorsement by the Netherlands Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Defense. Design: Mihai Eduard Coliban (layout) and Constantin Nimigean (typesetting). The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies [email protected] hcss.nl Lange Voorhout 1 2514EA The Hague The Netherlands HCSS SECUrity NATO’s Futures through Russian and Chinese Beholders’ Eyes* * The title was ‘borrowed’ from Vojtech Mastny, Nato in the Beholder’s Eye: Soviet Perceptions and Policies, 1949-56, Working Paper ;No. 35, iii, 94 p. (Washington, D.C.: Cold War International History Project, Woodrow Wilson International Center of Scholars, 2002), catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006033617. Table of contents 1. Introduction 5 2. Method 7 3. Findings from the Chinese language domain 10 3.1 NATO’s future is not on China’s (public) radar screen 10 3.2 Does NATO have a future? 10 3.3 US attitude towards NATO 12 3.4 Internal disagreements 13 3.5 European independent defense capabilities 14 3.6 Rising external challenges 15 3.7 A role for China? 16 3.8 Main Chinese takeaways 17 4. Findings from the Russian language domain 18 4.1 What are authors most interested in? 18 4.2 NATO’s future position towards other actors 19 4.3 The transatlantic link and US leadership 21 4.4 Further NATO expansions 23 4.5 Will NATO survive? 24 4.6 The Alliance’s future capabilities 25 4.7 NATO’s effectiveness 26 4.8 Role of NATO 27 4.9 NATO’s influence 28 4.10 Intra-NATO cohesion 30 4.11 Political-military balance 31 4.12 Aspects we didn’t find 32 4.13 Main Russian takeaways 33 5. Conclusion 35 5.1 Comparison 35 5.2 Why so few sources? 36 5.3 Getting serious about the future – towards a FutureBase 38 6. Bibliography 41 7. Annexes 46 Annex 1: Method 46 Annex 2: Language-domain sources used for the analysis 55 Annex 3: Coding scheme applied to the Russian corpus 61 Annex 4: All results 65 4 HCSS Report 1. Introduction As NATO celebrates the 70th anniversary of its Founding Treaty this year, many fundamental aspects of its future are widely debated within the Alliance itself.1 Western views on NATO’s future have, throughout the seven decades of its existence, ranged from those who predicted NATO’s imminent demise to those who claimed that the many ties that bind the two sides of the Northern Atlantic are so deep and enduring that they are bound to last for decades to come. Throughout this period, the center of gravity in this debate has always tended to lean towards the latter view. More recently, however, the Western outlook on NATO’s future is increasingly being painted in decidedly more somber hues. But what do other key players in the international system think about NATO’s future(s)? To answer this question, the Dutch ministries of Defense and of Foreign Affairs asked HCSS to take a closer and more systematic look at how Chinese and Russian experts have been analyzing NATO’s future in their languages over the past three years – basically since the beginning of the Trump presidency. Many of the key Chinese and Russian scholars working on these issues also publish in English. Given the nature of these countries’ regimes, however, it is often unclear to what extent they are signaling to the broader Western or international community as opposed to reflecting their own opinions or views. This may differ from publications in their own 1 Andrea Chiampan, “Trump and the Future of NATO,” Papiers d’actualité / Current Affairs in Perspective, no. 1 (February 2019); Lyubomir Monov, “NATO Under Pressure,” Journal of Strategic Security 12, no. 1 (2019): 1, https://doi.org/10.5038/1944 0472.12.1.1702; Karsten Friis, “Look in the Glass Ball: Nato Over the Next 70 Years,” INTERNASJONAL POLITIKK 77, no. 1 (2019): 117–125, https://doi.org/10.23865/intpol.v77.1624 ; Stephan Fruhling, “‘Key to the Defense of the Free World’: The Past, Present and Future Relevance of NATO for US Allies in the Asia–Pacific,” Journal of Transatlantic Studies 17, no. 2 (March 14, 2019): 238–54, https://doi.org/10.1057/ s42738-019-00014-0 ; Sanford Lakoff, “Strategic Defense and the Future of NATO,” in Arms Control, the FRG, and the Future of East-West Relations, ed. Wolfram F. Hanrieder, 1st ed. (Routledge, 2019), 103–17, https://doi. org/10.4324/9780429043635-8 ; Sten Rynning, “Sustaining NATO by Consultation: Hard Choices for Europe,” Journal of Transatlantic Studies 17, no. 2 (March 14, 2019): 139–56, https://doi.org/10.1057/s42738-019-00018-w ; Stuart Croft, “Emerging Dimensions of European Security Policy,” in Emerging Dimensions of European Security Policy (Routledge, 2019), 63–75, https://lens.org/098-497-691-315-206 ; Julian Lindley-French et al., “Future War NATO. From Hybrid War to Hyper War via Cyber War,” Supporting Paper of the GLOBSEC NATO Adaptation Initiative (Bratislava: GLOBSEC, 2018), https://www.globsec.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/GNAI-Future- War-NATO-JLF-et-al.pdf ; Patrick Breslin, NATO–the Next Generation (Routledge, 2019); Nebojša Vuković and Richard Sakwa, eds., “NATO: Essential or Obsolete?,” in David vs. Goliath: NATO War against Yugoslavia and Its Implications (Belgrade: Institute of International Politics and Economics, Belgrade Faculty of Security Studies at the University of Belgrade, 2019); Kenneth Myers, NATO–the Next Thirty Years: The Changing Political, Economic, And Military Setting (Routledge, 2019); James Sperling and Mark Webber, “Trump’s Foreign Policy and NATO: Exit and Voice,” Review of International Studies 45, no. 3 (July 2019): 511–26, https://doi.org/10.1017/ S0260210519000123 ; Wukki Kim and Todd Sandler, “NATO at 70: Pledges, Free Riding, and Benefit-Burden Concordance,” Defence and Peace Economics, 2019, 1–14, https://doi.org/10.1080/10242694.2019.1640937 ; Charles Kupchan, “NATO Is Thriving in Spite of Trump,” Foreign Affairs, 2019. NATO’s Futures through Russian and Chinese Beholders’ Eyes 5 language primarily targeted at domestic audiences, which also clearly include part of their countries’ elites whose knowledge of the English language might preclude them from being exposed to their projections and ideas. This document is structured in four sections. After a succinct overview of the method used in Chapter 2, the Chapters 3 and 4 analyze the main findings for the Chinese and the Russian language domains respectively. The final Chapter 5 gives the conclusions as well as some broader reflections on the promise and peril of this type of foresight work for improving the government’s strategic anticipation capacity. 6 HCSS Report 2. Method The method used in this study is based on the HCSS MetaFore approach. This protocol is an attempt to be more exhaustive and systematic in the quest for and analysis of relevant foresight insights on any given topic.2 There is value in both more ‘creative’ (and impressionistic) and in more ‘analytical’ (and systematic) forms of foresight. The HCSS MetaFore approach gravitates towards the latter, as it tries to map the bandwidth of (both creative and analytical) views on different future topics based on a standard protocol. This Chapter will briefly describe the main steps in this protocol. A more detailed description can be found in Annex 1. The first step was to iteratively construct queries in both languages that would be as similar as possible. Experimental queries were applied to several available multilingual search engines as well as bibliometric and full-text databases - Baidu, Dimensions,3 Google Scholar, Google Search,4 Lens5 and Web of Science6 - to discover search query terms that would allow us to identify documents with the highest possible signal-to- noise ratio (SNR) and number of relevant results. Our international team compiled a list of words and phrases relevant to NATO’s future, combined those in actual search queries, ran those on the search engines and databases, documented the signal-to- noise ratio outcomes for those queries, and refined them iteratively until the search results were found to be satisfactory (or any attempts of further improvement failed). In the end, our team converged on two broadly similar queries in both languages, with the resulting query – in the case of Google Search containing terms like “future of NATO” OR “NATO prospects” OR “foresight * NATO” OR “further existence of NATO” OR “NATO in * years” OR “what will happen to NATO” OR “development of NATO” OR “scenarios * NATO” OR “NATO’s fate” OR “Russia’s membership in NATO”.7 2 For details, see Stephan De Spiegeleire, Freija Van Duijne, and Eline Chivot, “Towards Foresight 3.0: The HCSS Metafore Approach - A Multilingual Approach for Exploring Global Foresights” (5th International Conference on Future-Oriented Technology Analysis, Brussels, 2014), 19, https://doi.org/10.13140/2.1.2054.5605.