Putin on the March. Douglas E. Schoen

NATO stands today at its most unstable point since the alliance’s inception. This is not all Putin’s doing; Western democracies have grappled with political upheaval and institutional collapse for years. But a solid portion of it does have to do with Putin: Russian aggression has further divided Europe and undermined the stability of EU and the NATO alliance. The state of the EU today reflects in considerable degree the success that the Russian leader has had in eroding and dividing an alliance that he has always seen as a threat to Russian security and to his own neo-Soviet ambitions of renewed empire.

      “The last thing Russia wants is a strong Europe,” wrote Judy Dempsey for Carnegie Europe. “A strong Europe means having a coherent and united foreign, security and defense policy.”⁸

      Before he left office in January 2017, Bulgarian president Rosen Plevneliev warned about Putin. “The threat,” he said, “is less about Russian tanks invading Europe and more about Russian influence dividing the Continent.”⁹ He said that his country was under attack by Russian hacking and propaganda during a referendum and local elections. He urged Western leaders to recognize that they were in a “dangerous and unpredictable” confrontation that he called “Cold Peacetime.” He warned: “The game of Mr Putin is to make other countries dependent.”¹⁰

      But it was too late. Bulgaria had already elected a pro-Putin regime.

      Donald Trump may prove to be a successful president, but, so far, his impact on the Western Alliance has been a destabilizing one—in no small part because of perceptions that he is sympathetic to, or at least apathetic about, Putin’s designs. Our NATO and EU allies don’t necessarily believe that the United States is on their side. This was made dramatically clear when the EU’s “most senior Brexit negotiator,” a member of the European parliament from Belgium, launched an attack on Trump and Putin, calling them a “ring of autocrats” who want to destroy Europe.¹¹

      “Not only do they like each other, they also have one thing in common,” said Guy Verhofstadt. “Bashing and destroying our way of thinking, our values, our European liberal democracy.”¹²

      Putin has also taken Turkey out of the Western/NATO orbit, even if Ankara technically stays a member of the treaty organization. He turned Turkey away from the United States, all the while “winning” on Syria. Before recent years, this would have been thought of as an unfathomable development, and in fact it was unfathomable even more recently when Russia and Turkey came to loggerheads in Syria. During the Syrian conflict, Turkey, allied with the United States, worked furiously for the overthrow of Assad, Putin’s client and the ally of Shiite Iran, the natural rival of and frequent meddler in Sunni Turkey. And Putin worked just as furiously to save Assad.

      Russia’s success in Syria was bad enough on its own—the entire situation has been a humanitarian and political disaster—but, worse, Russia and Turkey have now found common cause. Again, a Western political-leadership vacuum was crucial in doing so. Now, Putin and Erdogan, along with the mullahs in Iran, are the power brokers in the Syrian future, having taken responsibility for the Syrian ceasefire. Turkey’s Recep Erdogan, whom President Obama called “an outstanding partner and an outstanding friend” of the United States in 2012, is edging closer and closer to an alliance with Putin. Russia and Turkey have even begun joint bombing missions against ISIS.¹³

      Further, Putin and Erdogan are restarting the Turkish Stream natural-gas pipeline, a gas route that would bypass Russia’s existing pipelines through Eastern Europe to bring Russian gas to Western markets. The idea is that Russia, if troubles with Ukraine deepen, will be able to continue its gas transactions with Western countries like Germany and Italy without worrying about supplies being disrupted through the Eastern pipelines. The new pipeline, in other words, will allow Russia to cut off gas supplies to nearby countries like Ukraine while not having to disrupt sales to countries like Italy or Austria.

      Even the assassination in Ankara of Russia’s Turkish ambassador hasn’t stalled the two countries’ rapprochement. “A crime has been committed and it was without doubt a provocation aimed at spoiling the normalisation of Russo-Turkish relations and spoiling the Syrian peace process which is being actively pushed by Russia, Turkey, Iran and others,” said Putin in an address to the nation. “There can only be one response—stepping up the fight against terrorism. The bandits will feel this happening.”¹⁴

      Few Western observers seem to have absorbed the magnitude of the Turkish move toward Russia. Turkey had been long regarded as NATO’s Eastern partner. If its drift toward Moscow proves enduring, it could alter the power dynamic between Western Europe and Russia for years to come—by further weakening NATO, strengthening the hand of autocrats, and lessening the influence of the West in the Muslim world.

      Putin has also built a strong and stable yet misunderstood alliance with China. For years, I have warned about the impending Russia-China axis. If anything, things have only grown worse. The Russia-China reconciliation has expanded and accelerated to degrees even I would not have imagined.

      “Over these last decades,” Putin said in October 2016, “we have developed quite unique relations of trust and mutual support [with China].”¹⁵ That is an understatement.

      The two nations, once sworn enemies, have much in common—the common denominator is the desire to check and contain American power. Their trade interests, especially in energy, have both deepened in recent years, and they have each posed a distinct variation of an anti-Western, antidemocratic alternative model of power—models that, as the West flounders, gain ground internationally and even win hearts in democratic countries. Their militaries, once facing off across heavily fortified borders, have been increasing joint exercises, especially in 2015 when they put together huge naval exercises in the Eastern Mediterranean. And both are neck deep in rogue-state support and patronage, from the Middle East to the Far East to South America.

      In late July 2017, North Korea test fired an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) that experts concluded could have the range to hit Alaska, if not major US cities (yet). The missile test prompted a new round of high-tension rhetoric between Pyongyang and Washington, with President Trump warning Kim Jong-un that the North faced “fire and fury” if it continued to make threats.¹⁶ Even more disturbingly, the tests seemed to represent a quantum leap forward for North Korea’s missile-development efforts; most previous tests, while concerning, were usually marked by failure, sometimes abject failure, suggesting that the North was a long way from missile viability. But with this one, Pyongyang had attained a serious missile capability apparently overnight. How?

      In early August 2017, an answer emerged, in the opening paragraph of a bombshell New York Times report: “North Korea’s success in testing an intercontinental ballistic missile that appears able to reach the United States was made possible by black-market purchases of powerful rocket engines probably from a Ukrainian factory with historical ties to Russia’s missile program, according to an expert analysis being published Monday and classified assessments by American intelligence agencies.” The report went on to detail how US analysts had studied photos of Kim inspecting the new missiles’ rocket motors and concluded that they derived from old Soviet designs. The motors are thought to be powerful enough that “a single missile could hurl 10 thermonuclear warheads between continents.” The focal point of the activity is thought to be a missile factory in Dnipro, Ukraine, which in Cold War days made the deadliest missiles in the Soviet arsenal.¹⁷

      The North Korea/Russia/Ukraine missile story has been the strongest sign yet of a phenomenon that remains largely unknown to the general public: the tightening embrace between Russia and North Korea. Putin first visited North Korea in 2000; his ties with Kim Jong-un’s father, Kim Jong-il, were fairly strong, but most observers continue to associate the Hermit Kingdom with its traditional benefactor, China. Putin’s Russia, however, is moving closer and closer to a newly meaningful alliance with Pyongyang. Multiple reports in April 2017 indicated that Russia was massing its troops along its border with the Hermit Kingdom in the aftermath of a tense stare-down between the United States, Pyongyang, and Beijing over one of North Korea’s recent missile tests. Putin took no action against Kim when North Korea fired a ballistic missile in February 2017. He has even defended the North Korean nuclear program as one