Why Did Russia Violate NATO Airspace?

Is it reckless or 4D chess on Putin's part?

The column inches Russian president Putin got over the last two weeks would be enough space for a Sukhoi to take off from. All over the West the commentariat is panicking about how Russian drones and jets are in NATO airspace without permission. The calls for a strong response, which I wrote about last week, are universal, as is the speculation about motive. Why would Russia pursue such an aggressive line of action? What do the Russians expect to get from it, aside from possibly a downed MIG?

The answer is obvious if you accept my long-held thesis that NATO is more a façade than a true alliance. I’ve written thousands of words over the past three years making and remaking the point that NATO in its current form makes no sense. It’s a holdover from a different time when international politics worked differently and when the military situations on the ground in Europe was different. It is no longer fit for purpose, and Putin is trying to get the European countries to realise that.

To some, that might seem a strange and reckless tactic. Wouldn’t the natural response to finding out how impotent NATO is for the allies to make an effort to modernise the alliance? Intuitively it makes the most sense to stick with what you know, and to continue a good thing. As far as defensive alliances go, NATO is an almost uniquely good one in the sense that it never really needed to be used. In reality however, it is apparent that the allied states face a new set of choices now than they did when they joined the alliance. If NATO can’t keep Estonia safe it might look to Russia instead.

Back in the cold war switching blocs was not just a strategic choice but a deeply political one. If you defected from NATO to the Warsaw pact you’d be expected to follow the Kremlin’s lead not just on the battlefield but also on the home front. You could not keep being a liberal capitalist society and vice versa, defecting from east to west would necessarily mean drastic political reorganisation. Today, that is not at all the case. Russia is not fighting in Ukraine for ideology but for political control. Ukraine could be a theocracy, or an anarchist commune, or a syndicalist monarchy for all Putin cares. As long as he gets a veto on important foreign policy decisions and as long as he can be sure that you will neither attack Russia nor host forces who might he will not interfere in your domestic politics.

After the cold war when most of eastern Europe joined NATO Russia was weak, it had just gone through a traumatic transition from communism to capitalism and had two civil wars against separatist elements in Chechnya. As a newly free formerly communist country you would never want to throw in with a former master which had been reduced from a preeminent power to having to level Grozny because it could not even project enough power in Chechnya to deter rebels. Today however, Russia is advancing in Ukraine despite a coordinated effort from the west to keep Kyiv above water. It even has enough spare air power to bully eastern European NATO members like Poland and Estonia with drones and jets during intense combat in Ukraine. It is a force to reckon with in a way it just wasn’t 20 years ago.

I don’t think any eastern European NATO members are liable to defect at the moment. NATO is stable in its feeble form as it is not in any one member state’s interest to unilaterally declare themselves no longer part of the alliance. Everyone benefits from the illusion of alliance even if many states know that they would not come to the aid of some of their ostensible allies if the need arose. Of course, the members which feel the most threatened know this, which is what makes the alliance so weak. Making it obvious that the allies are not coming to save Romania or Estonia then, is an investment.

When the alliance officially goes defunct, as it inevitably will, some of the frontier members in eastern Europe will throw in with Moscow rather than trying to build a new alliance, what’s known as ‘band-wagoning’ in realist international relations theory. Russia’s goal with these airspace violations is to tease out which members might bandwagon in the future, and to force the policymakers in the affected countries to start evaluating options. No one will admit this publicly, but the fact that Russian jets landed safely back home rather than in a fireball in an Estonian field lends Russia credibility, credibility proportionally lost by NATO.

If you liked this post you can read a previous post about NATO here or the rest of my writings here. I also have a section for longer reads I call essays here, I particularly recommend my essay on Silicon Valley and AI called 'No Acoustic Guitars in Silicon Valley'. It'd mean a lot to me if you recommended the blog to a friend or coworker. Come back next Monday for a new post!

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I've always been interested in politics, economics, and the interplay between. The blog is a place for me to explore different ideas and concepts relating to economics or politics, be that national or international. The goal for the blog is to make you think; to provide new perspectives.

Written by Karl Johansson

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Cover photo by Shrinidhi Holla from Pexels, edited by Karl Johansson