The NATO – Russia Partnership A Marriage of Convenience Or A Troubled Relationship?

Four years after the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)-Russia Council came into being, it represents a picture in ambivalence and incomplete realization of partnership. This monograph focuses on the Russian side of this growing estrangement. It finds the Russian roots of this ambivalence in the increasingly visible manifestations of an autocratic and neo-imperial Russian state and foreign and defense policy. These strong trends in Russian policy inhibit the formation of a genuine security partnership that can provide for Eurasian security in the face of multiple contemporary threats. It is debatable whether Russia really wants a comprehensive partnership with NATO. Its military-political elite still views NATO and the United States in adversarial terms, even though its leadership speaks positively about the value of this partnership. Recent U.S. military initiatives like missile defense or the wars in Kosovo and Iraq are leading Russia to entertain thoughts of withdrawing from many of the existing European arms control treaties. Another cause of estrangement is to be found in that, as Russia regenerates its autocratic imperial model of state building, it aspires to the goal of a free hand in creating an exclusive Eurasian security bloc from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. This effort is incompatible, not only with the democratic choice of many of those peoples, but also with European security as a whole. We can see this, for example, in Moscow’s refusal to evacuate the Trans-Dniestrian territory it effectively has annexed from Moldova and its demands for a 20-year base there. Another example is Russia’s attempt to block Ukrainian and Georgian efforts to join NATO at some point. Thus the tendency to demand a free hand in creating a kind of exclusive bloc in Eurasia, buttressed by an approach to security which still remains mired in zero-sum categories, precludes Russia’s effective integration with NATO and the maximum benefit that could accrue to it from partnership with NATO. Russia’s ambition to form an exclusive military-economic bloc with its Commonwealth of Independent States neighbors also inhibits it from fully using the possibilities for partnership with NATO in the economic sphere as it relates to defense industrial cooperation. Although NATO is actively pursuing Russian participation in many projects, Russian officials and firms either cannot or will not make the best use of such opportunities. These problems similarly appear in regard to military operations and exercises.