Russia Is Testing NATO’s

Resolve in Eastern Europe


Simon Shuster @shus try

Sept. 6, 2 014
Russian President Vladimir Putin conducts a meeting with Russian ministers, members of
parliament, lawmakers and other public cultural leaders in the Chekhov Museum on August 14,
2014 in Yalta, Crimea.Sasha Mordovets—Getty Images
Russian President Vladimir Putin is feeling around for the gaps that
have emerged in NATO's defenses, and it may take more than military
spending to patch them up

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A few years ago, when NATO strategists would stop to consider a possible threat from
Russia, their chief concern was the possibility, however slight, that the Russian state
would implode, lose control of its nuclear arsenal and allow a few warheads to fall into
the wrong hands. That at least was the worry Ivo Daalder expressed in the fall of 2010,
when he paid a visit to Moscow as the U.S. ambassador to NATO. But on the whole, he
says he just wasn’t very concerned about Russia at the time. The alliance was too busy
with that year’s troop surge in Afghanistan and with newfangled threats like cyber
warfare.

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“As a security concern Russia wasn’t really on the agenda in 2010,” he tells TIME by
phone on Friday from Chicago. “The focus with Russia was really on cooperation.”
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At that year’s NATO summit in Lisbon, Russia seemed eager to play along. The military
doctrine it adopted earlier that year still listed NATO expansion as the primary threat to
Russian security. But Dmitri Medvedev, who was then serving as Russia’s president
while Vladimir Putin took a turn as prime minister, agreed in Lisbon to cooperate with
the alliance on various issues of mutual concern, such as terrorism and drug trafficking.
The brief war that Russia had fought two years earlier in neighboring Georgia, an
aspiring member of NATO, was duly put aside at the Lisbon summit as a bump in the
road toward Russia’s cooperation with the alliance. All the while, the defense
infrastructure that NATO had maintained during the Cold War to prepare for a
confrontation with Russia in Europe was falling deeper into disrepair.

“NATO had for many years failed to really invest in its infrastructure in the east,” recalls
Daalder, whose term as ambassador ended a year ago. “Even the basics were just very
poor to non-existent.” That included things like air bases in Eastern Europe, ports, oil
pipelines and other essential gear that NATO would have needed to “flush forces into
the region,” he says.

Only this spring, after Russia sent troops into another one of its European neighbors –
this time Ukraine – to occupy and annex the region of Crimea, NATO finally began to
consider for the first time in two decades how exposed its eastern flank had become. The
agenda at the NATO summit in Wales this week was shaped by this realization. But
adjusting to it will take much more than the summit’s decision on Friday to station a few
thousand troops in Eastern Europe on a rotating basis. It will need to adapt to a security
paradigm that Russia seems to be inventing on the fly, and wiping the dust off NATO’s
Cold War playbook may not do much to help the alliance find its footing on this
unfamiliar terrain.

“It’s a different ball game,” says Daalder. It still involves a distinctly Soviet bag of tricks
– most importantly Putin’s reminder last month of the strength of his nuclear arsenal –
but Putin’s actions in Ukraine have also displayed a new type of shape-shifting warfare,
one that is far more nimble and unpredictable than anything the stodgy old men of the
Politburo were able to muster.

Take, for instance, the standoff unfolding along the Russian border with Estonia, one of
the NATO allies that is, by virtue of geography and demography, most susceptible to
Russian meddling. Not only does it share a border with Russia that is nearly 200 miles
long, but its population is roughly a quarter Russian, forming an ethnic minority whose
rights Putin has promised to “protect” by any legal means. These vulnerabilities were
among the reasons Barack Obama chose to visit Estonia on Wednesday in a show of
solidarity. During aspeech in the capital, the U.S. President pledged his military would
come to Estonia’s defense if it were ever attacked or invaded. “An attack on one is an
attack on all,” Obama said, echoing Article 5 of NATO’s founding treaty, which obliges
all members to defend any ally that faces a foreign attack.

Two days later, as the summit in Wales was winding down, Estonian President Toomas
Hendrik Ilves sounded the alarm over what he reportedly called an invasion of Estonian
territory. He and other senior officials from his government said that unknown
assailants had come from Russia and abducted an Estonian security service officer at
gunpoint, allegedly using smoke bombs and jamming the radios of Estonian border
guards during the Friday morning raid.

Russia made no secret of its involvement. The security service known as the FSB (the
post-Soviet incarnation of the KGB) told Russian news agencies that it had the officer in
custody on suspicion of spying, but claimed he had been arrested on the Russian side of
the border, not in Estonia. Given the timing, some Estonian officials saw the move as a
blatant Russian provocation, not only against their country but the whole of NATO.

“This is a demonstrative show for the United States and other Western countries that
[Russia] does what it wants in this part of the world,” Urmas Reinsalu, an Estonian
lawmaker and former minister of defense, told the Postimees newspaper. Another
prominent Estonian politician, Eerik-Niiles Kross, who formerly served as the country’s
intelligence chief, told local media that the kidnapping “should be filed under ‘rewriting
the rules.’”

That seems like a fair term for what Russia has been doing in Ukraine all year. With its
annexation of Crimea in March, Russia redrew the borders of Europe and, as Daalder
puts it, “threw out the rulebook of post-Cold War security policy.” The new rules will
depend primarily on the way NATO responds. So far, Obama has made clear that his
“red line” is the border of the NATO alliance, and if Russia violates that border, the U.S.
would respond with force. But what exactly would constitute such a breach? A full-on
tank invasion or something more subtle?

It is through such ambiguities that Russia has been testing NATO’s resolve, prodding
and provoking to feel out the alliance’s weak spots. And it isn’t the first time Russia’s
done this. During Estonia’s noisy 2007 spat with Russia over a Soviet war memorial,
Russian hackers launched a massive cyberattack against Estonia that paralyzed the
websites of its government, parliament, banks and media. Estonian officials blamed the
Kremlin, and questioned whether a cyberattack of this or any other magnitude could
trigger Article 5 of the NATO treaty. At the Wales summit this week the allies
finally affirmed that it could, even suggesting that the NATO could launch a military
response to a cyber threat. This seemed to patch a key hole in the alliance’s remit.

So what about the arrest of the Estonian security official on Friday? Would that qualify
as an invasion if the government proves that Russian agents crossed into Estonia and
kidnapped him at gunpoint? Probably not. Even after the U.S. and NATO claimed last
month that Russia had sent thousands of troops into Ukraine, Obama stopped short of
calling it an invasion.

At some point Russia’s aggression may become blatant and destructive enough to trigger
NATO’s allied response. But the crucial question is where that point would be, and
whether it even exists. Some observers have begun to doubt it. Last month the Russian
political scientist Andrei Pointkovsky proposed a thought experiment on this question
involving the potential flashpoint of Estonia.

The population of the border city of Narva, he pointed out, is predominantly Russian,
and the Kremlin could in theory try to stir an ethnic rebellion in Narva much as it did
among the ethnic Russians in Crimea this spring. NATO would then have to consider
whether such an incursion breaches Obama’s red line, but in the meantime, Putin could
in theory decide to launch a “very limited” nuclear strike against a NATO city,
Pointkovsky wrote. What would the West do then?

“Put yourself in the place of Obama, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate . . . The progressive
and even the reactionary American public would cry out in unison that, ‘We don’t want
to die for f—ing Narva, Mr. President!,” wrote Pointkovsky.

In Pointkovsky’s assessment, it is far from clear how the U.S. would respond to this
doomsday scenario, and Daalder agrees. “Do I know for certain that if the Russians
would use nuclear weapons against Poland that we would retaliate? No,” says the former
ambassador. The Western assumption, he says, is that Putin would not take such a
gargantuan risk, that even the slight possibility of a NATO counter-strike would be
enough to deter him. This logic, known among defense wonks as Mutually Assured
Destruction, is what prevented the U.S. and the Soviet Union from ever starting a
nuclear war.

It has been a generation since the West has really been forced to consider whether such
thinking is sound. But based on the wording of its official military doctrine, which was
adopted in 2010, Russia has been thinking about this all along. A senior Russian general
evensuggested this week that the doctrine should be revised to allow for the possibility
of a “preventative” nuclear attack against the West. This issue did not come up at the
NATO summit in Wales, at least not publicly, but Daalder suggests it may be time to
assess Russia’s reasoning. “We haven’t thought about deterrence in a long time, and we
need to do it again,” he says. The expiration date has clearly past on NATO’s
infrastructure in Eastern Europe, but its mentality in standing up to Russia may also be
due for an update.

Kabul (CNN) -- U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in Austria on Sunday for talks with six
world powers and Iran on Tehran's nuclear program.
The world powers, including the United States, will join a final round of negotiations ahead of a July
20 deadline aimed at reaching a permanent deal on the future of Iran's nuclear program.
"This is a very important subject," Kerry said in the Austrian capital of Vienna. "It is vital to make
certain that Iran is not going to develop a nuclear weapon, that their program is peaceful. That's what
we're here to try to achieve, and I hope we can make some progress."
The nuclear talks will comprise Germany plus the five permanent members of the United Nations
Security Council -- the U.S., UK, France, China and Russia.
 Kerry unveils audit for Afghan election

Abdullah: Half of ballots 'suspicious'

Could Afghanistan be the next Iraq?

Tehran insists its ambitions are peaceful, but the world powers fear it plans to build nuclear
weapons.
Kerry is due to speak in Vienna with his German counterpart, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, senior
administration officials said. The foreign ministers' encounter will come amid a row over fresh spying
allegations against the United States.
On Thursday, Germany's government asked America's top spy chief stationed in the country to
leave.
This followed the revelation that two Germans -- one working at a German intelligence agency, the
other in the Ministry of Defense -- are suspected of spying for the United States.
Kerry's stop in Austria follows an unannounced visit to Afghanistan amid growing division following
the country's contested presidential runoff election.
After his visit, he announced that an audit of the disputed presidential election results will begin
within a day in Kabul, and the two candidates will accept its determination of who won.
The inauguration of the new President, originally scheduled for August, will be postponed while the
audit of votes cast for Abdullah Abdullah and Ashraf Ghani is conducted, Kerry said. Provisional
results showed Ghani ahead with roughly 56% support to 43% for Abdullah.
Both candidates have alleged vote fraud and manipulation during the runoff last month.

JAKARTA. Semalam, bos Federal Reserve (The Fed) Janet Yellen telah menyampaikan
pemaparannya di hadapan anggota Komite Perbankan Senat Amerika Serikat (AS). Seperti
biasa, setelah Yellen mengakiri pidatonya, para pengamat pun sibuk "menerjemahkan" isi
pidatonya. Salah satu topik paling hot adalah soal rencana The Fed untuk mulai menaikkan
bunga. Kapan kebijakan bersejarah ini akan diambil?

Soal arah kebijakan suku bunga tersebut, Yellen menyatakan kalimat sebagai berikut:

"...Jika ekonomi AS terbukti lebih kuat dari yang diantisipasi Federal Open Market Comittee
(FOMC) dan membuat tingkat penciptaan lapangan kerja maupun inflasi mencapai target FOMC
dengan lebih cepat, kenaikan target Fed funds rate (suku bunga acuan AS) mungkin akan terjadi
lebih cepat dari yang dibayangkan saat ini..."

Berdasarkan pernyataan itu, seperti dikutip Marketwatch.com (16/7), Dean Maki, Kepala Ekonomi
Amerika Barlclays menduga, paling cepat, The Fed akan mulai menaikkan fed funds rate atau
acuan bunga AS pada bulan Maret 2015. Namun, tampaknya, ini belum menjadi prediksi resmi
Barclays. Sebab saat ini, Barclays masih memasang prediksi bahwa kenaikan pertama bunga
acuan AS baru akan terjadi Juni tahun depan. Saat itu, Barclyas memperkirakan angka
pengangguran di negeri Uwak Sam akan tinggal 5,6%.

Lantas, mengapa skenario waktu kenaikan bunga AS mungkin maju dari Juni menjadi Maret
2015? Maki mengajak kita mencermati angka pengangguran. Akhir-akhir ini, tingkat
pengangguran di AS turun drastis. Nah, jika tren ini terus berlanjut, Maki menghitung angka
pengangguran di AS akan mencapai 5,7% di bulan Desember 2014.

Asal tahu saja, angka pengangguran 5,7% itu telah mendekati batas atas perkiraan kisaran rata -
rata angka penggagguran AS di akhir kuartal IV 2015 yang pernah dirilis The Fed. Angka yang
sama juga tidak jauh dari definisi "non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployement" versi bank
sentral AS itu. Gampangnya, ini adalah perkiraan seberapa rendah angka pengangguran bisa
turun tanpa memicu inflasi. Nah, The Fed memprediksi, angka penggagguran rendah yang aman
itu adalah sekitar 5,2%-5,6%.

"Jika angka pengangguran bisa mencapai 5,6% pada kuartal I 2015, alih-alih menanti Juni, suku
bunga acuan mungkin akan naik Maret," papar Maki.

Apakah mungkin bunga AS naik lebih cepat dari Maret? Maki meragukannya. Sebab, program
pelonggaran moneter secara terukur atau quantitative easing (QE) lewat pembelian obligasi di
pasar baru akan selesai sekitar Oktober 2014. Terlalu dratis jika The Fed mulai memperketat
kebijakan moneter dengan menaikkan fed funds rate pada pertemuan FOMC bulan Desember
2014. Fed juga senang membuat kebijakan besar dalam pertemuan yang disusul dengan
konferensi pers. Nah, pertemuan FOMC Maret mungkin menjadi moment tersebut.

Alasan lain, sejatinya, Fed juga masih menjadi jurus paling jitu untuk keluar dari rezim kebijakan
moneter longgar saat ini. Yellen sendiri tampaknya percaya bahwa angka pengangguran belum
memberikan gambaran menyeluruh tentang kondisi lapangan pekerjaan di AS.

Itu pendapat Maki, bagaimana pendapata ekonom lain? Michael Hanson, Senior Ekonomi Bank
of Amerika masih ragu. Menurutnya, pemaparan Yellen semalam tidak memberikan sinyal yang
cukup soal percepatan kenaikan bunga AS. Ia juga berpendapat, penurunan angka
pengangguran tidak akan serta-merta membuat The Fed menaikkan bunga lebih cepat. Yellen
dan timmnya pasti akan mencermati indikator-indikator lain secara lebih menyeluruh.

Catatan saja, sejak Desember 2008, The Fed telah menjaga target Fed funds rate di kisaran 0%-
0,25%. Kebijakan bunga terendah sepanjang sejarah ini diterapkan tak lain guna meredam resesi
tahun 2008-2009 dan mendorong laju ekonomi AS. Tak cukup sampai di situ, The Fed juga
menggelontorkan stimulus tak lazim bernama quantitative easing (QE). Lewat program ini, bank
sentral AS itu memborong triliuan dollar obligasi dari pasar.