After decades of defense downgrades, alliance members are individually and collectively investing in their security.
“We are not at war,” NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte explains. “But we are certainly not at peace, either.”
Put another way: After facing down the Red Army and containing the Soviet Empire for 40 years – followed by a couple of decades when most members of the alliance took a vacation from the hard work of international security – NATO is back to its core mission of deterrence.
Threatening Before getting into how NATO’s 32 members are retooling for Cold War II, it’s important to emphasize why they’re doing so: NATO is returning to its core mission not because the alliance wants or needs an enemy, but because Putin’s Russia acts like an enemy.
The growing list of Russian aggression and provocation during Putin’s reign includes aiding and funding Taliban attacks against the United States and other NATO forces in Afghanistan, invading and dismembering NATO aspirants Ukraine and Georgia, violating the Budapest Memorandum, CFE Treaty and INF Treaty, and attempting a violent coup in Montenegro on the eve of its NATO accession. Russia has also launched paralyzing cyberattacks against NATO member Estonia, countenanced and/or conducted cyberattacks against U.S. energy infrastructure and food supply, and interfered in elections in the United States, Netherlands, Estonia, Germany, France and Britain (NATO members all). It has used banned chemical nerve agents against targets in Britain, carried out sabotage and terror operations across NATO’s footprint (including U.S. targets), repeatedly threatened use of nuclear weapons, provided targeting data to aid Houthi attacks against U.S. and allied ships in the Red Sea, and shared advanced weapons with Iran and North Korea.
That’s Putin’s past record.
Looking at his future plans, NATO knows that Putin has stood up military bases in the Arctic, threatened preemptive use of nuclear weapons to somehow deescalate a conflict, issued military threats against Poland and Baltic territories, and diverted 35% of government spending to his military.
Incredibly, even after losing hundreds of thousands of troops in Ukraine, Putin’s army is larger today than when he launched his 2022 invasion.
Where might he use his bigger, battle-tested army? Putin claims that NATO members Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are “throwing (ethnic) Russian people” out and warns that Russia will “actively defend the rights of Russians, our compatriots abroad, using the entire range of available means.” Given that there are millions of ethnic Russians outside Russian territory – and that Putin has reserved for himself the right to determine whether they have been mistreated and whether they need to be defended – this is a recipe for more Russian aggression.
Retooling Importantly, while Putin was threatening war and waging war, NATO was downgrading defense and shelving deterrent assets.
Before Putin’s first invasion of Ukraine, in 2014, NATO “hugged the bear,” in the words of former NATO commander Gen. Philip Breedlove. The U.S. Navy’s North Atlantic-focused 2nd Fleet was deactivated in 2011. The U.S. Army’s Germany-based V Corps was deactivated in 2012. Washington withdrew every U.S. tank from Europe in 2013. That same year, Britain began shutting down its bases in Germany. By 2014, Germany fielded just 300 tanks, down from 2,125 in the 1980s.
Putin saw this not as a signal that NATO wanted to work with Russia to build a Euro-Atlantic community committed to peace and shared prosperity, but as a window of opportunity. That window finally began to close after Putin lunged at Kiev, tried to topple Ukraine’s democratic government and attempted to absorb Ukraine into a reconstituted Russian Empire.
As Rutte puts it, NATO’s European members recognize that “(d)anger is moving towards us at full speed … What is happening in Ukraine could happen here too.”
That brings us to NATO’s retooling for Cold War II and readjusting to a contested Europe. Not surprisingly, those allies closest to the danger are doing the most to confront it.
Finland, which borders Putin’s Russia, has increased defense spending by 85% since 2019. Even more dramatic, Finland abandoned a half-century of neutrality in 2023 and joined NATO.
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – all of which border Putin’s Russia – are investing 3% of GDP into defense, far above NATO’s 2%-of-GDP requirement.
Poland, which borders the Russian territory Kaliningrad, the Russian vassal state Belarus and the Russian war zone in Ukraine, recently leapfrogged France to become NATO’s third-largest military. Poland is requiring all military-aged men to begin military training, doubling the size of its military to 500,000, and investing more than 4% of GDP into defense. Warsaw is using those investments to field a powerful deterrent force: 32 F-35A stealth fighter-bombers from the United States, 980 K2 tanks from South Korea, 250 M1A2 Abrams tanks from the United States, 247 tanks from Germany, 648 self-propelled howitzers from South Korea, 486 HIMARS rocket launchers from the United States, and hundreds of anti-tank systems from Israel and Sweden. Most dramatic of all, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk declared in March that his country “must pursue the most advanced capabilities, including nuclear and modern unconventional weapons."
Allies bordering Russia aren’t the only NATO members beefing up their defenses.
The Netherlands is reconstituting its tank force.
Germany unveiled last month a massive $536 billion infrastructure fund to enlarge and modernize the German military. German officials are mulling a return of conscription.
Noting that Russian aggression “knows no borders,” President Emmanuel Macron of France is calling for a defense budget above 3% of GDP. And he’s considering extending the French nuclear deterrent to other European allies.
The British government is carrying out what it calls the “biggest sustained increase in defense spending since the Cold War,” unveiling a plan to stair-step Britain’s defense budget from 2.3% of GDP today to 3% by the next parliament.
All told, 23 members of the alliance now meet or exceed NATO’s standard of investing 2% of GDP in defense.
Defending As it did during Cold War I, NATO is deploying combat forces to defend at-risk members along its eastern flank. Stretching from Estonia on the Baltic Sea in northeastern Europe to Bulgaria on the Black Sea in southern Europe, only one of these battlegroups is led by U.S. troops (the battlegroup in Poland).
Britain, for example, leads the battlegroup in Estonia, supported by personnel from Denmark, France and Iceland. Related, Britain is deploying 20,000 troops to defend NATO’s northern flank.
Germany leads the battlegroup in Lithuania, backed by personnel from Belgium, Czech Republic, Iceland, Luxembourg, Netherlands and Norway. Related, the German military is building a permanent base in Lithuania – Germany’s first base abroad since World War II. It will house more than 4,800 German combat troops and 2,000 military vehicles.
Canada leads the battlegroup in Latvia, supported by personnel from Albania, Czech Republic, Iceland, Italy, North Macedonia Montenegro, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia and Spain.
France leads the battlegroup in Romania, bolstered by Belgian, Polish and American troops. Related, a rebuilt and reconfigured Soviet-era airbase in Romania is now NATO’s largest in Europe.
Collaborating Playing to their strengths, subgroupings of the alliance are collaborating to contribute to the common defense.
As part of Baltic Sentry, Finland, Estonia, Denmark, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Sweden and the United States have teamed up to prevent, detect and, if necessary, interdict Russian and Chinese gray-zone attacks against undersea cables in the Baltic Sea.
Poland, Germany and the Netherlands are developing military corridors to enable NATO allies to rapidly move troops and equipment from Polish, German and Dutch ports to NATO’s eastern flank.
Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Romania are joining East Shield, a Polish-led initiative that is fortifying hundreds of miles of border territory with trenches, bases, sensors and other defenses.
Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark have combined their air fleets to field a Nordic air force of 250 high-end warplanes.
Canada, Finland and the United States are pooling resources to expand production of polar icebreakers and enhance polar capabilities.
Italy and Germany have entered into an agreement to deliver 1,050 new infantry fighting vehicles to the Italian army.
Germany is spearheading the Sky Shield Initiative, an integrated air-defense and missile-defense effort enfolding 21 European nations.
To deter and match Putin’s missile deployments, the United States and Germany are deploying hypersonic weapons, Tomahawk land-attack missiles and SM-6 missile systems on German territory.
What West Germany was during Cold War I, Poland has become in these early chapters of Cold War II: NATO’s center of gravity and the heart for U.S. deployments in Europe. As noted, the United States leads NATO’s battlegroup in Poland. A new Aegis Ashore missile-defense base in Poland became operational last summer. Poland hosted B-52 bombers in late 2024. In 2023, Polish and U.S. personnel stood up U.S. Army Garrison-Poland, which is home to the U.S. Army’s V Corps Forward Command Headquarters. That same year, the U.S. Air Force shifted its midair refueling hub from Germany to Poland. Other U.S. assets in Poland include an armored brigade combat team, a combat aviation brigade, a combat sustainment support battalion, and a base for drone operations. Some 10,000 U.S. troops are now based in Poland.
Add it all up, and what the NATO alliance is building, deploying, coordinating, and most important of all, preventing serves to underscore something Gen. James Mattis observed almost a decade ago: “If we did not have NATO today, we would need to create it.”
Alan W. Dowd serves as director of the Sagamore Institute Center for America's Purpose. Any opinions expressed in this article are strictly his own.
- Landing Zone