The broad thrust of this article is arguing against a strawman. Nobody really disagrees that Russians might have said NATO was a threat. Anyone in the West can point that out freely and openly without fear of reproach. The issue is that NATO wasn't actually a threat in any plausible scenario in the way that Russians were describing it. Russians (or Putin specifically) typically alluded to NATO aggression either from a ground invasion or a nuclear first-strike, both of which were never in the cards given it would start World War 3 and mean a huge portion of the Earth's population from both sides being wiped out in an instant. Some Russians may have drank the propaganda koolaid and genuinely believed the West was willing to eliminate Russia in a geopolitical equivalent of a murder-suicide, but they were mostly relegated to the fringes.
What Russians/Putin were actually worried about was one of three things:
Western cultural and economic hegemony. NATO expansion doesn't really directly impact this, but NATO expansion serves as a barometer that the West is still triumphing over the former Soviet Union.
The West fomenting pro-democracy movements in Russia, similar to the Color Revolutions. Much of Russian society and Putin in particular have a deep antipathy for democracy, seeing it as not only a personal threat but as an invasive, enemy ideology and incorrectly blaming it for the turmoil of the Yeltsin years. Again, this doesn't really have anything directly to do with NATO expansion, but the fact that NATO is expanding at all means the West is robust enough to possibly try something like a pro-democracy coup in the future.
Loss of their sphere of influence. Many Russians still see their country as a Great Power, and the fact that NATO even has the possibility of being extended to Ukraine is deeply insulting.
So yes, many Russians say "NATO is a threat". But no, no reasonable Russian thinks NATO is a threat in a conventional sense since Russia still has the largest nuclear stockpile in the world. Instead, saying "NATO is a threat" is used as a dogwhistle to stoke generalized anti-Western sentiment or to appeal to delusions of grandeur, i.e. that Russia should reassemble the borders of the Soviet Union.
The thesis of the article is not that Russians merely said that, but that they believed it (whether this belief was actually true is, for the purposes of the article, neither here nor there), and that McFaul is misrepresenting the context of Putin's statements to make him look disingenuous in this regard. What is taboo in the West is to point out that, when they did say these things, Russian elites were not merely pretending to be worried about NATO as a front for their dastardly neo-imperialist designs.
The thesis of the article is not that Russians merely said that, but that they believed it
That's a conclusion this article tries to offhandedly make, but most of the evidence presented is unrelated to that point. If the article wanted to conclude that Russians genuinely believed NATO was a threat specifically from the point of a ground invasion or a nuclear first strike, it needed to do a lot more work justifying why Russians thought NATO was willing to commit collective suicide by ignoring MAD when there were decades of Cold War precedent saying this wouldn't happen. Instead, the article tries to sneak that conclusion through the back door by handwaving away any irrationality with a whataboutism that the US was irrational for invading Iraq.
If you’re just going to dogmatically insist on the hermeneutics of suspicion then there’s really nothing more to be said. And why think that the only thing Russian elites could possibly fear from NATO is a ground invasion or a nuclear strike? (A claim which Lemoine notably doesn’t make. Although the US did unilaterally withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia under Bush, which surely couldn’t have soothed anyone antsy about nukes.) You simply assume this without argument. Why shouldn’t they also be concerned with, say, a Color Revolution or losing their sphere? (Or even just an increase in the risk of accidental conflict/mistaken escalation?) Do you think it’s irrational for the US to claim a sphere of influence via the Monroe Doctrine? Or is your objection solely to the rationality of Russian desire for a sphere of influence?
It’s not a “whataboutism,” it’s an example to show that national elites can be sincerely committed to obviously-mistaken propositions about their own security interests. “There is historical precedent for X, so you shouldn’t be so skeptical that X could happen,” is not whataboutism at all, it’s a perfectly legitimate argument. Or what hermeneutically differentiates American elite fear of Iraq from Russian elite fear of NATO for you, and if nothing, then do you think the former were just lying too?
And why think that the only thing Russian elites could possibly fear from NATO is a ground invasion or a nuclear strike?
I'm not saying this, as per my first post. I'm saying the arguments of "NATO is a threat" coming from Russia boil down to two flawed lines of thinking:
That NATO is a threat from a conventional sense, in the form of a ground invasion or a nuclear attack. The problem with this line of thinking is Mutually Assured Destruction is still as relevant now as it was in the Cold War. Some pro-Russian sources/posters say the threat from NATO is indeed conventional, but they never have a good answer for the fact that MAD makes it irrelevant.
That the West is a threat in unconventional ways, in form of fomenting pro-Democracy movements or general economic + cultural hegemony. The problem with this line of thinking is that NATO expansion is a non-sequitur. The fact that Finland and Sweden are joining NATO doesn't particularly make Russia more vulnerable to unconventional threats like these, other than serving as a vague barometer that the West is doing well.
Even allowing for a sizeable degree of irrationality (since rival elites indeed probably have an inflated sense of how dangerous their outgroup is), it's still very difficult to see how NATO gets through MAD or how it's directly relevant to unconventional threats.
First of all, even if NATO weren’t directly attacking Russia, having members of a huge alliance on your border increases the risk of accidental conflict or mistaken escalation, as I said. And to make matters worse, it also dramatically raises the stakes of such erroneous clashes, because now instead of a minor skirmish with one bordering state, Article 5 can transform things into a world war. Moreover, this also puts neighboring states under the nuclear umbrella of another power, which in turn increases the risk of nuclear war too. And even if all of these risk-increases are small in absolute terms, the consequences if they eventuate are so utterly catastrophic that they’re still massively negative in expectation. I don’t see anything irrational in being very worried about this even if you aren’t particularly worried about a direct invasion or a nuclear first-strike out of the blue.
Also, it seems strange to say that MAD obviates any fear of conventional threats. If that’s the case then why don’t nuclear states massively cut their conventional military budgets relative to non-nuclear ones? They can just nuke the home countries of any invaders, after all. Instead what we’ve seen are very high conventional military budgets throughout the Cold War, right alongside huge nuclear stockpiling.
Other than the "strong NATO increases Russian paranoia of unrelated unconventional attack" bullet point that I mentioned above, I don't see how it appreciably increases the risk of an accidental conflict. NATO and the Warsaw pact were crammed right up next to each other for decades without major incidents along the European border. Russia specifically has bordered 5 NATO States for over a decade now, and it's even turned Kaliningrad into one of the most heavily weaponized regions in the world, like a dagger ready to stab at Warsaw which is <200 miles away or seal off the Baltics via the Suwalki Gap, but again there's been no major incidents.
Conventional militaries are still needed for offensive actions against non-nuclear powers that the US and Soviets both engaged in during the Cold War.
NATO and the Warsaw Pact did have notable incidents along their borders. US-Soviet tank squads almost fought over Soviet prerogatives in East Berlin in ‘61. Able Archer almost triggered WWII in ‘83, it was a massive NATO military exercise in, inter alia, Western Germany (right on the border with the Warsaw Pact). US deployment of Pershing 108s to Western Germany (again, on the border) in the early 80s made the Soviets think NATO was preparing a first strike because the Pershings could hit Belarus and Ukraine in <10 minutes from there. That caused the Petrov incident, where everyone almost got nuked. The Cuban Missile Crisis itself was precipitated by the US putting new ballistic missiles in eastern Turkey, once more, right by the Soviet border. As a matter of history, the idea that there were no notable incidents (many of them based on accidents or misunderstandings) centered on the NATO-Warsaw border is just silly.
Yes, Russia has bordered those states for a while now, and they vigorously protested their entry into NATO too! And just during this war, Lithuanian attempts to cut off some Russian transit into Kaliningrad itself caused an international incident, as did mistaken (one might even say “accidental”) reports that a Russian missile had crossed into Poland and killed two people. Neither of those incidents would have been nearly as tense and serious but for the fact that Article 5 is lurking in the background in both. Bordering NATO states leading to escalated tension over minor clashes and misunderstandings isn’t a merely theoretical possibility, it’s already happened multiple times just this year.
The US and the Soviets were not building their conventional militaries so big to fight Vietnam and Afghanistan, they wanted to be ready to fight each other in the Fulda Gap if need be. This was the object of lots of NATO and Warsaw military planning that’s now public record. MAD did not remotely obviate the desire for conventional superiority over one’s nuclear-armed opponents. If MAD were all you needed, this would be blatantly irrational.
This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a
court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to
optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.
The weekly Culture War threads host the most
controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are
appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy;
if in doubt, post!
Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts.
You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.
Why are you called The Motte?
A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently,
it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey",
originally identified by
philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial
but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens
this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for
the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired
propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."
On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.
New post guidelines
If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it.
A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts
such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a
submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).
Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or
significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The broad thrust of this article is arguing against a strawman. Nobody really disagrees that Russians might have said NATO was a threat. Anyone in the West can point that out freely and openly without fear of reproach. The issue is that NATO wasn't actually a threat in any plausible scenario in the way that Russians were describing it. Russians (or Putin specifically) typically alluded to NATO aggression either from a ground invasion or a nuclear first-strike, both of which were never in the cards given it would start World War 3 and mean a huge portion of the Earth's population from both sides being wiped out in an instant. Some Russians may have drank the propaganda koolaid and genuinely believed the West was willing to eliminate Russia in a geopolitical equivalent of a murder-suicide, but they were mostly relegated to the fringes.
What Russians/Putin were actually worried about was one of three things:
Western cultural and economic hegemony. NATO expansion doesn't really directly impact this, but NATO expansion serves as a barometer that the West is still triumphing over the former Soviet Union.
The West fomenting pro-democracy movements in Russia, similar to the Color Revolutions. Much of Russian society and Putin in particular have a deep antipathy for democracy, seeing it as not only a personal threat but as an invasive, enemy ideology and incorrectly blaming it for the turmoil of the Yeltsin years. Again, this doesn't really have anything directly to do with NATO expansion, but the fact that NATO is expanding at all means the West is robust enough to possibly try something like a pro-democracy coup in the future.
Loss of their sphere of influence. Many Russians still see their country as a Great Power, and the fact that NATO even has the possibility of being extended to Ukraine is deeply insulting.
So yes, many Russians say "NATO is a threat". But no, no reasonable Russian thinks NATO is a threat in a conventional sense since Russia still has the largest nuclear stockpile in the world. Instead, saying "NATO is a threat" is used as a dogwhistle to stoke generalized anti-Western sentiment or to appeal to delusions of grandeur, i.e. that Russia should reassemble the borders of the Soviet Union.
The thesis of the article is not that Russians merely said that, but that they believed it (whether this belief was actually true is, for the purposes of the article, neither here nor there), and that McFaul is misrepresenting the context of Putin's statements to make him look disingenuous in this regard. What is taboo in the West is to point out that, when they did say these things, Russian elites were not merely pretending to be worried about NATO as a front for their dastardly neo-imperialist designs.
That's a conclusion this article tries to offhandedly make, but most of the evidence presented is unrelated to that point. If the article wanted to conclude that Russians genuinely believed NATO was a threat specifically from the point of a ground invasion or a nuclear first strike, it needed to do a lot more work justifying why Russians thought NATO was willing to commit collective suicide by ignoring MAD when there were decades of Cold War precedent saying this wouldn't happen. Instead, the article tries to sneak that conclusion through the back door by handwaving away any irrationality with a whataboutism that the US was irrational for invading Iraq.
If you’re just going to dogmatically insist on the hermeneutics of suspicion then there’s really nothing more to be said. And why think that the only thing Russian elites could possibly fear from NATO is a ground invasion or a nuclear strike? (A claim which Lemoine notably doesn’t make. Although the US did unilaterally withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia under Bush, which surely couldn’t have soothed anyone antsy about nukes.) You simply assume this without argument. Why shouldn’t they also be concerned with, say, a Color Revolution or losing their sphere? (Or even just an increase in the risk of accidental conflict/mistaken escalation?) Do you think it’s irrational for the US to claim a sphere of influence via the Monroe Doctrine? Or is your objection solely to the rationality of Russian desire for a sphere of influence?
It’s not a “whataboutism,” it’s an example to show that national elites can be sincerely committed to obviously-mistaken propositions about their own security interests. “There is historical precedent for X, so you shouldn’t be so skeptical that X could happen,” is not whataboutism at all, it’s a perfectly legitimate argument. Or what hermeneutically differentiates American elite fear of Iraq from Russian elite fear of NATO for you, and if nothing, then do you think the former were just lying too?
I'm not saying this, as per my first post. I'm saying the arguments of "NATO is a threat" coming from Russia boil down to two flawed lines of thinking:
That NATO is a threat from a conventional sense, in the form of a ground invasion or a nuclear attack. The problem with this line of thinking is Mutually Assured Destruction is still as relevant now as it was in the Cold War. Some pro-Russian sources/posters say the threat from NATO is indeed conventional, but they never have a good answer for the fact that MAD makes it irrelevant.
That the West is a threat in unconventional ways, in form of fomenting pro-Democracy movements or general economic + cultural hegemony. The problem with this line of thinking is that NATO expansion is a non-sequitur. The fact that Finland and Sweden are joining NATO doesn't particularly make Russia more vulnerable to unconventional threats like these, other than serving as a vague barometer that the West is doing well.
Even allowing for a sizeable degree of irrationality (since rival elites indeed probably have an inflated sense of how dangerous their outgroup is), it's still very difficult to see how NATO gets through MAD or how it's directly relevant to unconventional threats.
First of all, even if NATO weren’t directly attacking Russia, having members of a huge alliance on your border increases the risk of accidental conflict or mistaken escalation, as I said. And to make matters worse, it also dramatically raises the stakes of such erroneous clashes, because now instead of a minor skirmish with one bordering state, Article 5 can transform things into a world war. Moreover, this also puts neighboring states under the nuclear umbrella of another power, which in turn increases the risk of nuclear war too. And even if all of these risk-increases are small in absolute terms, the consequences if they eventuate are so utterly catastrophic that they’re still massively negative in expectation. I don’t see anything irrational in being very worried about this even if you aren’t particularly worried about a direct invasion or a nuclear first-strike out of the blue.
Also, it seems strange to say that MAD obviates any fear of conventional threats. If that’s the case then why don’t nuclear states massively cut their conventional military budgets relative to non-nuclear ones? They can just nuke the home countries of any invaders, after all. Instead what we’ve seen are very high conventional military budgets throughout the Cold War, right alongside huge nuclear stockpiling.
Other than the "strong NATO increases Russian paranoia of unrelated unconventional attack" bullet point that I mentioned above, I don't see how it appreciably increases the risk of an accidental conflict. NATO and the Warsaw pact were crammed right up next to each other for decades without major incidents along the European border. Russia specifically has bordered 5 NATO States for over a decade now, and it's even turned Kaliningrad into one of the most heavily weaponized regions in the world, like a dagger ready to stab at Warsaw which is <200 miles away or seal off the Baltics via the Suwalki Gap, but again there's been no major incidents.
Conventional militaries are still needed for offensive actions against non-nuclear powers that the US and Soviets both engaged in during the Cold War.
NATO and the Warsaw Pact did have notable incidents along their borders. US-Soviet tank squads almost fought over Soviet prerogatives in East Berlin in ‘61. Able Archer almost triggered WWII in ‘83, it was a massive NATO military exercise in, inter alia, Western Germany (right on the border with the Warsaw Pact). US deployment of Pershing 108s to Western Germany (again, on the border) in the early 80s made the Soviets think NATO was preparing a first strike because the Pershings could hit Belarus and Ukraine in <10 minutes from there. That caused the Petrov incident, where everyone almost got nuked. The Cuban Missile Crisis itself was precipitated by the US putting new ballistic missiles in eastern Turkey, once more, right by the Soviet border. As a matter of history, the idea that there were no notable incidents (many of them based on accidents or misunderstandings) centered on the NATO-Warsaw border is just silly.
Yes, Russia has bordered those states for a while now, and they vigorously protested their entry into NATO too! And just during this war, Lithuanian attempts to cut off some Russian transit into Kaliningrad itself caused an international incident, as did mistaken (one might even say “accidental”) reports that a Russian missile had crossed into Poland and killed two people. Neither of those incidents would have been nearly as tense and serious but for the fact that Article 5 is lurking in the background in both. Bordering NATO states leading to escalated tension over minor clashes and misunderstandings isn’t a merely theoretical possibility, it’s already happened multiple times just this year.
The US and the Soviets were not building their conventional militaries so big to fight Vietnam and Afghanistan, they wanted to be ready to fight each other in the Fulda Gap if need be. This was the object of lots of NATO and Warsaw military planning that’s now public record. MAD did not remotely obviate the desire for conventional superiority over one’s nuclear-armed opponents. If MAD were all you needed, this would be blatantly irrational.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link