If Nato is serious about its survival, it needs to build bridges with Russia​

The protective umbrella is looking tattered. The only thing that will fix it is a shift in focus, both by working closely with Putin and overhauling its approach to defence

Trump Putin (Getty)

Nato is not “brain dead” as president Emmanuel Macron of France claimed, nor indeed is the president himself brain dead as his opposite number in Turkey, president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, suggested on Friday. The offensive language is childish, but it has served its purpose. All the members of the organisation that has since 1949 been the keystone of European defence, need to think about its future.

The event that pushed the allies into founding the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation was the blockade by the Soviet Union of West Berlin in 1948. Berlin was an island in the middle of Soviet-dominated East Germany. The land corridors to the western sections were closed and the only way its people could be supplied with food and fuel was by air. The Berlin people nearly starved and froze, and it was thanks only to the gigantic effort with what we now call the Berlin Airlift, and an unusually mild winter, that prevented the city being taken over.

America showed Russia that it would protect western Europeans as, despite Britain also contributing to the airlift, more than two-thirds of the supplies came in on US planes. Russia backed off, and while the threat from the east has receded, that protective umbrella has lasted to this day.

It may not last much longer. There are two reasons why.

The first is that this week’s Nato summit, just outside London, will see a US president that – for the first time ever – is ambivalent about the US commitment to Europe. It is not just that, in his view, Europe has taken a free ride on the US, with America paying for its defence. It is also that Donald Trump sees Russia as a potential ally, someone you do business with rather than a challenger to the west’s way of life. The president will go through the motions of supporting Nato, but emotionally, he is inclined more towards Russia.

Europe, or at least the European Union, is, by contrast, a trade rival, flooding the US with its products while keeping American ones out. Once the trade deal is done with China, expect the guns to swing towards Europe.

Actually, Trump's inclination towards Russia is very similar to that of Jeremy Corbyn, who has just called for Nato to switch direction and build bridges with Russia. So Nato is under attack from both the right and the left. That protective umbrella is looking tattered, more so than at any time since 1949.

The second challenge comes from technology. Warfare is less likely to be over territory (though I do understand Russia’s interest in establishing a land corridor into Kaliningrad) than over influence. The weapons are likely to be cyberattacks, not tanks rolling over the countryside. You don’t need to buy the conspiracy theories about Russia fixing the US election or the Brexit referendum to be aware that this is how Russia will seek to deploy its power in the years ahead. You don’t really want territory, save for a few historical issues such as Crimea, because Russia already has the biggest land mass of any country in the world. You want your ideas about how societies should be organised to be adopted more widely. You want respect. You want soft power.

So how should Nato respond? Well, for a start, there has to be a rebalancing of responsibility. Europe has to do more as the US does less. Europe should not expect another US president to switch American policy back. The pivot away from Europe had begun under Barack Obama and will continue under Trump’s successor.

Next, the EU has to recognise that it needs to find a way of incorporating Russia more closely into the European economy. That is difficult while the present regime persists in Moscow but, were Russia under different leadership, it could be an associate member of the EU, just as the UK may become at some stage in the years ahead. Nato can keep a chink of a door open in the way that the EU cannot.

Third, Nato needs to beef up its technological competence. It has to spend much more money on cyber defence. Simple as that.

Finally, Nato has to become more than the sum of its parts. It is and will remain primarily a defence alliance. But it is also an alliance of countries with a common interest, and it should look for ways of cooperating beyond defence. Russia needs to be brought in from the cold. In that sense both Corbyn and Trump are right. The trouble is a strong Nato would make that easier, not more difficult – but they both want a weaker one.