When Vladimir Putin was elected president of Russia in 2000, a reporter asked what he did as a KGB case officer in Dresden, East Germany. Mr. Putin’s response: “We were interested in any information about ‘the main opponent,’ as we called them, and the main opponent was NATO.” The mission hasn’t changed. In office, Mr. Putin has consistently sought to weaken the Western alliance.
Since its founding in 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has been the Kremlin’s No. 1 enemy. Successive Soviet and Russian leaders sought to undermine the alliance and separate the U.S. from Europe. Mr. Putin and his inner circle can only marvel at the dangerous game President Trump has been playing. His confrontation with the allies over Greenland’s future threatened to damage the world’s most successful alliance in a way that decades of Russian sabotage failed to do. The gap between the U.S. and its allies, on full display this week, can only reinforce Mr. Putin’s conviction that the trans-Atlantic alliance is seriously weakened.
The Soviet Union’s answer to NATO was the Warsaw Treaty Organization, created in 1955. Before disbanding in 1991, it was the only such alliance in history whose members invaded each other. Soviet troops invaded Hungary in 1956 and Warsaw Pact troops marched into Czechoslovakia in 1968. These invasions ensured Soviet supremacy in Eastern Europe. Mr. Putin aspires to control the former Warsaw Pact states, as he made clear in the draft treaty he presented to NATO before Russia invaded Ukraine.
After the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, the future of NATO was debated in Russia and the West. Did it still have a purpose? Communism was defeated and Russia wanted to become a democracy. What was the need for this Cold War relic? Why not create an all-European security organization in which Russia and the U.S. would have an equal voice?
While Russians and their Western supporters argued for a new Euro-Atlantic security architecture, NATO and its supporters understood that the world’s most successful alliance shouldn’t disband but adapt and admit those former Warsaw Pact states that were clamoring to join.
The Clinton administration offered Russia a distinctive partnership with NATO, hoping to give Moscow a stake in the trans-Atlantic order. The NATO-Russia Founding Act was signed in Paris in 1997, but it did little to diminish the Russian conviction that NATO was the adversary. Mr. Putin early in his presidency discussed the possibility of joining NATO with both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, but it became clear that Russia wouldn’t join an alliance it couldn’t dominate.
Mr. Putin’s antipathy toward NATO has only grown. The Kremlin has increasingly supported European political parties and groups on the left and right that oppose NATO and the U.S. Mr. Putin justified Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 by declaring that, if Russia hadn’t moved, “it would have meant that NATO’s navy would be right there in this city of Russia’s military glory, and this would create not an illusory but a perfectly real threat to the whole of Southern Russia.”
Mr. Putin doesn’t fear NATO because it threatens Russia’s physical security. Rather, he understands that expanding NATO membership to former Soviet states and Warsaw Pact members undermines his goal of re-establishing Russia’s sphere of influence. NATO remains the chief obstacle to Mr. Putin’s imperial ambitions. Had Ukraine been a member of NATO, Russia wouldn’t have dared to invade it.
How ironic, then, that a dispute between the U.S. and its allies over a NATO member’s territory could end up undermining NATO and helping Mr. Putin realize his goal of subjugating Ukraine. “It was hard to imagine before that such a thing could happen,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Tuesday. He added that it could create a scenario in which “one NATO member is going to attack another NATO member.” Although three NATO members—Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia—have experienced something similar.
Ms. Stent is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of “Putin’s World: Russia Against the West and With the Rest.”