NATO and Russia

Putin and his supporters justify the invasion of Ukraine by claiming that NATO is “expanding” and threatening Russia.

The fact that this is untrue shouldn’t divert us from a close examination of this claim, because it may provide insight into the real motivations of Putin and his Billionaire State.

First, is NATO actually expanding, and what is the nature of this expansion, if it exists?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlargement_of_NATO

Here is a summary of NATO’s expansion, since its founding:

The most recent accessions to NATO are: Albania and Croatia (2009), and Montenegro and North Macedonia (2020). None of these countries border Russia, but they all border Serbia. NATO and these new Balkan members clearly want to guard against a revival of Serbian nationalism, and associated genocide of non-Serbs. The only other country that borders Serbia is Bosnia and Herzegovina, which is trying to get into the EU, and may eventually join NATO.

The new members added from 1999-2004 are mostly countries which in living memory have been occupied or invaded by the Soviet Union. Occupation by the Soviet Union, we need to remember, always included executions, prison camps and a wide network of secret police informants, extending into many aspects of everyday life. These countries include: the Czech Republic (as part of Czechoslovakia), Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, and Slovakia (as part of Czechoslovakia). Slovenia, as part of the old Yugoslavia, was never occupied by the Soviet Union.

All these countries have legitimate security concerns based on their experience of being occupied and oppressed by the Soviet Union, the predecessor of Russia. This occupation—we might say colonization—condemned these countries to underdevelopment and powerlessness for 45 years, leaving behind a social and psychological legacy of helplessness, mistrust and anger.

For example, when the Stasi files were opened in East Germany, people were stunned to discover that friends, teachers, clergymen and even family members had been spying on them. This may have been better organized in Germany, but similar networks of informants existed in all the East Bloc countries.

And in addition to mere spying, there’s this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zersetzung

These nations are all understandably determined not to fall back under Russian domination. If European countries—including Ukraine—want to join NATO, Putin and Russia have no one to blame but themselves.

However, there has been no NATO expansion since 2004 in which Russia was a factor. The frontier between NATO and Russia has been largely stable since then, with one exception: Hungary is now strongly under the influence of Putin. Hungary is still officially a member of NATO, but it isn’t even allowing shipments of weapons to Ukraine to cross its territory; functionally, it is no longer a NATO ally. And if it’s not helping in even a minor way in this crisis, would it send troops if Putin attacked Poland or Slovakia? Putin has neutralized Hungary.

What does it mean to be a member of NATO, in practical terms? A new member’s military organization has to be consistent with NATO, at least to some extent. The communication protocols and the ammunition are standardized, but the armies and navies are not integrated and obviously the newer members still have some Soviet-era equipment, such as the MIGs that both Poland and the Czech Republic use.

This is a fairly loose alliance. If the strategic goal was to invade Russia, the different armies and air forces would be much more tightly integrated, with (for example) German and American divisions completely standardized in organization, equipment, and training, and with the units integrated down to the brigade level—that is, a German brigade and American brigade might be grouped into the same division.

But if the strategic goal is to defend (in depth) against a Russian invasion, then the national armies would have to be independent—-as they are today. Estonia and Bulgaria wouldn’t be fighting the same war, and don’t need the same organization.

There are US troops in Europe, but the bulk of the combat units are in Germany, not Eastern Europe; it’s not as if NATO is massing its troops close to Russian territory.

Realistically, how does NATO threaten Russia? Yes, it “threatens” Putin’s attempts to re-create the Soviet Union in some form, along with the Warsaw Pact, but that is after all its purpose. NATO has always been mostly focused on preventing Russia from dominating Europe; if this is a threat then it’s a toothless one, because NATO has been around for three generations without a single bullet being fired at a Russian soldier.

Maybe it “threatens” Putin’s pretense that Russia is a normal country which is no danger to anyone? But no NATO propaganda campaign could equal the brutality and atrocities of the invasion of Ukraine; Russia is not a normal country, and it is a threat to the world.

But perhaps it’s not NATO, but something else that Putin fears, with which NATO is associated? Could NATO be a synecdoche for Westernization in general?

But “Westernization” is vague, and there are bound to be some parts of Westernization that Putin objects to more than others. To really get at his motives, we need to look more deeply.

To Putin, the fall of the Soviet Union was a great historic tragedy, and his thinking seldom strays far from the Soviet model. Sending tanks into Ukraine to set up a puppet government is exactly what Khrushchev did in Hungary in 1956, and what Brezhnev did in Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Putin has no doubt thought deeply about why the USSR lost the Cold War with the West, and one clue to his thinking is that he has never tried to revive Soviet economic policies. Like many historians, he seems to believe that the West won because of its greater economic productivity.

Having lived through those times, I remember that the public understanding of this difference was slow to develop. In 1946, the USSR was still recovering from massive war damage and casualties, and no one assumed the economy of Poland would ever match, say, that of France. Some cities and countries had obviously benefited greatly from capitalism for centuries, and most of those were in the West. Neither London nor Amsterdam ended up in the East Bloc, and neither did Paris or Zurich or New York. Given this historic Western advantage, it was still a fair question whether centrally planned economies might be better in the long run.

But instead, as time passed it became clear that the West was outdistancing the East. By the late ‘60s it was quite obvious, and the point of sharpest contrast was in Germany. The extraordinary performance of West Germany compared to the poor, slow-moving DDR was undeniable.

And in Berlin, the difference was particularly dramatic; in the ‘70s, West Berlin practically glittered with prosperity, while East Berlin was all concrete and mildew. The DDR had to wall its people in, as if the entire country were a prison.

People in both the East and West concluded this difference was due to the superiority of the Western system. What else could they think?

When there are two areas with similar history, geography and ethnicity, but with different political and economic systems, then any major differences between these areas in economic growth, life expectancy and overall well-being can reasonably be attributed to a difference in the two systems. And this is what happened with East and West Germany, most visibly in Berlin. I call this the Checkpoint Charlie Effect.

Now, what if Ukraine joined the EU and prospered? Bear in mind that Putin thinks Ukrainians are really Russians. What if, in a few years, the average Ukrainian lived much better than the average Russian? This would be a Checkpoint Charlie Effect—an apples-to-apples comparison proving that Putin’s Billionaire Capitalism was inferior to EU Capitalism.

To add some context here, let’s look at GDP (in a couple of flavors) of Russia, Ukraine and selected countries in Eastern and Central Europe, along with the US numbers for reference.

GDP (nominal and PPP) per capita, by country

IMF estimate 2022

County	GDP(nominal) per capita, $	GDP(PPP) per capita, $	Ratio of GDP(PPP) to USA
Ukraine	4,958	13,943	0.20
Russia	11,665	29,485	0.43
Poland	19,056	35,943	0.53
Romania	16,293	32,950	0.48
Czech Republic	28,077	42,956	0.63
Germany	54,653	56,956	0.83
Estonia	29,735	39,729	0.58
Moldova	5,240	13,879	0.20
Latvia	21,489	39,729	0.58
Finland	56,833	51,867	0.76
Slovenia	31,026	40,820	0.60
USA	74,725	68,309	1.00

I include GDP(PPP) because it measures the standard of living for the average citizen. Because of the difficulty of measuring cost of living anywhere, much less in every country in the world, GDP(PPP) has some real limitations, particularly in comparing advanced countries to each other. But large differences in PPP certainly tell us something.

Another problem is that GDP(PPP) per capita is the mean purchasing power per person, not the median; in Russia in particular, with its extremes of inequality, that’s a problem. The GDP(PPP) numbers might be taken to indicate that the average Russian lives as well as the average Romanian, but that’s almost certainly not true. The median numbers for both countries would quite likely tell a different story.

But these numbers do indicate:

• The dramatic advantage of belonging to the EU, especially for former East Bloc countries.

• The advantage of never having had a communist government—as exemplified by Finland, the US and (largely) Germany.

• That Ukraine and Moldova—former East Bloc countries which are not members of the EU—are the poorest countries in this sample by far.

In other words, if Ukraine were admitted to the EU, it would have room for rapid improvement. The people appear well-educated and if they work to improve their economy with the same vigor they’ve shown in facing Russian tanks then they could double their standard of living in fairly short order.

So if Ukraine were admitted to the EU, it’s positioned to rapidly create a Checkpoint Charlie Effect on Russia’s southern border. I believe preventing that is Putin’s specific motivation, not to imply that’s his only reason.

But having found this specific motive, let’s also look at the overall context. Can Billionaire States and democracies live in peace? I doubt it.

Billionaire capitalism implies an extreme concentration of wealth, and this necessarily puts pressure on the majority. Their wages are lower, their opportunities are less, and their health, education and life expectancy are all worse—-all due to the burden of billionaire parasitism.

How do billionaires explain this to vast majority? They don’t—-instead they change the subject, and they generally change it to nationalism or religion.

But there are places where Billionaire Capitalism doesn’t hold much sway, most notably the EU. And whatever mistakes the EU bureaucracy might make, ordinary people are bound to have much better outcomes in the EU than under Billionaire Capitalism. To live in a society designed to concentrate wealth forever is to be under constant pressure, even if you are skilled and educated.

Billionaire States like Russia will always feel “threatened” by places where the people have a good chance to live decent and meaningful lives. Conflict between these two systems is nearly inevitable.

Let’s hope that conflict doesn’t lead to the end of civilization.