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Despite the war raging in Eastern Europe, much of the focus of last week's NATO summit in Madrid was thousands of miles farther east. For the first time, some of the West's most powerful Asian allies—Japan, Australia, South Korea, and New Zealand—attended a NATO meeting. The alliance's new Strategic Concept, released at the summit, for the first time labeled China a potential threat, one that poses "systemic challenges" to NATO.
Yet in the next breath, the United States doubled down in Europe. On the same day the Strategic Concept was released, the White House announced the U.S. military would station new forces in Poland, Germany, and elsewhere in Europe, while enhancing rotational presence in Romania and the Baltics. One hundred thousand U.S. servicemen will now be stationed in Europe. More destroyers and F-35 fighters—weapons systems that would be critical to success in any war in the Pacific—will be based in Spain and Britain.
With Russia humiliated, isolated, and likely stalemated in Ukraine, this enhanced U.S. posture in Europe is a strategic delayed reaction, the equivalent of going to where the puck was, instead of where it will be, in a hockey game. The United States should hold European NATO members to their new defense spending commitments, not provide an even larger American security blanket.
The United States deployed about 60,000 servicemen in Europe before Russia's invasion of Ukraine began. Increasing that number dramatically in the early days of the war made a certain amount of sense; most observers expected the Russian Armed Forces to steamroll Ukrainian resistance and seize Kyiv. Sending more U.S. troops to Europe, as both an enhanced tripwire for deterrence and a visible reassurance to NATO allies, would have been a defensible reaction.
Four months later, the situation is altogether different. Russia's military has been exposed as tactically deficient, logistically impaired, and spiritually bankrupt. Western estimates of Russian combat deaths range from 15,000 to 30,000, a toll that exceeds in four months what the USSR lost in a decade in Afghanistan. A dozen Russian generals lie among the dead, while the flagship of Russia's Black Sea Fleet, the cruiser Moskva, was sunk by Ukrainian missiles two months ago. Russia's newest weapons, much hyped on the battlefields of Syria, are being checked by (often old) Western systems, like the justly celebrated Javelin anti-tank missile.
There is no cavalry coming, either. Russia went to war in February with the army it had, stripping all its regions of troops to cobble together an invasion force that proved woefully inadequate for its original aims. Despite loud predictions in some quarters, Russian President Vladimir Putin neglected to use the occasion of Victory Day in May to institute national mobilization and put prior conscripts back into uniform.
Russia announced in late May that it has removed age limits for its professional soldiers, a sign of its struggle to recruit and retain technical specialists. Increasingly large signing bonuses are being used to entice conscripts to stay in service as professionals. And there are indications Russia is still lagging in recruitment of new military personnel.
Western sanctions and the opprobrium attending Moscow's aggression will ensure any postwar Russian military rebuilding project is slow and painful. Though the ruble is stable for now, restrictions crippled Russia's ability to import modern weapons components, a critical vulnerability. An April report by the Royal United Services Institute, drawing on analysis of weapons recovered from Ukraine's battlefields, found that "almost all of Russia's modern military hardware is dependent upon complex electronics imported from the US, the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Japan, Israel, China and further afield." The ongoing brain drain of tens of thousands of Russia's young tech workers will hamstring attempts to find a domestic solution to this problem.
The addition of Finland and Sweden to NATO only compounds Russia's strategic difficulties. The Nordic nations boast well-trained troops, national cohesion cemented by military conscription and societal dedication to total defense, and high-caliber domestic defense industries. Adding Finland and Sweden to the alliance would also turn the Baltic into a NATO lake, bottling up Russian naval forces and making the vulnerable Baltic countries of Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia more defensible.
In wealth, population, and most measures of hard power, European NATO outpaces Russia. The combined military forces of NATO's 28 current European members match Russia's, at about 1.4 million servicemen. The post-Brexit EU has triple Russia's population and about eight times its economic output. The combined defense spending of just Britain, France, and Germany equals Russia's. Europe can defend itself.
With Russia now fully exposed as a great power pretender, "a gas station with nukes" as some have long alleged, why should the United States devote substantially more military power and attention to containing it?
The preeminent external challenge to American security and prosperity is in Asia, not Europe. China dwarfs Russia in almost every measure of national power, from an economy 10 times as large as Russia's to a fleet that already outnumbers the U.S. Navy. The U.S. government acknowledges the magnitude of the China challenge. Both this administration and its predecessor frequently noted that China is the "pacing challenge" to the United States. The war in Ukraine doesn't change this fact; if anything, it underscores it.
The Biden administration can perhaps be forgiven a degree of self-congratulation in Madrid. Since February, the United States has successfully rallied NATO, enabled Ukrainian self-defense, and bloodied a revanchist Russia. But with Russia checked, a far greater threat looming in Asia, and an increasingly urgent need to make Europe finally defend itself, the last thing the United States should be doing is sending more troops to Europe. In refusing to take advantage of a golden opportunity to reorient the U.S. military toward the Pacific, President Biden is setting America up to fail its greatest strategic challenge.
Gil Barndollar is a senior fellow at Defense Priorities, a Washington, DC think tank.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
