When I was transferred to the headquarters of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Brussels in 2005, I was intrigued by the “ANIMUS IN CONSULENDO LIBER” displayed in large letters on the wall of the main conference room. The best translation I found had given me “Free spirit in consultation”.
Posted yesterday at 9:00 a.m.
At the time, I was working in support of the Canadian chairmanship of the Military Committee, which was held by General Ray Henault, former Chief of Staff of the Canadian Forces. Very quickly, I realized how much virtually all international military activities of the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) depended on this “freedom”, albeit heavily influenced by a consultation process in which I was to participate for three years.
Those were the years of our long and intense participation in the Afghanistan campaign as our alliance welcomed half a dozen new member states from the dissolution of the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics), including the three Baltic countries. The emotion and excitement of the senior officers of these countries were palpable and they did not hide their joy and their pride in joining NATO.
These sentiments contrasted sharply with the concern of Ukrainian generals whom we had met in Kyiv in preparation for the Bucharest Summit where the Alliance had accepted the Action Plan for Georgia and Ukraine’s membership. Already, the Ukrainians confided to us, with closed microphones, their concern to have to face one day a Russian invasion.
This day occurred in 2014 in the Donbass, but, more dramatically, on February 24. I have since had about twenty media interviews to comment on the situation in Ukraine. Like several other analysts, I consider the growing opposition to Putin in Russia to be just as important, if not more, than the kinetic actions in this battered Ukraine, at least in terms of unraveling the greatest European crisis since the Second World War. . A few times I have used a turn of phrase using the “tipping point of our horror tolerance” or words to that effect to describe the central factor of consultations within our alliance. When Minister Mélanie Joly, arriving at NATO headquarters, told reporters that “everything was on the table”, it was obvious that she was referring to the possibility of the establishment of an exclusion zone aerial over Ukraine. After the meeting, the Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, made it clear that this option had been rejected, because “the only way to implement a no-fly zone is to send NATO fighter planes into the Ukrainian airspace and then to shoot down Russian planes to enforce it”. This would obviously lead directly to a war between NATO and Russia and it is not surprising, at this point in the war in Ukraine, that consensus could not be reached on such a measure.
A lot of people don’t understand how decisions are made within our alliance. These are based on “consensus”, a word that I put in quotation marks, because its meaning in Brussels is very different from the usual meaning of consent of the majority or the greatest number. In other words, this means that there is no voting procedure in NATO. During this transfer which marked forever my vision of military officer, I attended the tortuous process, but necessary where the consultations continue until the moment when emerges a decision acceptable by all. Sometimes member countries decide not to agree on an issue and, without having classified sources, this is certainly what happened if there was indeed a discussion on the possibility of the establishment of a no-fly zone over Ukraine. Any country, whether Iceland or North Macedonia, had only to oppose the proposal and President Volodymyr Zelensky’s request had to be immediately rejected.
There is a whole series of possible events that could cause NATO to become a belligerent party in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. Whether it is the massive shipment of armaments to the Ukrainians, human or electronic intelligence support, the risk of naval confrontation with the Turkish blockade of the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus Strait, or even a case of cybernetic slippage.
Our alliance stands on the edge of a precipice the depth of which could reveal nuclear terror, even the risk of mutually assured destruction, the most glaringly true acronym of all, the MAD (mutual assured destruction).
This brings me to the man at the center of the killing spree we have all witnessed since that fateful evening when American intelligence had to be vindicated when it announced the invasion. In 2008, I was in the great hall of the Palace of the Parliament of Romania as we welcomed Vladimir Putin with trumpets and a red carpet. This did not prevent him from opposing rather brutally our alliance’s plans to deploy defensive missiles in Poland and the Czech Republic. In the same speech, he opposed with even more fervor the candidature of Georgia and Ukraine, and I believe that he already had in mind the cruel campaigns he was going to lead against their accession to the NATO. How then to gauge the chances that this autocrat, who knew how to sweep away all forms of political opposition, shows restraint in his use of the nuclear codes of the Russian arsenal?
The opposition to Putin, to which I have already referred, can be expressed through at least two vectors. First, there is the possibility of a mass uprising, in light of the tens of thousands of arrests that have taken place in the Russian Federation. Second, oligarchs, stemming from a dictatorship that Chrystia Freeland recently described as a “fallen kleptocracy”, could try to attack the leadership of a weakened Putin, stuck in a war that turns out badly for him. In this perspective, if some analysts might think that the megalomania or the sociopathy of the strongman of the Kremlin could make him a suicidal being, some extremely wealthy oligarchs around him are certainly not and will do anything not to lead to MAD.
I bring you back to the title I chose for this article. We Canadians are more than ever dependent on the decision-making process of our Alliance. So let us begin to realize that it is OUR perception, to each of US, that will inform the fundamental decisions that OUR political and military representatives will take in Brussels or by videoconference. I can’t help but think that humanity, if it wants to survive on this planet, will soon have to think about how to ensure that a man, a single man with no safeguards around him, cannot forever find themselves holding the fate of our world at their fingertips.