NATO and Europe’s new ‘Cold War’
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As the war between Russia and Ukraine grinds closer to a fourth year, on the periphery, trouble is brewing. We have recently uncovered a staggeringly reckless campaign of Russian sabotage in Europe. Russian aggression and more subtle acts of hybrid warfare are forcing members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, to confront a new reality on the European continent.

But NATO is split over support for Ukraine.

And as Northern and Eastern Europe fortifies its defenses and braces for further Russian hostilities, NATO, which for three quarters of a century has aimed to unite Europe and North America against the threat of Soviet expansion, is navigating fraught waters. If Putin is allowed to succeed in reducing Ukraine to a vassal state, he will not stop there.

Our security, British, French, European and transatlantic, will be jeopardized. In the 30 years since the fall of the Soviet Union, never has NATO's mandate been more urgent than now. NATO allies will continue to stand together to face these threats. It's something of a moment as a new Iron Curtain threatens to fall in Europe. I'm Christopher Waljesper in Chicago. When you hear LSEC data and analytics, what do you think of?

I'm joined today by our Senior European Security Correspondent, Sabine Siebold.

Sabine has been reporting on Europe and NATO for 20 years. Hi, Sabine. Hello from Brussels. Now, Sabine, the political landscape across Europe has changed drastically since the war in Ukraine began nearly four years ago. How does that impact NATO? Yes. Let me just take a step back. We've got a

countries in the south who might be more concerned with terrorism or migration. So there's all kinds of different interests there that need to be realigned. And Germany and France in the past have been doing that. The problem is over the past years, we've seen that this motor has started to stutter.

How so? We have domestic turmoil in both countries. We've been seeing that. Germany is heading into a snap election at the moment because the government collapsed a few weeks ago. There's a lot of political turmoil in France. So there's a risk that it may not be able to function much at all, which comes at a real, real bad time. At the moment, we are waiting for the Trump administration to take office and

Having the stuttering motor of France and Germany might actually put the EU at a great disadvantage at a time when its unity would really be needed most as it is faced with such a potentially demanding new U.S. president and an ongoing war in its neighborhood in Ukraine. And as you mentioned, Germany and France, they're not the only ones guiding the direction of NATO. The other big player is the U.S.,

So how are EU NATO members preparing for Donald Trump's second term and the very real possibility of a scaled back US presence in the alliance? It's very difficult for NATO, obviously, because the United States is the dominant power, military power within NATO. So you could call the American military the backbone of the alliance.

Also, the idea for NATO, for Europe was always that in the case of a Russian attack or a looming conflict, Europeans would act as the first responders with their troops.

holding out for a few weeks while waiting for U.S. reinforcements coming over the Atlantic to support them. That we've had tens of thousands of American troops stationed in Europe. This number has shrunk, but there's important American bases in Europe still. But what we've seen for a longer time actually is that the focus of the U.S. is pivoting towards Asia. Especially China is seen as weakening

one very important theater. The other thing we know is that the American military would be overstretched if it were to serve in more than two or three theaters of war. So just by doing the math, the Europeans will have to watch out for themselves much more. They will have to invest much more into their defense.

than before and they will be less able to rely on that protection by the Americans. The other point that's crucial for European defense is the United States is a nuclear power and its nuclear umbrella protects many European countries most of whom unlike France and Britain do not avail of their own nuclear weapons. So there's a few American nuclear bombs spread out all over Europe to

to be carried by national fighter jets, German fighter jets, other fighter jets to their targets in case of a war. So that's interesting. What is NATO Secretary General Mark Rota doing to try to keep the U.S. engaged in a meaningful way? I mean, Rota is quite fresh at the head of NATO, but one of the reasons he was picked as new NATO leader was

was the fact that he's seen as an experienced bridge builder, an integrator. He's also said to have a good relationship with Donald Trump, having been called Trump whisperer, actually. So what Ritter has been doing since taking office in October, he has stressed that it was part due to Trump's insistence during his last term that a record number of 23 out of the 32 allies now meet NATO's 2% military spending goal.

That's 2% of national GDP. And that's in comparison to just three countries meeting that target one decade ago. And Ritter also has made it clear that allies will need to get used to the fact that they will have to spend much more than 2% in the future to cater more for their needs in defense.

Trump has called for the target to be raised to 3% and he has called out allies not meeting the goals as free riders. We know from NATO diplomats that Ritter, when he went to see Trump at Mar-a-Lago, he very much stressed the link between the war in Ukraine and the Indo-Pacific with North Korean troops now deployed in the Kursk region in Russia and

And Trump obviously sees China and the Indo-Pacific region as much more important for the US than Ukraine. So by drawing that link, Rutte is actually trying to keep Trump, to keep the US engaged in NATO to prove to them, hey, listen, NATO, the alliance is also important for you.

Now, as you noted, NATO isn't a monolith, right? There are different regions with varying interests and risks. How are members, say, in the Nordic or Baltic states preparing for a possible escalation of conflict with Russia? Yeah, I think, first of all, we might want to mention that, of course, the Baltic states are

do have a lot of experience with Russia, with the Soviet Union. They were occupied

And they have always had a much, much more hawkish position towards Russia than Germany, for example. Baltic states, they're seen as one of the most vulnerable spots of NATO. If you look at the map, you know, they're basically squeezed in between Kaliningrad, Belarus and Russia. And it's only a very short land corridor. It's 60 or 70 kilometers long that actually connects them to Poland and thereby to NATO's mainland.

And if you talk to military sources, they will basically tell you it's going to be very hard to defend. But obviously, this corridor is one main supply route.

But there's only a few railway connections and there's only a few streets that actually connect Poland to the Baltic countries. So in case of a conflict, in case of war, it would be very, very hard to keep that open, which means all the Baltic countries would have to be resupplied with troops, with arms, with everything they need via the Baltic Sea or by plane.

So what NATO decided to do after Russia's invasion of Crimea in 2014 is they established multinational battle groups in the Baltic countries and Poland. So each of these countries got one multinational battle group, each comprising around 1,000 troops and led by one specific country. And these units were meant to act as a tripwire in case of a Russian attack.

some sort of first responders to have boots on the ground while waiting for more reinforcements to follow. And following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February '22, the Allies decided to reinforce these existing battle groups while at the same time establishing four more of these battle groups in Bulgaria, in Hungary, in Romania and Slovakia. So they

effectively doubled the number of troops on the ground right on the eastern flank with troops from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south. So NATO has positioned these units across Eastern Europe, but a lot of the tensions right now are not full-scale war, at least not on NATO soil. What other sort of attacks are we seeing on NATO nations right now? Okay, so...

overtly what we're seeing is that Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered his armed forces to be beefed up to 1.5 million soldiers. He's ramping up arms production and together with the experience Russian troops have gained in the war on Ukraine, the

where Russia is combining modern technologies such as drones with World War I-style trench warfare and the use of heavy artillery, Western security sources now believe that Russia will be capable of attacking NATO territory by the end of this decade.

But hybrid warfare, it's a blend of measures below the threshold of an all-out kinetic war. But hybrid warfare can also include spread of disinformation, cyber attacks, all kinds of other measures that play out in this gray area between war and peace. It's just not like tanks rolling across a border.

It's much harder to attribute in many cases and to actually get under control. For like the last half a year, NATO has accused Russia of stepping up a campaign of hybrid attacks against NATO allies since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 22. This campaign includes an increasing number of cyber attacks, spreading of propaganda. We've also seen arson attempts and acts of sabotage. I

a few countries that have reported such incidents. It's Poland, it's Germany, it's Britain, it's Czech Republic. So the latest incident in mid-November, we saw that two telecommunication cables running along the seabed of the Baltic Sea were cut. Security sources say responsible was a Chinese bulk carrier, which came from a Russian port and basically

basically dragged its anchor on the seabed, thereby damaging these cables in Swedish economic waters. However, it has not been proven yet whether this happened on purpose or by accident. There's other examples. In Germany, incendiary devices were found hidden inside air freight parcels and they caused fires at a warehouse in Leipzig. That's a huge hub for DHL, the parcel company.

So Germany's domestic intelligence chief has said the country narrowly avoided a plane crash, another case that security sources also suspect Russia is behind. But that obviously raised suspicions also in that DHL plane crashed a few weeks ago in Lithuania. So how are these acts of hybrid warfare being carried out in such a way that they aren't easily pinned on any one country?

That's quite interesting, actually. If we are talking about these acts of sabotage, what security sources tell us is that Russia is increasingly hiring thugs and petty criminals for a few hundred euros, posting jobs on Telegram, for example. This means the actions are, one, deniable, and two, they spare scarce Russian resources. How is Russia, and I guess in the case of the Baltic Sea, China, responding to these accusations?

So Russia's response to accusations about hybrid attacks has simply been to deny them. For example, when the head of Britain's MI5 said in October that Russian military intelligence was trying to sow mayhem in Europe with arson and sabotage, the Kremlin said the allegation was unacceptable and unfounded.

The line from Moscow is that the West is in the grip of Russophobia and automatically blames everything bad that happens there on Russia. China, in the case of the Baltic Sea, has agreed to take part in the investigations. But we don't know more yet. Now, we mentioned it earlier, but I want to dig a little deeper into how Donald Trump's second term in the White House might impact the stability of NATO.

First and foremost, Trump says he'll end the war in Ukraine in a day, although he's given little detail of how he'd do that. What does that mean for NATO and broader security in the region? We might see peace negotiations, but there's also concern in the West that Russia might simply use

any lull in the fighting to basically beef up its own forces and to gain strength again for another attack. That's also something that Ukraine is afraid of. So that's one of the reasons why they actually say, okay, we won't settle for anything less than NATO membership. That would mean that they will benefit from Article 5, which is the mutual defense clause, one for all, all for one. And the second option, a troop presence.

with a good chance for Europeans to provide the troops to take part in the burden sharing that Trump demands. Still, given that the front line is longer than 1,000 kilometers, this might put a huge strain on Europeans.

And Trump's got a penchant for ripping up broad coalitions in favor of bilateral deals. During his first term, he pulled the U.S. out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. How might that approach impact NATO? He has that history. But in fact, I think the INF Treaty is actually a bad example for that because I think most NATO countries would really rally behind that.

The INF Treaty signed in 1987 between the United States and the Soviet Union, actually one of the cornerstones of arms control. It outlawed nuclear and conventional ground-launched missiles with a range between 500 and 5,500 kilometer. And by doing that, it actually eliminated an entire category of weapons.

I mean, most people are normally talking about ICBMs, about intercontinental ballistic missiles, so these shorter range missiles may not sound as important. But we have to remember, missiles with a shorter range are seen as particularly dangerous because they have shorter flight times. An ICBM will travel around half an hour before hitting its target.

So this gives you at least this half hour to potentially run checks with your adversary and clear things up. A ballistic missile with a shorter range might only take minutes before impact, which significantly reduces the warning time and time to figure out whether it might just be a false alert before retaliating with your own missiles. So

The reason the Americans quit the INF Treaty in 2019 was that they accused Moscow of violating the accord. And they had done so even before Trump took office. Russia has denied these accusations. But I think in the question of the INF Treaty, NATO is actually standing behind Trump.

Because if the Americans had been sticking to the treaty, it would have bound their hands. And, I mean, we've seen the Oreshnik missile a few weeks ago. Yeah, that Oreshnik missile is a short-range missile that would have violated the INF Treaty. What...

threat does that weapons capability pose to NATO? We know that Putin has used nuclear rhetoric before to intimidate the West, and he's done so on several occasions. This one, the launch of the Oreshnik, is taking escalation a little bit further.

Security experts see the launch on November 21 as Putin saying, look, I do have nuclear weapons and I might just use them. First of all, while NATO will immediately register that such a missile has been launched, Western experts have no way of telling whether the missile is armed with a nuclear or a conventional warhead. And second, once the missile has been launched, its trajectory can be calculated.

But especially right after the start, the precision of this calculation only goes so far. So in the case of the Oreshnik, this means that NATO would not have immediately been able to discern whether the missile would hit a location in Ukraine or actually NATO territory, something bound to cause real alarm.

Well, so you mentioned earlier NATO's ground troop preparation. But in the event that Russia is able to scale up this type of armament, how

How is NATO prepared for a larger scale attack similar to the Ereshnik? This one is really difficult because air defenses, I think, is one of the most complicated topics. Basically, you're trying to hit a bullet with a bullet and there are several layers of air defense. In November 2022, a stray Ukrainian air defense missile hit Polish territory. That incident actually happened.

highlighted huge gaps in NATO's air defenses. There actually was a belt of these systems based along the border between Western and Eastern Germany meant to protect NATO territory from any Soviet attacks. After 1990, many NATO allies scaled down the number of air defense units

to reflect the assessment that they would from now on only have to deal with a limited missile threat coming from countries such as Iran, not like a peer adversary such as Russia. Germany was NATO's frontline state during the Cold War, and at the time Germany had 36 Patriot units. Today,

The German forces are down to nine Patriot units after donating three of them to Ukraine. Berlin has ordered eight new units, but it will take years until they are delivered. Demand is high, everybody's queuing up and production takes a long time. For example, Germany, Spain, Netherlands, Romania and Sweden have ordered 1000 Patriot missiles, which is huge. If you're talking, you know, that's amounts of missiles that we haven't seen any

any time since the Cold War. Okay, so we've discussed heightened threats of military strikes from the air, NATO readying ground troops, psychological warfare, sabotage, espionage. It

It feels like we're on the cusp of a new Cold War. I think we can say that. What people are talking about, all these topics that have come back, is there enough bunker space for the population? Do we still have sirens to warn our citizens? I mean, I grew up in the 80s when we still had siren drills at school. Today, many cities don't even have any sirens left. Now they are wondering, will our warning apps still work in a war?

where the power grid might be affected. This all smells very much like a Cold War atmosphere again to me, and it is a marked contrast to the decades after fall of the Iron Curtain. I mean, after 1990,

Many NATO allies drastically shrank their forces, they got rid of thousands of tanks and scrapped heavy weapons such as howitzers in the belief that Russia simply no longer posed an existential threat. There was a belief that NATO would have a grace period of 10 years to rearm in case Russia turned hostile again. And I've mentioned it before.

suffering from Russian invasions in the past, Eastern European NATO allies have been more hawkish and vigilant than some of their Western neighbors who did not take their warnings seriously. But in the end, it took Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 to cause a fundamental turnaround. So if you ask me, are we in a new Cold War? I would say yes, definitely. And in some ways, it even feels hotter than the Cold War in the 80s.

This time, we have a war raging on European territory involving Russian forces and Western weapons, and many arms control treaties that were in place in the 80s have collapsed in the meantime. To stay ahead in fast-moving markets, you need to transform quality data into tailored, practical, and valuable intelligence.

Access your choice of pre-built and market-validated models fast. And choose AI-powered analytics tools to suit your specific business needs. Experience distinct advantages with innovation, differentiated analytics, actionable insights. Discover new possibilities with LSEC data and analytics. Thanks to Sabine for sharing her extensive reporting and expertise. You can read more of her reporting at reuters.com.

Reuters World News is produced by Jonah Green, Gail Issa, Sharon Reich-Garson, David Spencer, and myself, Christopher Waljasper. Our senior producers are Tara Oakes and Carmel Crimmins. Our executive producer is Lila Dekretzer. Engineering, sound design, and music composition by Josh Sommer. We'll be back on Monday with our daily headline show.

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