John Tefft and William Courtney
This piece is part of a commentary series on the upcoming NATO summit in Washington in which RAND researchers explore important strategic questions for the alliance as NATO confronts a historic moment, navigating both promise and peril.
At this week's summit in Washington, NATO will celebrate 75 years of the most effective defensive alliance in modern history. Alliance leaders seem likely to recommit to what amounts to a “containment-plus” policy toward Russia.
A containment-plus policy seeks to stop or limit some of Russia's harmful activities, such as evading oil sanctions and preventing Russian sabotage in Europe, and to roll back others, such as its occupation of parts of Ukraine.
Russia's attempt to subjugate Ukraine is a direct threat to the security of Europe, and NATO members are confronting it. NATO and its members seek not just to hold aggression in check, but to roll back Moscow's conquests in Ukraine and its expanding hybrid war in Europe.
This is the right policy, so long as Russia is ruled by a regime as aggressive and oppressive as President Vladimir Putin's. As our colleague, former U.S. ambassador to NATO Alexander Vershbow, wrote last year, “Russia needs to understand that there can be no normalization of relations until it once again upholds the fundamental principles laid down in the 1975 Helsinki Final Act, the 1990 Paris Charter, and the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act.”
Russia's attempt to subjugate Ukraine is a direct threat to the security of Europe, and NATO members are confronting it.Share on Twitter
Legendary career diplomat George Kennan, the intellectual father of post–World War II containment policy, wrote in 1947 that “the main element of any U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.”
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