Thomas Graham
Introduction
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 put an end to European security as a cooperative project. That project was grounded in the so-called Helsinki Decalogue, a declaration within the 1975 Helsinki Final Act that laid out agreed principles of conduct between the West and the Soviet bloc.1 In the years and decades that followed, European security grew in complexity and scope, especially after the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet Union. Arms control agreements, institutional arrangements between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Russia, and the agencies of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) gave an ever denser structure to the security order. That order has collapsed. European security needs now to be reimagined and rebuilt during what promises to be a prolonged period of Russian hostility and obstructionism.
In this time of great uncertainty, the natural tendency is to defer long-term planning for Europe’s future security and focus on managing urgent matters—particularly as the war in Ukraine rages, governments struggle against “Ukraine fatigue” among their publics, and Ukraine’s battlefield fortunes wane. When the West believes that the goal should be Russia’s strategic failure lest it press further westward into Europe, a dispassionate discussion of future security arrangements is difficult to conduct.
Absent long-term planning, however, the future unfolds as the outcome of disparate measures taken for tactical reasons rather than as a matter of strategic design. This approach will yield a suboptimal arrangement for European security. The United States and its allies and partners need a strategic vision for the future around which to coordinate policies and operations in the years ahead. Even if the vision never fully materializes, as unforeseen contingencies inevitably intervene and force course corrections, it will lend purpose to current choices.
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