Everything to Gain By a Russia-NATO Partnership

SITUATION: Russian President Dmitry Medvedev will meet US President Barack Obama and leaders of other NATO countries on 20 November for the first summit of the NATO-Russia Council since the August 2008 war in Georgia. The heads of states will discuss a joint assessment of common threats prepared by their diplomats, cooperation in missile defense, and sign off on expansion of transit from and to Afghanistan via Russia.

ANALYSIS: Relations between NATO and Russia, which came to a freezing point in the wake of the August 2008 war in Georgia, were thawing throughout 2010 and this process will culminate when, as Russian diplomats hope, Moscow and Brussels sign off on the joint assessment of threats that Russian and NATO experts and diplomats have been crafting since December 2009.

According to Russian diplomats, the 25-page joint assessment, which Moscow expects to be endorsed at the 20 November summit, has five sections that focus on international terrorism, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), threats to vital infrastructure, including threats to nuclear facilities, threats emanating from Afghanistan, and piracy.

Russian diplomats' description of the assessment is corroborated by NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen who in a 15 November interview published in the Russian daily Kommersant promised that at the summit "we will see fairly positive results, including practical solutions for the problems of nuclear security, terrorism, Afghanistan." In a separate statement the NATO chief said Moscow and Brussels would also agree to conduct a joint review of 21st-century security challenges "because we are faced with the same security threats."

Apart from discussing the joint threat assessment, the Russian delegation led by President Dmitry Medvedev and their NATO counterparts will clinch agreement on transit of NATO cargoes from Afghanistan to Europe via Russian railways in what would be the first time NATO armored vehicles will be allowed through Russian territory. Separately from the Russian delegation, NATO leaders will meet to endorse the new NATO strategic concept at the first day of the 19-20 November summit in Lisbon. The concept, which will probably expand the Alliance's missions to include missile defense, cyber security, and combating piracy as well as reaffirm older missions, such as territorial defense and nuclear deterrence, is not expected to refer to Russia as a threat. (In comparison, Russia's 2010 Military Doctrine lists NATO as a primary source of external military threats to Russia).

With the summit just days away NATO and Russia were yet to agree on assessment of some of these challenges to say less of joint action against them. Russia does not share US and European assessments that Iran poses a missile threat and that therefore a missile defense needs to be built to counter the Iranian missile threat, Russian diplomats were quoted in the November 15 issue of Kommersant as saying.

Russia's position is that the joint missile defense should be able to intercept short and medium range missiles only and constrained geographically only to regions where there are real threats. The Active Layered Theatre Ballistic Missile Defense (ALTBMD) - which NATO is to endorse at its November 19-20 summit in Lisbon - complies with Russia's wishes for range limitations. The system will have a range of less than 1,000 km and will be used to protect troops in Europe. In its planned configuration, ALTBMD will not threaten the capabilities of the Russian strategic forces. As renowned Russian arms control expert Pavel Podvig put it in the November issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, "there is no harm in not building it - it won't be able to offer much protection anyway." 

More importantly, substantive cooperation between NATO and Russia on missile defense will move the entities away from the organizational standoff in which their militaries are still locked towards cooperative efforts in what will enhance predictability and stability on the European continent.

BOTTOM LINE: Russia should and likely will accept NATO's invitation in Lisbon to cooperate on missile defense, albeit the real cooperation will probably be limited to exchanges of data collected by radars, while Moscow, on one side, and Brussels and Washington, on the other, will continue to disagree on whether and what missile threats Iran poses.

Reaching consensus on common challenges to NATO and Russia is very important because once Moscow and the alliance finalize joint assessment of threats they will proceed to develop a joint plan of action of combating these threats. "The assessment gives the answer who is to be blamed while after that we will decide what do," a Russian diplomat told Kommersant on 15 November. Crafting and implementing such a plan of joint action would amount to a qualitative change from the NATO-Russia Council's half-hearted cooperation agenda, which had mostly boiled down to exchanges, war games, cargo transit, and occasional dispatches of Russian warships to NATO missions, before the freeze that came after the 2008 war.

The joint actions against the gravest of hard security threats, such as proliferation, WMD terrorism and failure of states would elevate relationship between Russia and NATO to that of a substantive and sustainable partnership, if not an alliance, which would be firmly based on long-term common interests and which would greatly benefit both sides in the post-Cold War world characterized by geopolitical tectonic shifts and empowerment of non-state actors.