Meelis Oidsalu
Editor for Defense and Governance Issues
Postimees Media
Former Undersecretary for Defense
Ministry of Defense
Estonia
“Hi, my name is Donald Rumsfeld, how are you?” said a man who held out his hand and stepped on the balcony where I was just about to finish my pre-meeting cigarette and chatted with desk officers from other Baltic and Nordic countries. It was August 2001, we were in Copenhagen where the meeting of Baltic, Nordic and U.S. defense ministers was about to start. Mr Rumsfeld had no clue that the event that changed the way his country thinks about security and global politics was only a month away.
Defense secretary Rumsfeld made an honest mistake presenting himself to a 25-year old junior official, as the real head of the Estonian delegation, minister of defense Jüri Luik was not much older, only 35. At that age, Mr Luik was already a veteran diplomat. In 1994, aged only 24, he had successfully led the Estonian delegation during bilateral negotiations with the Russian Federation on the departure of Russian troops from Estonia. Now he was about to ask Donald Rumsfeld to exploit the historic window of opportunity for NATO’s enlargement to the Baltic “peninsula”. Of course, in reality, NATO does not enlarge. Nations can apply to join NATO once they have proven to be worthy of the North Atlantic Treaty.
9/11 provided Estonia and other Baltic nations with the opportunity to prove their military vigor to their future Allies. Operation Iraqi Freedom was Estonia’s first military operation since the end of the Soviet Union. Unlike many other allied countries, the Estonian Parliament had not set any restrictions on Estonian "crusaders". The medical reports show that the first military operation was a “real thing” – eight men from the Estonian infantry platoon, which was the first to arrive in Iraq, were wounded - as much as a quarter of the unit. The Estonian state blindly trusted its warlords and those allied units under whose command the Estonian infantry group was placed. The trust paid off. In March 2004 Estonia together with six other Eastern European countries became NATO member states.
What have we learned about NATO and ourselves as an Ally during the following years? First of and foremost — that collective deterrence really works. After the 2008 war with Georgia Russian Federation has been periodically projecting military power in the vicinity of its borders with the Baltic and the Nordic neighbours conducting massive exercises “Zapad” imitating direct blatant military attacks. Russia has, nevertheless, not once really dared to test Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty.
Second big lesson from two last decades is that NATO is an immense Alliance, and not only in terms of military strength its member states possess, but also in terms of inertness – the inevitable feature of its immensity. Civilians tend to look at military organizations as clean cut, efficient, fast, proactive structures. But military bureaucracy can be the worst kind of bureaucracy. This inherent problem gets even worse when there are thirty two countries trying to coordinate differing political interests. And all this happens simultaneously on two levels of NATO - the diplomatic and the military.
One could say that In theory NATO should not be functioning, it is far too complex. In practice, none of this matters. It may sound like naive hippie-talk, but it is not the formal structure that makes NATO work, but rather the myriad of informal networks and personal relationships forged between diplomats, defense officials and military personnel of different member states.
NATO was established because in the last century Europe was a scarefully messy place. Our ancestors witnessed two industrial scale mass wars with tens of millions of casualties. For Europe NATO was the only feasible way of survival on the continent where Stalin led Soviet Russia had very clearly established its intention to go all the way with the democratic West. For some time after 9/11 NATO focused on out-of-area operations and forgot about its original mission of collective defense against ever expansionist Russia. This changed in 2014 after the occupation of Crimea. Even Germany, for the first time since the Second World War, established a permanent military presence in a foreign country (NATO Battle Group in Lithuania).
After two decades the refurbishment of collective defense has not been finally resolved. Things got a bit ugly before the NATO Madrid Summit of 2021, when Estonia’s Prime Minister Kaja Kallas told Financial Times that our country would be wiped from the map under existing NATO plans.
The response was quick, plans were redesigned and additional forces were assigned to reinforce NATO’s Eastern Flank. NATO’s collective defense is – nevertheless – still a work in progress. Two years after the start of the biggest war in Europe since the Second World War only 18 of 32 member states spent the agreed minimum of 2% of GDP on defense. We can and must do much better. And we most certainly will, because despite all, NATO has proven extremely effective in delivering its main promise – preserving peace to allow Western democracies and econonomies to flourish.