Description
In the early 2020s the U.S government has shifted focus from the Middle East and Europe toward the Indo-Pacific. As a result, fewer advanced American military resources are expected to be present in the European theatre. Meanwhile, the Russian Federation has been busy developing military and non-military means of remote warfare, including intermediate and hypersonic nuclear missiles and sophisticated cyber/information warfare capabilities (Thornton & Miron 2019, Brauss & Krause 2021). NATO so far only produced a fragmentary response to the growing disparity in capabilities and Moscow’s proclivity to use means of remote warfare to project power in what it views as a legitimate sphere of influence. This paper reviews the situation in three European sub-theatres, namely the Black Sea, the Baltic Sea and the (European) Arctic region. Whereas some NATO (and EU) measures will bolster resilience, most countermeasures are decidedly insufficient when it comes to dealing with aggression and antagonistic behavior under the Article 5 threshold (Simón & Lanoszka 2020, Elonheimo 2021). America’s over-the-horizon capabilities, touted as partial substitutes for continued U.S. presence in the wider Middle East (Szymanski & Marchman 2021), offer little comfort and alternative means are not deployable quickly enough to offset these challenges.
