OPINION: So what is Vladimir’s Putin’s endgame, and where are things headed next?
With the largest concentration of hostile Russian military forces since the Cold War positioned within and around Ukraine, we are now in a new era of history. It will be a period of sustained tensions and contestation between Russia and the West.
For the first time since the height of the Cold War, Russia now has conventional force superiority in Europe. Already Putin has demonstrated the intent and capability to mass large-scale military forces to coercively roll back the clock and occupy the sovereign territory of another country.
This Russian triple threat combined with a Russian leader willing to take risk means Europe and the U.S. will face a level of insecurity and potentially instability that we haven’t faced in decades. Moreover, because of the growing conventional capacities of the Russian and Chinese militaries, the United States must increase its reliance on nuclear deterrence to reduce the chances of a war. NATO’s nuclear posture must be modernized in order for the alliance to be able to deter numerically superior Russian conventional forces from attacking NATO’s easternmost members, including Norway, Lithuania, and Poland in the north, Romania and Turkey in the south, and others in between.
Over the last several decades, the United States and its allies enjoyed an unusual historical luxury of greatly reduced nation-state threats to our national security. Now, unfortunately, as was the case for centuries before, history is returning.
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