At NATO, work on a new strategic concept is entering the decisive phase.

Secretary General Stoltenberg sent the member states an initial draft, and the foreign ministers recently discussed it.

The text remained confidential for the time being;

it will change several more times before the heads of state and government meet in Madrid at the end of June.

But then the new concept should be in place and set the direction for the next ten years.

One thing is clear: it will have to describe a radically changed security situation, especially with regard to Russia.

Thomas Gutschker

Political correspondent for the European Union, NATO and the Benelux countries based in Brussels.

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The old concept from 2010, which is still officially valid, now reads like the document of a vanished world.

"Today there is peace in the Euro-Atlantic area," it says, "the threat of a conventional attack on NATO territory is low." One does not regard "any country as its enemy."

Especially not Russia, with which one would like to have a “real strategic partnership”.

These passages are a reminder of how short the half-life of such paper can be.

Here it was already obsolete after four years when Russia annexed Crimea and thus forcibly shifted the borders in Europe.

For NATO, this initiated a trend reversal: away from missions for stabilization outside the alliance area, back to the defense of its own members.

Does the founding file belong “in the trash”?

The new concept is emerging amidst the strategic competition between the great powers and the largest conventional war in Europe since 1945. Russia has also invaded Ukraine, a partner country that the alliance had promised membership.

The Member States must find an answer to this.

In any case, they will portray Russia as a threat to the international order and to their own security;

That was already the direction of the final declaration of the NATO summit in June 2021. At the time, however, the alliance still stuck to the three Ds: Deterrence, Defense, Dialogue - in English: deterrence, defense and dialogue.

The framework for the dialogue was set by the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act.

Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, the Alliance has moved away from this political document in two steps.

It stated that Moscow had said goodbye to this and that it would not stand in the way of the necessary reinforcement of the eastern flank.

Does the third step now follow: that NATO also terminate the agreement?

It doesn't look like that.

British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss has already stated that the Founding Act "belongs in the trash";

also in Paris one sees it similarly.

However, Germany and some other Western European countries are persistently campaigning for the text to be preserved as an “empty shell”.

The reason given is that one should not think of relations solely in terms of the current war situation;

it could be that the situation is changing in Russia too.

In addition, they do not want to put themselves on the same level as the Kremlin, but rather remain "morally superior".

The East-Central European countries initially reacted allergically.

Now they say they can live with it.

Germany has credibly assured that it will not invoke the Founding Act to thwart a significantly larger troop presence there.

Even the gutting of the Founding Act has serious consequences.

NATO is thereby releasing itself from its commitment not to permanently station substantial combat troops.

Allianz and Russia have never made any binding agreements on what “substantially” means, what “permanently” means.

Reference is now also made to the changed situation.

The 1997 commitment was linked to the "current and foreseeable security environment" - that is, to the world that is still reflected in the strategic concept of 2010, but is now history.

Biden cautious on nuclear issues

This raises a second, quite thorny question: What does this mean for nuclear deterrence?

In the Founding Act, Member States also acknowledged "that they have no intention, plan or reason to deploy nuclear weapons on the territory of new members" and that they do not see the need to "change the nuclear posture or policy to change NATO on any point".

Remarkably, as early as November 2021, Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg warned the emerging traffic light coalition against questioning the stationing of these weapons in Germany.

The alternative is that they could otherwise reappear in "other European countries", "also east of Germany".

A wink with the fence post.

The coalition then actually committed itself to “nuclear sharing”;

it even wants to acquire modern, nuclear-capable F-35 fighter jets.

As part of the strategic concept, the federal government does not want to touch on the subject.

America has also been holding back so far;

Joe Biden is extremely cautious on nuclear issues.

And yet Putin put the alliance in a difficult position with his nuclear threats at the beginning of the war.

At the beginning of April, the Polish government was demonstratively “open” to American nuclear weapons.

If Putin keeps igniting, it will be difficult to force this genie back into the bottle.