A just-released Pew Research survey of eight major NATO members does not bode well for peace in Europe, as almost half of each country’s population would not support the use military force to defend an ally if it became engaged in serious military conflict with Russia.
While barely over half of those polled in the United States (56%) and Canada (53%) are for the use of military force in response to Russian aggression toward a NATO ally, less than half of respondents in the UK (49%), Poland (48%), Spain (48%), and France (47%) would support such a response. Italy and Germany are even less willing to fulfill their treaty obligations with levels of support sagging at 40% and 38% respectively.
These numbers are alarming because the scenario envisioned by the poll is a distinct possibility. If the conflict in Ukraine is not enough to stoke the patriotic mobilization that serves as the Putin regime’s only claim to legitimacy, the Russian president may decide to up the ante and start nibbling on the Baltics. Estonia and Latvia are especially inviting targets with 20-25% ethnic Russian populations.
The conventional wisdom is that he wouldn’t dare, because as NATO members, they are protected by the attack-on-one-is-an-attack-on-all Article V of the NATO Charter. But if the domestic political imperatives — Putin’s key motivator all along as he is well on the way to a presidency-for-life — are urgent enough, it is precisely the Baltic states’ status as NATO members that makes them attractive. Exposing NATO (and, first and foremost, the US, Putin’s perennial obsession) as a paper tiger will furnish the Russian dictator with an outburst of domestic allegiance, compared to which the “Crimea-is-ours” hysteria may seem like a soft whisper.
Given the purely symbolic level of NATO deployments in the Baltics, this poll and others (which Putin is likely to monitor almost as carefully as he does the Russian ones) may be making the temptation all the more irresistible.
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