STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Dan Hamilton has been listening with us. He served as deputy assistant secretary for European affairs at the State Department in the 1990s. He was responsible for NATO security issues. Welcome to the program.
DAN HAMILTON: Good morning.
INSKEEP: Why is NATO needing to talk about its defense strategy against a Russian attack now?
HAMILTON: I think that the - as Teri just said, you know, the allies in Europe are uneasy. They're uneasy about the continued U.S. commitment to the alliance. They're nervous about Russia's not only conventional war against Ukraine, but the uptick in these unconventional assaults all across the rest of Europe. You know, the U.S. B-1 bombers had to relocate back to the U.S. from the U.K. because of a suspected assault on a U.K. base. There is sabotage at Leipzig Airport in Germany. There's been arson attacks, cyberattacks. So they wanted to hear directly that NATO has a strategy and that NATO, you know, has got it, as General Grynkewich said at the Warsaw Forum.
INSKEEP: Would you talk me through that threat? I mean, when you mentioned the British airbase, of course, that's something that British authorities blame on Iran, not Russia, but some of the others could be traced to Russia. Is there a way for Russia to seriously attack and gain ground in Europe without the full-scale ground offensive that didn't work very well for them in Ukraine?
HAMILTON: Well, the - it's hard to see Russia launching some full-scale attack, especially if it's bogged down right now in Ukraine and any mass movement of forces, of course, would be detected early by NATO. But, you know, think about what Russia's goals might be, is to demoralize European governments, distract them from attention to Ukraine or that they question their own policies to supply Ukraine with armaments that they might then need and get European publics to question their own government support for Ukraine. You know, the Leipzig attack in Germany is - was in a German state right next to crucial state elections in East Germany, where the far right gained significantly, just a couple of weeks ago, and they all have a pro-Russian attitude there.
So instead of thinking of assault, think of a small scenario. You know, you could have armed individuals without insignia just crossing a river in a Baltic state like Narva, Estonia, which is right on the Russian border. Would NATO go to war because of something like that? Is there a consensus among allies on how you respond? These kinds of scenarios are what keep NATO officials up at night because it might be a political move by Putin sometimes to split the alliance rather than...
INSKEEP: Yeah.
HAMILTON: ...A conventional assault.
INSKEEP: When you talked about armed men without - armed troops without insignia crossing a border, of course, that's the way Russia seized Crimea once upon a time.
HAMILTON: That's right, in 2014.
INSKEEP: Does the United States in some way undermine the alliance by lifting sanctions on Russian diesel, something that clearly dismays Europeans?
HAMILTON: Well, they're just at cross-purposes, you know, for the president to announce this, even though there is a U.S. law, as a bipartisan group of U.S. senators said, to stop - that prevents U.S. dollars from financing Putin's war. He went ahead with that announcement anyway. At the same time, as Teri mentioned, the EU yesterday launched the biggest batch of sanctions against Russia that it has since the 2022 invasion. So we are definitely working at cross-purposes here.
INSKEEP: Does it surprise you that the sanctions have not ultimately brought Russia down? Their economy was hurt for a while but seems to have gradually recovered.
HAMILTON: It's a wartime economy. It's being propped up by Chinese support, and I don't think it can sustain itself if it keeps going like this. So the sanctions do hurt, and they force Putin to make tough choices.
INSKEEP: Dan Hamilton is a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University. Thanks very much for your time.
HAMILTON: Thank you.
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