Gen. Petr Pavel chair of NATO Military Committee

WASHINGTON: After two decades of watching the American share of the NATO budget grow from 50 to 75 percent, the alliance’s leadership is determined to learn how to operate without the usual American help, even as nationalist movements roil the capitals of the transAtlantic alliance and Vladimir Putin hacks his way through democratic elections.

Meeting with a handful of reporters in Washington on Wednesday as he prepares for retirement in June, the alliance’s Gen. Petr Pavel said Europe needs to rethink how it readies itself for an uncertain future. “Europe needs to mature and grow up and be more responsible for its own defense,” the Czech general said, adding that it’s time European countries “provide all the capabilities to handle a regional crisis without American engagement, if the United States does not wish to engage.”

After several years of warnings from candidate — and now president – Donald Trump demanding Europe assume more responsibility for its own security, and hearing the same from administration officials traveling in Europe over the past year, he said the alliance is moving toward that maturity.

Pavel was quick to say he “is fine” with the calls from Washington for Europeans to spend more on defense, and feels that the will exists in Europe’s capitals to do so. The US and Europe “have to stay together” to confront shared threats like Russia and terrorism that are on Europe’s doorstep.

Those two problem sets can form a toxic mix, as we see playing out in the U.K. where a former Russian military intelligence colonel who spied for the West was attacked – along with his daughter – by a nerve agent earlier this week. The two, along with a police officer who responded to a call for help, are in critical condition.

The attack recalls a similar assault on Putin critic Alexander Litvinenko in 2006, who was fatally poisoned in London with a rare radioactive metal, polonium. The British government concluded in 2016 that he had been murdered by Russian operatives, likely with the direct knowledge of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Despite Pavel’s reassuring tone, however, Europe is worried.

In a visit with Defense Secretary James Mattis at the Pentagon on Wednesday, Estonian Defense Minister Jüri Luik praised his host’s “personal commitment to the transatlantic relationship,” since, as he deadpanned, “let’s be honest, I mean, without the U.S. commitment, deterrent, the defense capabilities of our transatlantic family would be not sufficient to fulfill all of these complicated tasks which we face.”

Estonia was the recipient of what is widely considered to be the first massive cyber attack against an entire nation. The event was the result of a decision in 2007 to remove a statue of a Red Army solder from the capital of Tallinn. What followed was a wave of botnet attacks that shut down news outlets and government email servers, and took down online banking services for weeks.

Since then, Estonia has been a leader in cyber best practices, and is one of only a handful of NATO countries – including the US, UK, Greece, Romania, Latvia and Lithuania to meet, or approach, the 2 percent goal of defense spending the alliance agreed to in 2014.

There are threats brewing within the alliance as well. The past year has seen a wave of nationalist, and at times xenophobic, politicians who have won elections in NATO countries from Italy, Poland, Hungary, Germany, the UK and the United States. Of this trend, Pavel was less forgiving. Calls for isolationism and appeals to nationalist or ethnic identity politics “is always a substitute for a lack of policies,” he told me. “Whenever a government gets into trouble it turns to nationalism because it is then easy to generate support. But I believe these tendencies will not prevail” among members of the alliance.

In the face of populist movements, it’s important for NATO leaders to recall the shared values of democracy and inclusion, he said, and to “stress the values on which Western democracies are built.”

Pavel was reluctant to single out any one NATO member for criticism, but the recent Russian agreement to sell its sophisticated S-400 air defense system to Turkey was clearly an immediate cause for concern. The move comes after years of tension between Ankara and its allies, which have admonished the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for assaulting and jailing journalists, arresting human rights activists, and rolling back the democratic institutions that Turkey has been slowly building for years.

The radar and missile system – which has yet to be delivered — will have to operate as a standalone unit, since it can’t be networked with any NATO technologies already in the country.

But the system itself is less an issue as the database that will have to be built to make it operational. “The value of the system is in the database,” Pavel said, “and the database will be collected on the territory of a NATO ally, with all allied assets present in Turkey” being mapped and logged into Russian systems, hesaid. Getting the S-400 ready for battle isn’t like handing a soldier a Kalashnikov, which can be used by any untrained soldier. Rather, Russian personnel will be on the ground to instruct the Turkish military how to operate the complicated radars and fire control systems, handing Moscow critical intelligence on what NATO assets are in the country, where they are, and what kind of capabilities they may have.

The United States stores as many as 50 B61 gravity bombs in Turkey, part of the estimated 150 American nuclear weapons spread throughout Europe.

Just as it would be “hard to imagine that NATO experts would be sitting in Russia for several months and feeding the database,” Pavel said, “it is hard to imagine that Russian experts will be sitting in a NATO ally and feeding a Russian system with NATO data.”

On Tuesday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan ripped into his NATO partners for opposing the purchase of the S-400. Greece already operates the less advanced S-300 system, Erdogan said, “but you said that you will not let Turkey acquire S-400. You claimed that the contact with Russia was a mistake. You also said that you might introduce sanctions. We are not going to be accountable to you. We will proceed along the right way without any concessions for the sake of achieving our own goals.”

NATO allies have long been concerned about Russia’s comparative advantages along the alliance’s borders. The United States has helped beef up NATO’s presence in the Baltics by sending hundreds of troops and dozens of tanks and armored vehicles to flesh out new units put in place to deter any possible Russian aggression against it’s former vassal states.

But a new RAND report points out that the 32,000 NATO troops in the Baltics face almost 80,000 highly mobile Russian forces just over the border. Russia also has an advantage in tanks in the region, with 757 main battle tanks, compared with NATO’s 129.

Russia has also placed an emphasis on being able to mass forces in its border regions, the report says, using rail and road networks to “enjoy a significant time-distance advantage in generating combat forces during the opening period of a crisis.” And the NATO advantage in air power would also be significantly tested given the defenses in the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, giving the Kremlin an “advantage in advanced integrated air defenses.”

On top of all that, mil-to-mil contacts that have long been in place to for NATO and Russia to share information appear to have broken down. Pavel shared that NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander, Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, has been trying to meet with his Russian counterpart, Gen. Valery Gerasimov, only to have planned meetings cancelled three times by the Russians. The NATO-Russia Council has not met since October, after hosting three meetings last year. Pavel doesn’t expect another meeting until after the Russian presidential election, which kicks off on March 18.