Atlantic Alliance
From The Long Union, an encyclopedia of a world that didn't happen
The Atlantic Alliance refers to the collective institutions and security commitments that bind Western Europe and North America into a single geopolitical bloc. Its core structure rests on three pillars: NATO, the military alliance; the European Union, the economic and political union; and bilateral defence and trade agreements among member states. Since the Soviet collapse of 1991, the Alliance's strategic posture has been defined not by the prospect of expanding to absorb all of Europe, but by the permanent coexistence with the Union of Soviet Sovereign States as a looser, weakly coordinated rival across a long border.
The August Emergency and the Novo-Ogaryovo Accords presented the Atlantic Alliance with an unexpected outcome. The Soviet Union did not dissolve; instead, it transformed into a nine-republic confederation. This meant that the Alliance could not achieve the post-Cold War dream of a Europe "whole and free" extending to the Urals. The departed republics — the Baltic states, Georgia, Moldova, Armenia, and Azerbaijan — departed into independence and vulnerability. NATO expanded to absorb the Baltic states and to bring Poland, Hungary, and the Czech lands under the alliance umbrella, but the fundamental strategic problem persisted: a large, armed, resource-rich Union remained across the border, economically failing but territorially intact.
The Vienna Monitoring Office, established in 1992 under the terms of the Accords, became the chief mechanism by which the Alliance attempted to manage compliance with the borders, minority protections, and peacekeeping arrangements that were supposed to regulate the Union's relations with its departed republics. This was an uncomfortable arrangement for both sides. The Union viewed the monitoring operation as a Western intrusion into its near abroad. The Alliance viewed the Union's persistent instability and disputed borders — particularly in the South Caucasus over Nagorno-Karabakh and in the contested zones between the Union and the departed republics — as a chronic source of humanitarian crisis and potential wider conflict.
By the early 2000s, the Atlantic Alliance faced a different constraint on its Eastern strategy. The Blagoveshchensk Framework of 2005 bound the Union's primary oil and gas exports to Chinese credit and Chinese industrial demand rather than to Western markets. This arrangement bypassed the Alliance entirely. The Union Rouble crisis of 1998 had severely damaged the Union's creditworthiness in Western markets, and the recovery, when it came, ran through Beijing and Shanghai rather than through New York or London.
The consequence was a gradual reorientation of Alliance energy policy. The Union remained hostile and unpredictable, but it was no longer economically integrated with the West. Ukraine, the critical bridge between Union energy supplies and European consumers, became increasingly contested ground. Ukraine had remained technically within the Union until 1995, and its status thereafter — independent but perpetually caught between pressure from the Russian Sovereign Republic and pull toward the European Union — became the central problem of Alliance Eastern strategy. The Alliance could not fully absorb Ukraine without directly confronting the Union; it could not leave Ukraine undefended without permitting the Union to reassert dominance over its energy transit routes.
References
- 1.The Long Goodbye: Soviet successor states and the Union" author]], 2010, University of Chicago Press
- 2.Federalism and Fracture: The Union's Regional Economies" edited collection]], 2016, Oxford University Press
- 3.Vienna Monitoring Office Conflict Resolution Report, 1995–2005, institutional archives
- 4.Strategic Review of Atlantic Alliance Eastern Expansion, NATO Strategic Planning Division, 2008
- 5.Energy and Fragmentation: The Confederal Logic of Russian Federalism" author]], 2018, Harvard University Press