NATO’s Military Schengen

The UK reached a deal with Estonia last week for the former’s 4^th Combat Brigade to be on high readiness to deploy to the latter where it would meet up with those British troops that are already there. Shortly after, the news broke that the UK also plans to sign a similar defense deal with Germany later this week, which will allow for joint exercises in Estonia and/or Lithuania and joint military procurement too. For those who aren’t aware, Germany is building a 5,000-soldier-strong tank brigade base in Lithuania.

Some context is required to better understand the motivations behind these complementary moves. Last November, NATO logistics chief Lieutenant-General Alexander Sollfrank suggested the creation of a Schengen-like military corridor for facilitating the movement of troops and equipment through the EU. The first stage of this “military Schengen” was then launched in late January between Germany, Poland, and the Netherlands, following which France announced that it’ll join in early June.  

The Netherlands has deep-water ports that could be used by the Anglo-American Axis to easily ship large amounts of troops and equipment to Europe, where they’ll then pass overland via rail and road to Germany and Poland en route to Ukraine and/or the Russian-Belarusian Union State’s borders. As for France’s inclusion, it considers itself Germany and the UK’s equal in managing European military affairs, plus it might plan to expand the military Schengen as a means of spreading its influence in the Balkans.

France already announced its intentions in February to upgrade its forces in Romania to the brigade level by next year together with deploying more tanks and artillery there too. The general in charge of France’s newly created land command for Europe then told Politico in early August that more must be done to facilitate military movements, which preceded the outlet’s latest update about that earlier this month where they wrote about its logistical problems ahead of spring’s large-scale drills in Romania.

French President Emmanuel Macron ominously threatened at the start of the year to stage a conventional military intervention in Ukraine under certain circumstances, which he later specified include bolstering Ukrainian forces in Odessa if Russia’s begin to approach it. Readers should also be aware that Romania is constructing something called the “Moldova Highway” for speeding up the deployment of NATO troops and equipment to Ukraine’s borders from Greece’s Mediterranean ports.

In early June, British media reported on the five corridors that NATO would rely upon for dispatching forces to that frontier on an emergency basis in the event of a major crisis, which includes the earlier described Dutch-German-Polish and Greek-Bulgarian-Romanian ones, et al. The military Schengen doesn’t yet include the bloc’s Balkan members and hasn’t been tested at scale so far so it’s not all that viable right now, but it could certainly come to pose a serious threat to Russian interests with time.

The Balkan dimension of these plans is taking a backseat to the Central European one, where the UK was actually the first to get involved over a year and a half prior to Sollfrank’s military Schengen suggestion. It signed a trilateral military alliance with Poland and Ukraine one week before the special operation began, and it was this arrangement which convinced Zelensky to ditch the draft peace deal with Russia around that time at Johnson’s urging since he knew he could rely on it to maintain hostilities.

That proto-military Schengen laid the contemporary basis for this new namesake initiative, which was already written about above, is also informally expanding into the Balkans too. Taken together, the traditional Western European leaders of Britain, France, and Germany are engaged in an intriguing interplay whereby they’re preemptively positioning themselves for a potential hot war with Russia. The US is pulling the strings since it wants them to contain Russia at its behest as it “Pivots (back) to Asia”.  

The already over two-and-a-half-year-long NATO-Russian proxy war in Ukraine, which has since morphed into a “race of logistics” that’s also been described as a “war of attrition”, has greatly offset the US’ initial plans to prioritize China’s containment by distracting it and degrading its previously large stockpiles. The US is incapable of simultaneously containing Russia and China with equal gusto, ergo why it must “Lead From Behind” to channel the Obama Administration’s description of its role from the 2011 War on Libya.

What’s meant by this concept is that the US is increasingly forced to rely on like-minded regional partners to advance their shared goals since the global systemic transition to multipolarity is leading to the gradual end of America’s erstwhile unipolar hegemony. More burden-sharing will therefore be required between the US and others, to which end the troika of Britain, France, and Germany (the latter of whom plans to build Europe’s largest military) will be tasked with containing Russia in the future.

To be sure, the US will not voluntarily withdraw from Europe in its entirety, it just wants the Europeans to step up and shoulder more responsibilities instead of relying mostly on America like they’ve thus far done at the expense of Washington’s larger objective of more muscularly containing China in the future. Although this grand strategy is associated in the media with Trump, it’s already being applied to a certain extent by the Biden Administration, which feels coerced by global systemic circumstances into doing so.

Having explained the context within which the latest military moves of NATO members Britain, Estonia, and Germany are being made, it’s now time to briefly talk about their practical relevance. Germany and the UK will probably participate in building what’s been described as the “EU defense line” along the Baltic States and Poland for fencing off the Russian-Belarusian Union State. This project could also foreseeably expand to include new NATO member Finland too with Anglo-German support as well.

From a military perspective, NATO’s Baltic members of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are considered the most vulnerable to Russia, ergo the UK’s latest focus on expanding its security ties with the first and the third while the second comes between them and will naturally be included in this framework. Germany’s new base in Lithuania serves as Berlin’s military anchor in the Baltics, which it can now easily access via the military Schengen that’ll probably be expanded to include those three Baltic States soon.

Their adjacency to Russia coupled with their varying proximities to St. Petersburg and Moscow, which would be prime targets in the event of a NATO-Russian hot war, makes them the predictable convergence point between some of the bloc’s top militaries for containing and threatening Russia. Poland is conspicuously omitted from these plans, at least officially for now, but that might be attributable to its new Germanophilic government subordinating its interests to Berlin since December.

Keen observers like Onet’s Witold Jurasz noted that Poland wasn’t mentioned by Zelensky last week as one of the five countries with which Ukraine shared the secret annexes to his “Victory Plan” (the US, UK, France, Italy, and Germany). Social media is also full of sharp commentary from Central Europeans about Poland’s similar exclusion from Friday’s meeting in Berlin between the American, British, French, and German leaders. As Jurasz noted, Poland appears to have dropped out of the diplomatic game.

That’s not to say that it might not stage a comeback, especially if it makes progress on its plans to compete with Germany for building Europe’s largest military, but just that its envisaged regional role as a kingmaker in the Ukrainian Conflict very clearly hasn’t yet come to pass and might ultimately never. Poland is being overshadowed in this regard by Germany, which together with the UK appear to be the US’ preferred partners for containing and threatening Russia in the Baltics as was explained in this piece.

Looking forward, these ambitious plans will struggle for the time being due to five reasons. First, there’s no realistic diplomatic or military end to the Ukrainian Conflict in sight right now so the US might feel pressured to retain its force presence Europe until then, which could lead to its continental partners slacking on implementing the military Schengen for shouldering more responsibilities against Russia. This could push back the US’ plans to “Pivot (back) to Asia” for a potentially indefinite period.

Second, January’s military Schengen and its first expansion to France have yet to be tested at scale, and there might predictably be a lot of work that must first be done for optimizing its primary Central European corridor before it becomes viable in emergencies. It’s no small matter to synchronize the bureaucracies of traditionally disparate countries like France and Poland for example, each with their own ingrained working cultures. No meaningful progress is thus expected anytime soon.

Third, the military Schengen would have to formally expand to include the Baltic States and Scandinavia (Finland is considered part of the latter in this context) in order to have a chance at approaching its full potential in this respect, but that also hasn’t yet happened. Even if they all formally join sometime soon, as was written above in the preceding point, a lot of work would still have to be carried out to optimize their respective military logistics corridors. Once again, nothing significant is expected on this front soon.

Fourth, NATO has already depleted the bulk of its stockpiles by supplying Ukraine since early 2022, and they’ll have to produce more replacements before they can have enough excess capabilities to spare for rapid deployments at scale to the Russian-Belarusian Union State’s borders. In the worst-case scenario, they can always send what they’ve maintained for meeting their minimum national security needs, but even that is much less than before. In other words, no meaningful progress is expected anytime soon.

And finally, the military Schengen concept presupposes a hot conflict of controllable escalation with Russia that remains below the nuclear threshold, which can’t be taken for granted. Moreover, even if that unfolds, then Russia could target logistical chokepoints along these corridors. When reflected on, NATO’s military plans against Russia – both in general and regarding the latest developments – are indeed ambitious, but perhaps overly so and might thus never fully materialize as planned.