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NATO’s plans for war – and peace

 The alliance’s 75th anniversary is an opportunity for NATO to see security in broader terms than weapons.

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Officers of the White Angels – a special unit of Ukraine’s National Police – help a woman walk into a van during an evacuation to safe areas, in Toretsk, Donetsk region, Ukraine, June 28.
  • By the Monitor's Editorial Board

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the member states of NATO have bolstered their shared military readiness across Eastern Europe and admitted Sweden and Finland to their ranks. Now world leaders gathering in Washington this week to mark the 75th anniversary of the alliance plan to go further. They expect to deepen their military support for Ukraine and extend security cooperation with like-minded partners in Asia.

These measures mark a push within NATO to apply its long-standing approach to building peace through “defense and deterrence” to a new age of threats. Yet within the alliance, some members are also pushing safeguards for collective security that do not rely on military hardware. One national leader, Finnish President Alexander Stubb, said debates about global security are overly based on planning for war. “We also need to start talking about peace and a pathway towards peace,” he told a forum of policymakers in Helsinki last month.

A bilateral security agreement signed Monday between Poland and Ukraine enumerates what Mr. Stubb may have in mind. It sets a “shared responsibility for peace” on “commonly shared principles of democracy, rule of law, good governance, [and] respect for fundamental freedoms and human rights.”

That is just one of 19 such agreements that individual NATO members have forged with Ukraine. While many include supplying Kyiv with weapons, they also include measures to strengthen governance and ensure that children in war zones keep going to school. That dovetails with Sweden’s national security strategy, which links peace to the security of girls and women.

Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas, one of Europe’s foremost hawks in response to Russian aggression in Ukraine, argued that encouraging corruption reform in Ukraine is as important as sending it arms. Her argument corresponds with a bilateral security framework the Biden administration signed with Ukraine last month. It encourages “implementation of Ukraine’s effective reform agenda, including strengthened good governance, anti-corruption, ... and rule of law.”

These building blocks, argued Michael Doyle, professor of international affairs at Columbia University, explain why liberal democracies remain peaceful – at least with each other. “When governments are constrained by international institutions, when political elites or the electorate are committed to norms of liberty, when the public’s views are reflected through representative institutions, and when democracies trade and invest in one another, conflicts among republics are peacefully resolved,” he wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine last month.

In a 2021 speech to the United Nations, U.S. President Joe Biden put that more succinctly. “The future will belong to those who embrace human dignity, not trample it.” Russia’s war in Ukraine is expanding NATO’s approach to security beyond arms. It sees peace rooted in human dignity as unshakable.

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