The
greatest amount of mainstream
media
attention,
though, focused on Pew’s findings on the apparent unwillingness of large NATO
member countries’ publics to support the use of military force by their
governments to defend a fellow NATO ally from Russian aggression:
“Roughly half or fewer in six of
the eight countries surveyed say their country should use military force if
Russia attacks a neighboring country that is a NATO ally. And at least half in
three of the eight NATO countries say that their government should not use
military force in such circumstances. The strongest opposition to responding
with armed force is in Germany (58%), followed by France (53%) and Italy (51%).
Germans (65%) and French (59%) ages 50 and older are more opposed to the use of
military force against Russia than are their younger counterparts ages 18 to 29
(Germans 50%, French 48%). German, British and Spanish women are particularly
against a military response.”
This
contrasts strongly with the poll’s findings on these publics’ views on Russia
as a military threat to its neighbors:
And
broad majorities of these publics believe the U.S. would rally to an embattled
NATO ally’s aid:
“While some in NATO are reluctant
to help aid others attacked by Russia, a median of 68% of the NATO member
countries surveyed believe that the U.S. would use military force to defend an
ally. The Canadians (72%), Spanish (70%), Germans (68%) and Italians (68%) are
the most confident that the U.S. would send military aid. In many countries,
young Europeans express the strongest faith in the U.S. to help defend allied
countries. The Poles, citizens of the most front-line nation in the survey,
have their doubts: 49% think Washington would fulfill its Article 5 obligation,
31% don’t think it would and 20% aren’t sure.”
The
German numbers are the most disconcerting. It would be extraordinarily
difficult for the U.S. to mount a ground and air defense anywhere in Eastern
Europe or eastern Scandinavia if we couldn’t use German bases, air and sea
ports, and transportation networks. Even so, the numbers Pew reported for responders
in eastern Germany are not surprising given the longstanding and remarkably
wide pervasiveness of Ostalgie across multiple demographic groups.
So
what gives? And what can policymakers and analysts take away from the results?
For
starters, a poll is only as illuminating as its questions are worded. Many of
the Pew survey’s questions fall into the popularity contest category of ‘do you
have confidence in (fill in the leader’s name) to do the right thing in foreign
policy?’ or ‘do you approve of (fill in the leader’s name)’s handling of (fill
in the international issue)?’ or ‘do you have a favorable opinion of (fill in
name of country or international organization)?’ All this may indicate the
probability that a “low-information” individual will follow some leader or
embrace some organization based on “likability” alone, but it doesn’t tell us
anything about what that individual’s actual policy preferences are (or would
be if they had more information about the choices at hand).
And
therein lies the weakness of most polls: they’re almost invariably too
generally worded to truly help the policymaker and analyst understand what an
informed public would or would not support. For example, consider Pew’s ‘rally
to a NATO ally’s defense’ question:
“Q52. If Russia got into a serious
military conflict with one of its neighboring countries that is our NATO ally,
do you think (survey country) should or should not use military force to defend
that country?”
People
who don’t normally think about how geography or foundational principles of
regional security relate to them in their daily lives don’t tend to take those
intangibles into account in their gut responses to questions like this. And
some might differentiate between an abstract case (e.g., “a neighboring country
of Russia”) and an actual named country they can picture relative to themselves.
So to further refine the data and better understand what people actually
believe or want (as varied across a given country’s regions and demographic
groups), a series of follow-on questions might be desirable:
1.
First, two
questions to baseline whether responders support the core Helsinki
principles at stake, and whether
they believe their country’s relationship within NATO should be transactional
and self-interested.
a. “Do you believe your country, all NATO and EU
members, and Russia should refrain from threatening or violating each others’
frontiers and territorial integrities?”
b. “If Russia committed military acts of aggression or
coercion against your country, would you want the U.S. and other NATO allies to
militarily come to your country’s defense?”
2.
The next three questions
would identify the degree to which responders believed NATO’s defensive burden
should be shared in a conflict in the responders’ own neighborhoods.
a. “If Russia committed military acts of aggression or
coercion against (name of a fellow NATO ally that bordered responder’s country),
would you want the U.S. to militarily come to that country’s defense?”
b. “Would you support U.S. military use of your
country’s territory to defend (name of a fellow NATO ally that bordered
responder’s country)?”
c. “If Russia committed military acts of aggression or
coercion against (name of a fellow NATO ally that bordered responder’s country),
would you want your country to militarily come to that country’s defense?”
3.
The final three would
identify the degree to which responders believed the NATO defensive burden
should be shared in a conflict beyond the responders’ own neighborhoods.
a. “If Russia committed military acts of aggression or
coercion against (name of a fellow NATO ally at a distance from responder’s
country), would you want the U.S. to militarily come to that country’s
defense?”
b. “Would you support U.S. military use of your
country’s territory to defend (name of a fellow NATO ally at a distance from
responder’s country)?”
c. “If Russia committed military acts of aggression or
coercion against (name of a fellow NATO ally at a distance from responder’s
country), would you want your country to militarily come to that country’s
defense?”
We
might not like the answers to these questions, but they would tell us a great
deal more than what we found in the Pew survey.
Lastly,
in digesting the Pew numbers, the slight rebounds in many polled countries
regarding Russia’s and Putin’s “favorability” from 2014 to 2015 ought to be examined
in terms of the possible effects of Russian propaganda. A good poll question to do
this might have been to ask what principal media outlets in a responder's country, including social networks, the responder turned to for trusted news on Russia, NATO, or Ukraine. A
pretty good picture of the information war would emerge from that data.
The
EU is focusing its efforts to counter Russian propaganda on Russian-speaking populations in former
Soviet states, including the Baltics. That’s all fine and good, but it would seem that
the domestic information gaps regarding Russian political, informational, economic,
and military threats to their own countries are in sore need of being addressed
as well. NATO and EU member governments should be reaching out to the independent
press within their own borders with hard and verifiable facts that counter the Putin
regime’s narratives, highlight the Putin regime’s efforts to influence European
politics and policy, and detail the Putin regime’s illiberality at home. National
leaders on both sides of the Atlantic owe their citizens a frank and continuous
dialogue on how the foundational values of European security enshrined in the
Helsinki Final Act are being endangered by the Putin regime’s policies, and
what that should mean to them in their daily lives. Those free electorates should
then be left to decide whether those values are worth defending.
The views expressed herein are solely those of the author
and are presented in his personal capacity. They do not reflect the official
positions of Systems Planning and Analysis, and to the author’s knowledge do
not reflect the policies or positions of the U.S. Department of Defense, any
U.S. armed service, or any other U.S. Government agency.
[i]
Given the Putin regime’s authoritarian nature and the pervasiveness of its
security apparatus, though, I don’t have much confidence that all the Russian
citizens polled gave their true views without fear of repercussions. There is nevertheless more
than enough qualitative evidence elsewhere that a majority of the Russian
people support the Putin regime and its foreign policies. The resolute depth of
that support is what's open to question. I find that Pew’s number highlights the
extreme improbability that there will be any mass popular movements taking to
the streets throughout Russia in opposition to the regime anytime soon. More
importantly, Pew’s findings on the depth of Russian popular irredentism
indicate the improbability of Western-leaning classically liberal politicians coming to power if the Putin regime were to fall.
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