Royal Netherlands Navy Adm. Rob Bauer/NATO Military Committee
Adm. Rob Bauer, chairman of NATO’s Military Committee, delivered this speech during the annual Machiavelli lecture at The Hague, Netherlands, in February 2023. It has been edited to fit Sentry’s format.
One year and one day ago at this time, I was standing in my office at NATO headquarters in Brussels. I was looking at a map of Ukraine that we had put up a few months before. And I knew: Tonight I will receive a phone call that the invasion has begun. I sent everyone home early, because it was going to be a short night.
Quarter past four, I got the call. Half past six, I was at headquarters. Half past eight, there was a meeting of the North Atlantic Council where the first facts about the invasion were discussed.
Around the table there was a sense of dismay. Not because we had not seen the invasion coming.
In the months before, intelligence had been shared on an unprecedented scale and NATO’s intelligence picture was better than ever. But dismay because in the course of one night, the course of world history had changed. It [was] a tectonic event. War [was] back on the European continent.
Just weeks before, we had sat down with Russia in a historic NATO-Russia Council meeting. The Russian delegation was ill prepared and uncoordinated in its expressions. The Russian statements deviated so far from reality that they were met only with surprise and calm contradiction by NATO allies.
Russia claimed, among other things, that NATO was responsible for the breakup of Yugoslavia. After which countries like Montenegro, Croatia, Slovenia and North Macedonia one by one asked for the microphone to explain the real course of history.
In the run-up to 24 February [2022], diplomacy was conducted at all possible levels. And while those talks were still being conducted, and all alarming intelligence reports were being denied by the Russian side, the first tanks drove across the borders of Ukraine.
The tracks of the T-72 and T-90 tanks crushed all the mechanisms of conflict resolution and international diplomacy we had built together over the past 70 years. And soon these tanks, along with merciless shell and missile attacks, would wreak unprecedented havoc on sovereign, democratic Ukraine.
The Russian incursion ushers in a new era of collective defense. Not just for Ukraine. Not just for the entire NATO Alliance. But for all free democracies in the world.
The vibrations of the Russian tanks are felt — to this day — as far away as Japan and Australia. For 20 years after the Cold War, NATO Allies tried to establish a balanced form of cooperation with Russia. It was the first country to be designated a Partner for Peace by NATO in 1994. But since the war in Georgia in 2008, Russia has embarked on an increasingly steep downhill path and has now even reached the low level of abducting and mistreating Ukrainian children in a network of so-called reeducation camps.
NATO military authorities have closely followed the Russian pattern of aggression. In response, we have developed strategies for the collective defense of NATO territory to expect the unexpected. Those strategies were sorely needed, because the fundamental difference between crisis management and collective defense is that it is not we, but our adversary, who determines the timeline. We can no longer decide for ourselves where and when we participate in a conflict or what our level of ambition is.
We have to prepare for the fact that conflict will present itself at some point, and then we will either be ready or not. It requires a winner’s mentality. Because in a war, there is no second place.
Collective defense requires a shift in mindset that goes far beyond the armed forces. Preserving peace means preparing for war. Niccolò Machiavelli even goes so far as to say that you have to arm yourself even more strongly in peacetime than in war, both operationally and mentally, because that is when you have the time and space to make yourself stronger and to learn from history.
Time and space are two things Ukrainians absolutely do not have. Since the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, they have been in the highest state of readiness. And together with their Armed Forces, the Ukrainian population has developed a resilience that inspires the whole world.
There is hope. David can indeed [defeat] Goliath.
For people in the military, war is a reality that we face much more often. It is sometimes even claimed that we love it. I know that even after this lecture, people will write that I am a warmonger. Just as I was scolded for murder in 1981 when I walked across [Amsterdam’s] Dam Square in uniform on my way home. I can assure you, Soldiers do not like war any more than doctors like illness or firefighters like fire.
Servicemen and women know far too well the devastation of war and violence. In my 41-year career in the Armed Forces, I have seen it time and time again. The grief and despair of losing a colleague. Someone’s father. Someone’s mother. Someone’s partner. Someone’s child.
The grief of a colleague who, due to a mental or physical injury, can no longer be in the military and pursue his/her life’s purpose. The grief and pain of people who have killed an opponent by order of the Dutch government and have to live with that fact forever. War equals devastation.
That is why the men and women who serve in the Armed Forces are ready to do everything in their power to limit war and preferably even prevent it. Men and women in uniform are steeped in the realization that war is very close.
But in countries like Finland and Sweden, people do feel the threat of war. In a matter of months, these countries have left decades of neutrality behind. This was not an imposed decision by their governments, but a bottom-up movement, spanning all parts of society.
The Finns and Swedes realized that they could no longer rely on the guarantees of the international rules-based order. Neutrality was no longer an option. We too, as the Dutch, are part of that international rules-based order. Our entire prosperity is built on the guarantees of that system and on the assumption that if we trade with a country (like Russia) and are mutually economically dependent, we will never go to war with that country. And the assumption that if we make a country rich (like China), the country will become democratic.
Access the full speech as delivered at https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/opinions_212156.htm?selectedLocale=en