Sanctions may push Russia to challenge the current status-quo.

Rethinking European Security

Charles Doran Jakub Grygiel

In its essential effort to rein in Russia along the European perimeter, the West is making a large and unwitting strategic error. Aided by a 25 percent decline in the price of world oil (and correspondingly of natural gas), the principal source of Russian revenue, the West is trying to curb Russia through the use of economic sanctions. But at the same time, NATO has left the actual territorial security of a number of states such as Kazakhstan or Georgia, to say nothing of Poland and the Baltic Republics, thoroughly vulnerable to manipulation, infiltration, and perhaps direct attack.

The problem is not that revenue denial will fail. The problem is that revenue denial will work all too well in a fashion that NATO least expects and in a fashion that it is unprepared to counter. The West hopes to discourage Russian president Vladimir Putin from risking aggrandizement. But in reality, by neglecting its own European defenses at the same time that it undercuts Russia’s sources of revenue, the West increases those risks. In essence, the West, you could say, has its strategic priorities upside down.

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