NATO launches largest military exercise since the fall of the USSR

NATO launched its largest military exercise since the collapse of the Soviet Union last Thursday, mustering 50,000 personnel and around 65 vessels, 150 aircraft and 10,000 vehicles  from all 29 NATO allies plus Finland and Sweden.

Scheduled to run for two weeks, Trident Juncture 18 will involve joint military drills in Norway, stretching from the North Atlantic to the Baltic sea. The exercise will recreate the scenario of restoring  Norwegian sovereignty after a foreign attack.

A US Aircraft carrier, the USS Harry S. Truman, with some 6,000 personnel will also participate, making it the first American Navy aircraft carrier strike group to enter the Arctic Circle since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

The exercise is the latest in a series of military escalations between NATO allies and Moscow. Norway shares a land border with Russia along the Kola peninsula, a region peppered with naval bases and restricted military zones. Since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, Norway has beefed up its military force and welcomed increased U.S. troop presence within its borders—a fact that has not escaped Russian attention.

Increased U.S. troop presence “makes Norway less predictable and could cause growing tensions, triggering an arms race and destabilizing the situation in northern Europe,” the Russian embassy in Norway said in a statement on its Facebook page in June.

Despite NATO’s insistence that Trident Juncture 18 l addresses an imagined scenario with a “fictitious aggressor,” Russian officials already reacted to the drill. “The escalation of NATO’s military and political activity in the Arctic region, namely in the immediate vicinity of Russia on the territory of northern Norway, hasn’t gone unnoticed,” said the Russian Foreign Ministry in a statement.

Trident Junction 18 arrives in the wake of already heightened tensions between NATO and Moscow spurred by reports of airspace violations by Russian military aircraft. Russia conducted its own military exercise last month, called Vostok-2018. Toted by the Russian defense ministry as being twice as large as the biggest Soviet maneuvers of the Cold War era, Vostok-2018 included joint drills with the Chinese and Mongolian armies along  Russia’s western border.

The NATO drill also arrives amid a hostile week in Russian and U.S. relations. President Vladimir Putin warned on Wednesday that European nations could face “a possible counterstrike” should the United States deploy new intermediate-range missiles in Europe after withdrawing from the 1987 I.N.F. nuclear treaty prohibiting these weapons.

Still, NATO officials insist that Trident Junction 18  is not about aggression, but about defense and maintaining peace. “Exercises like this make NATO better prepared to counter any aggression, if necessary,” said the Norwegian Armed Forces in a statement. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg echoed this sentiment during a press conference before the drill: “Trident Juncture 18 sends a clear message to our nations and to any potential adversary: NATO does not seek confrontation,” he said. “But we stand to defend all allies against any threat.”

Not everyone agrees. Norwegian parliament member Torgeir Knag Fylkesnes countered to Reuters that “You have to be quite hawkish to view this as something that brings peace in any way.”

The reality is that both NATO and Russia are ratcheting up their respective military activities in forces unprecedented since the Cold War. If ongoing hostilities are not checked, will mutual deterrence be the result?

PHOTO: An AH-64 Apache attack helicopter touches base in Romania during NATO´s Exercise Noble Jump in 2017. Source: NATO / Flickr. Filed under CC.