If you are not at war, there will be a limit on what you and your public are willing to spend on things they can’t see,” he told CNN. If you are a peacetime democracy, it’s very difficult to switch to that footing and counterattack your opponent’s non-conventional attacks. “NATO could only go as fast as members were willing to invest. This war mentality is key when dealing with threats that are not boots on the ground, but are just as aggressive and exist in places that are harder to see. Peter Caddick-Adams, a former official NATO historian, explains that it is extremely difficult for nations not currently at war to behave as though they are. To those working in these areas, it came as no surprise that Russia had been so successful interfering in the elections of other nations or that China had so successfully spread disinformation in Western countries during the pandemic. This inertia has also held back the West’s ability to deal with cyber and non-conventional threats from adversaries, including Russia and China.
But in reality, there was no stipulation on what that 2% – even if they reached that threshold – was spent on, so it was never an indication of how prepared or useful they might be,” Giles added. Over time, cynical countries who didn’t feel at risk pointed to the spending of 2% to claim that they were doing enough on defense. “Spending 2% of GDP on defence was supposed to be a baseline – the minimum credible level of defence budget. It is commonly accepted that energy security has been a key feature of the war in Ukraine, with Russia using energy as a weapon against Western allies. These sorts of attacks can have very real-world impact, van Weel explained, referencing a cyberattack that took out German wind farms last year.
And there’s definitely a percentage of our population that falls for this kind of disinformation,” van Weel said. And although we’ve been debunking that for years, you see that this keeps coming back. “Russia claims that NATO promised never to expand to the east after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Those weapons are not only aimed at the target, in this case Ukraine. You can put a gun to their head, you can blackmail them, you can spread disinformation to turn others against them or you can turn off the energy to their house,” David van Weel, NATO’s Assistant Secretary General for Emerging Security Challenges, told CNN. “A weapon, by its broadest definition, is something that you can use to coerce someone into doing what you want them to do.
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