Commander-in-Chief

45

The tires of Air Force One touched the runway of Copenhagen Airport — Kastrup just after six p.m. A steady rain shower ensured the crowd around the airport was light, and the reception was minimal, but Ryan was met on the tarmac by the U.S. ambassador to Denmark, a few senior NATO staff, and a representative of the Danish prime minister.

The pleasantries out of the way, he folded into his motorcade and headed into the city.

The NATO summit would open at the Eigtveds Pakhus conference venue, in central Copenhagen, next door to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark. Ryan and his entourage would spend the night at his hotel. Tomorrow morning he would go to the Amalienborg Palace for a friendly breakfast with the Danish royal family, and then he’d be on his way to Eigtveds Pakhus, where the real work would kick off at noon.

The afternoon meeting would involve a short speech by the Lithuanian president, Eglė Banytė, requesting help from NATO in both the Baltic Sea and its border regions, to counter the threat of invasion. After this, President Banytė had agreed to yield part of her time to Jack Ryan, so he could back her request for the NATO deployment.

The Lithuanian president would then immediately return to her threatened country; she insisted she had to be in Vilnius if the Russians came; it wouldn’t do for her to be any more safe than her citizens.

The real battle in Copenhagen would begin the next day. Ryan would reconvene with all the other leaders and discuss the emergency proposal. This would be conducted in a roundtable format, and Ryan fully expected a lot of pushback from a large number of the European member states.

There was, officially speaking, anyway, no voting in NATO. The organization bragged about its principle of consensus decision-making, meaning, essentially, that all members had to come to an agreement for anything to happen, except in the case of responding to actions that had been codified into the NATO charter. In theory, this meant that an Article Five violation such as an actual attack on Lithuania would be met with an automatic response from all twenty-eight member states, but the reality was a lot murkier.

Ryan wanted to move troops now, before hostilities began, but the truth of the matter was he wasn’t even convinced NATO would agree to move troops after an Article Five violation.

A final meeting would be held the following afternoon, and there a poll would be taken to see if all members agreed on the proposal. Usually, if a member state or two knew they were seriously outnumbered in their dissent, they would abstain for the good of the institution and allow the action to proceed, but the consensus decision-making principle had the effect of giving veto power over any proposal to twenty-eight out of the twenty-eight nations.

It might have been a great way to avoid war, Ryan acknowledged, but it was no way to fight one.

As soon as Ryan was secure in his suite at the Radisson Blu hotel, he began going over his speech with his staff, troubleshooting any rough spots. When he finished with this he tasked both his NATO ambassador, referred to officially as the United States’ permanent representative to NATO, and the deputy chief of mission, the number-two member of the U.S. embassy here in Denmark, to play the part of NATO members ready to shoot down every one of his proposals.

The three sat around a table in the dining room of the suite. Both the NATO ambassador and the DCM had folders and notebooks full of reference material, but President Ryan had only an empty pad and a pen in front of him.

After the first round of the mock discussion Ryan called a time-out, and lectured the two diplomats about their performance. “Ladies, we’re going to have to take this from the top. You are talking to me like I am the President and you are a couple of people I could fire at will.”

The deputy chief of mission cast a confused look at the NATO ambassador, and then one at Ryan. “Well, Mr. President. That is the case.”

Ryan said, “Nobody’s getting fired for being too tough on me. Take off the kid gloves and tell me what I’m going to hear tomorrow.”

The NATO ambassador said, “Yes, sir, but don’t say we didn’t warn you.”

They then spent another hour on the drill, and when they were finished Ryan felt like he’d been put through the ringer. His two faux-European leaders had brought up every possible protest Ryan could think of, and many he never would have considered.

Secretary of State Scott Adler had watched the entire affair in silence while sitting on a nearby couch, ready to render judgment at the end.

Ryan turned to Adler and took a bottle of water off the table to wet his dry throat. He felt like he’d been talking nonstop. “How did I do, Scott?”

“You did well, Mr. President. You will make a good case for our cause.”

Ryan picked up a negative implication in the comment. “But you don’t think we’ll get the votes, do you?”

Adler said, “If I was a betting man, I’d bet on the Europeans moving with caution, not action, and telling you they would need to see an Article Five violation before deploying into Lithuania.”

Ryan said, “And if there is an Art Five violation? Will they move even then?”

Adler sighed a little. “I hope I’m wrong, but I wonder if they would excuse one event, write it off to hotheads in the military overstepping their bounds, and then demand evidence of a second Article Five.”

Ryan said, “Which will come when Russian Spetsnaz officers high-five each other over beers in the dining room of the Presidential Palace in Vilnius.”

Adler said, “Again, I hope I’m wrong, and I hope there is consensus.”

Ryan asked, “Anything I can do to up my chances?”

“Just give it your best shot, don’t make it personal between you and them, and be ready to roll with the punches.”

Ryan knew Adler was worried about his President losing his sense of decorum and becoming argumentative. Ryan found himself sharing his secretary of state’s concerns. He said, “And you be ready to deal with the diplomatic fallout if I screw up.”

Adler chuckled. “Trust me, Mr. President, I’m ready. Frankly, sir, if you didn’t have a mouth, I wouldn’t have a job.”

The meeting kicked off more or less on time, although the arrival of twenty-eight world leaders to a single place resulted in what Ryan considered to be a maddening amount of protocol, mostly unofficial, in the form of who had to shake whose hand first or which prime minister stepped up to greet which president in which order. There were cameras present as the principals entered the conference room and posed for a group photo, and Ryan knew media in each nation here would talk themselves silly if their leader was shown less deference by the behavior of other leaders.

The photographers in attendance were given fifteen minutes to chronicle the absurdity of it all, and then the cameras were shuffled out of the room and the twenty-eight men and women and their senior advisers got down to work.

The secretary general of NATO was the former prime minister of Norway, and well liked by everyone in the room. Ryan wasn’t a fan of the man’s policies, but got along well enough with the guy. After his short speech to kick off the emergency meeting, he recognized Lithuania’s president, and she read a prepared statement to the room.

Eglė Banytė was an eloquent speaker, her words were impassioned, and the English interpreter kept the running translation up in Ryan’s ear with incredible skill.

After ten minutes she ceded to Ryan, and the secretary general turned the floor over to the American President. He stood at the lectern and cleared his throat while the eyes of twenty-seven national leaders turned in his direction.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I appreciate the opportunity to speak before you today. My staff has placed a briefing booklet in front of you that covers what I am going to say here in more detail. I’d just like to ask for a few minutes of your time so I can make my case directly to you.

“When Russia’s president Valeri Volodin was the beneficiary of a strong energy sector, he was a dangerous man. He increased military spending by twenty percent, he adopted or restarted provocative and threatening initiatives involving his intelligence, military, and even his nuclear weapons programs. He brought his Navy to full combat readiness; he began overflying NATO nations from the border of his country all the way to the United States with strategic bombers. He threatened maritime commerce with his Navy, commercial airline routes with his air force. He harassed dissenters, he assassinated enemies, and he imprisoned those with whom he had business disagreements. He used his police, his spies, and his soldiers as blunt instruments to increase his power, both domestically and internationally.

“Again, he did all this at the height of his success. During the good times.

“Now Valeri Volodin is failing on all fronts, and for this reason, I submit to you, he has only become more dangerous.

“Back when things were good for him it appeared nothing could touch him. Certainly he felt he was invincible, and one of the consequences of this was the Ukrainian invasion.

“Ukraine looked toward the West to increase its economic and cultural ties, and Volodin panicked. Other former nations of the Soviet Union who have chosen freedom have found prosperity, and the Kremlin sees these nations as an existential threat to its backward and autocratic ways. The Kremlin cannot allow its subjects to witness the success of its neighbors, because then they would demand change for themselves.

“Volodin calculated that we would do nothing when he attacked Ukraine, so he attacked Ukraine. We did not do nothing, so he doesn’t own all of Ukraine. But we did not do enough, so today a large swath of that country is nothing more than a Russian puppet state.

“We’ve lost eastern Ukraine, but its loss illustrates something important. In the eyes of Valeri Volodin, Russia’s security depends on the insecurity of its neighbors.

“Now he sees a new threat: a Baltic region allied with NATO, increasing their ability to meet their energy needs without dependence on Russia. He sees Lithuania specifically as a successful and independent nation that serves both as demonstration of the failures of his policy and a potential corridor to his province on the Baltic Sea. He needs a victory. It will help Russia’s economy, bolster the Kremlin’s power, and take the pressure off him after his string of losses.

“Russia’s hybrid warfare against Lithuania is purposefully ambiguous. As long as Russia’s aggression stays below a certain threshold, there will be enough pundits and pacifists in the West assuring everyone that the real threats are not in Russia, but in the West. They will continue saying this until the facts on the ground are so utterly different from what they assert that the world will have no choice but to come to the conclusion that the pacifists were wrong, but by then it will be too late to do anything about it.

“People speak of hybrid warfare like it is a new phenomenon. But there is nothing new about it. Valeri Volodin’s Kremlin is executing the time-tested battle plan of using the full spectrum of power. In the United States, we refer to this under the acronym DIME. Diplomacy, information, military, and economics.

“DIME starts with diplomacy. Volodin’s Russia is pulling away from all international norms, violating treaties, making pacts with our enemies to increase Russia’s power at the expense of democracies, world bodies, agreed-upon standards of behavior. They’ve left the European Court of Human Rights, and they have breached every agreement and security assurance they have given in the past twenty years.

“He is diplomatically isolated because of the hostility of his regime, but his diplomats continue to aggressively pursue Russia’s policy in whatever venues remain open to them.

“On the intelligence front, he is swinging for the fences. For one, I believe FSB has a worldwide operation to bolster energy prices. If he can get oil and gas prices to rise, this will augment his power, both at home and abroad. The assassination of the prosecutor in Venezuela going after corrupt oil officials, the killing of the Saudi deputy minister of petroleum and mineral resources, the oil rig attack in Nigeria. Plus the attack on the LNG facility in Lithuania. It is no coincidence that all these events have happened in the past few weeks, and it is also no coincidence that they all have the effect of benefiting Volodin. We’ve seen gas prices shoot up fourteen percent in the past month, and crude prices a shade over nine percent.

“On the military front… well, we all saw what happened yesterday with the crash of SA44. Volodin is blatantly positioning an invasion force near his neighbors, threatening ships in the Baltic and filling the skies with military aircraft, with catastrophic results. He’s doing all this because he is gambling that the West isn’t committed to the fight against him, that we will allow him to absorb the Baltic back into his sphere of influence.

“It is on the last letter of DIME — economics — where we have seen his greatest failure. He began with this, and it was all he needed for a time. When oil and gas prices were high, Volodin used his energy companies, Gazprom and Gazprom Neft, as a weapon. But oil and gas prices have plummeted from last year’s highs, and Europe is an unfriendly market because Volodin has used Gazprom against you for so long that you found other sources of energy.

“The notion that energy only flows from East to West is outdated. Right now Western nations are supplying Ukraine, via Poland and Slovakia. The Nord Stream pipeline is up and running, and the Central Europeans are better off, because LNG going directly into Germany could be sent from Germany into Central Europe if Russia cuts them off again.

“At the height of the market Gazprom was worth three hundred sixty billion U.S. dollars. Now it is worth fifty billion. I will put it very simply. Gazprom’s business model is dead.

“Russia’s business model: using energy revenue to build the military, and using Europe’s need of energy as a way to threaten it… this model is also dead.”

Ryan took a sip of water before continuing. “So what is Volodin doing to reclaim his power? He has decided that if he can’t stay big, then he must make his adversary small. He is trying to drive a wedge between the United States and Europe, and to emasculate NATO by ripping away Lithuania, showing the weakness in the organization. He wants to turn NATO into nothing more than a piece of paper. If he accomplishes this he will give himself the strongest military power in Europe, and he will do it without a protracted war.

“Russia can’t win a protracted war, but it can harass, it can block, and it can terrorize. I ask you all to look around at the state of the world today. This is exactly what Russia is doing.

“President Volodin knows that many Western European nations take the stance that dialogue is preferable to confrontation. They talk in circles while they look at the chessboard, but they do not move any pieces. But the Baltic States are allies of America and NATO partners. If they are attacked and we do nothing, our friends will know the NATO they once respected has become an empty promise.

“Deterrence only works if Volodin believes the West will act. Right now he doesn’t believe that, so there is really no limit to what he might try to achieve. We, as an alliance, need to show the Russians our collective resolve.”

Ryan looked around the room slowly, taking his time. “How do we do that? What’s the solution to the crisis? Step one, recognize and come to terms with the fact Russia’s actions of the past year have changed European security forever, and we will not return to where we were before. The realization that a new normal is upon us is crucial if we are to take the bold steps necessary.

“Step two, more economic sanctions against the Russian elite. Thousands of Russia’s most prominent do their shopping in the West, their banking in the West, they send their children to school in the West. Increasing sanctions on the privileged and powerful would be easy for us and relatively harmless to us, but devastating for the decision makers in Russia.

“Step three… We call on NATO to immediately deploy the Rapid Deployable Corps into Poland. A decision in the next days could put substantial forces into the area within a week, and within a month the risk of an invasion from Russia would be greatly reduced.

“Step four, ladies and gentlemen, is the most urgent and most important of all. We call on NATO to immediately deploy the Very High Readiness Joint Task Force to Lithuania, positioning them on both the Kaliningrad and Belarusan borders. The VHRJTF could be moving within twenty-four hours, and they could be in position in seventy-two. While this force is no match for any real Russian attack, it could serve as a tripwire, and may cause President Valeri Volodin to pause, to reflect on the consequences of an attack. It would show him NATO was willing to fight for Lithuania.

“I am talking about a temporary NATO presence in Lithuania and Poland, not a permanent NATO base. As soon as the current crisis comes to an end, we will move to withdraw the rapid response units from Poland and Lithuania.

“I am under no illusions here. I fully expect Russia to react negatively to these proposals. They will respond to this move by us, and we will not like their response. But it is my fervent belief that the actions they are making now are a result of our inaction in the past, and we cannot let this continue.”

Ryan paused again and looked around the room. “Volodin does not have a better military, a better economy, or better ideas than the West. To date, Volodin has had an advantage over the free nations of the West in one valuable commodity.” Ryan held up his finger. “Just one.” After a pause for effect, he said, “Simply put, he has will. President Volodin has the will that we do not. And he has this in excess.”

Ryan said, “There is an impression in the West, even now after all that has taken place, that the existing security order in Europe is stable. There are rules by which nations live, and those rules ensure peace. And since peace is in everyone’s best interests, why would this ever change?

“Ladies and gentlemen, Russia is rewriting the rulebook right in front of us. They are not waiting for tomorrow. We should not, either.”

Jack Ryan sat down. The room was quiet after his speech, but these were never raucous affairs, so he hadn’t expected anyone to throw confetti.

After the meeting was adjourned, Ryan spoke privately for a few minutes with President Eglė Banytė and assured her he’d do everything in his power to support Lithuania. She thanked him, expressed her belief that the motion would be approved, and headed for the airport.

Ryan appreciated her positivity and her staunchly brave face.

But he wasn’t nearly so sure.