Ends, Ways, and Means

Recent policy shifts in Washington mean NATO’s June summit in The Hague will undoubtedly focus on support for Ukraine and member states’ defense spending. The alliance, however, needs not only a military strategy but also a coherent political strategy based on the principles of “‘ends, ways, and means”: clear objectives, efficient methods, and sufficient resources. 

NATO already has the goals and increasingly robust capability means, but it misses approaches to deal with hybrid warfare, or so-called gray-zone or sub-threshold operations, which the alliance’s new secretary general has labelled a “destabilization campaign”.

For the past decade, NATO—in particular its European members—has actually faced multiple such campaigns, and the frequency has only intensified since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Russia’s “long confrontation” through “weaponization of everything” is based on a covert war aimed at threatening the lives of Europeans and weakening the West’s unity and resilience. Moscow’s campaigns combine conventional kinetic warfare with unconventional strategies associated with non-kinetic tactics, such as disinformation, cyberattacks, infrastructure sabotage, assassination attempts, national election infiltration, and weaponization of all tools of national power. But the Kremlin is not acting alone. 

President Vladimir Putin’s alliance with North Korea, following one sealed with China in 2022 and one with Iran in 2024, indicates a coordinated effort to escalate confrontation with the West and, more broadly, with democracies worldwide in an attempt to establish a new global order. Putin has created at home an economy on a long-term war footing and is leading a grand strategy to which liberal democracies have yet to respond appropriately. His tactics involve the threat and practice of invading neighboring sovereign nations to exert control over Russia’s peripheries, a goal reminiscent of colonial conflicts. He also uses a sophisticated strategy of permanent, low-intensity conflict that relies on hybrid warfare.

To counter this, NATO and the EU need to react by improving their cooperation through a whole-of-government approach that integrates all national instruments of power known as DIMEFIL: diplomatic, information, military, economic, financial, intelligence, and law enforcement tools. The transatlantic partners need to join with allies further afield to address threats in each of these seven areas.

• Diplomacy: to fight “wolf warrior” diplomacy, which is usually associated with past Chinese diplomatic style but has more recently been reflected in, for example, Russian nuclear threats to unsettle Western publics
• Information: to fight propaganda and Infowars, sometimes launched by cyberattack
• Military: to defend territorial sovereignty and critical infrastructure, especially that undersea and in the energy sector (as NATO has started doing with its Baltic Sentry operation)
• Economic: to bolster resilience in all sectors, especially energy
• Financial: to establish a hybrid war economy similar to Putin’s feat
• Intelligence: to uncover covert operations and conduct counterintelligence on adversarial territory
• Law Enforcement: to defend against nefarious legal actions such as Kremlin-financed claims against Europe

NATO and, especially, the EU also need to increase cooperation in scientific and technological innovation, crucial areas for the international competition that will shape the 21st-century global order. Brussels is already falling behind in these fields and has become overly dependent on the United States and China, as former Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi noted in his 2024 report on competitiveness to the European Commission.

The energy sector is likely the most vulnerable sector for destabilization campaigns, a threat that until recently was overlooked. The EU, after all, aims to become climate neutral by 2050, and, in the meantime, boost its economy through green technology. Russia’s strategy of socioeconomic development foresees low greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 while Beijing seeks to become a developed zero-carbon economy and a “modern socialist country” by the centenary of the founding of the People’s Republic.

The competition for energy transitions, therefore, has become a new theater of conflict that uses hybrid warfare and destabilization campaigns. This is especially true for Russia efforts in Europe, which aim to erode energy resilience and exploit dependence on the supply chains and critical minerals needed for new energy infrastructure and systems. Europe’s reliance on Chinese batteries and critical raw materials is one example of the challenges facing the West.

Russia’s weaponization of energy and its attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure are two others. Although the International Criminal Court considers attacks on electric power infrastructure to be war crimes, the EU remains divided over sanctioning Russian gas. The bloc recently failed again to block Russian liquefied natural gas imports since some member states foresee restarting them once hostilities in Ukraine end. This decision reflects Europe’s failure to grasp the nature of a new energy warfare that the Kremlin has waged against the continent. China also represents a threat in this regard. Beijing employed a strategy similar to Moscow’s when it imposed limits on its critical raw materials exports to the United States in response to Washington’s increased tariffs on Chinese goods. As authoritarian powers pursue such policies, the West must urgently craft a strategy for defending itself from this and other types of hybrid war.

NATO and the EU consequently need to cooperate more on energy security and technological innovation. Their collaboration on hybrid threats, with a specific emphasis on cyber defense, enhanced resilience, strategic communication, and situational awareness, is insufficient. Although a 2023 NATO-EU Joint Declaration underlined the need for coordination on strategic competition, resilience, and infrastructure protection, and a joint task force on resilience and critical infrastructures was established, progress remains limited. Developing systems that can facilitate early warnings and quick reactions to potential attacks in all areas of DIMEFIL must be a priority.

In addition to a strong decision-making process and the political will to decide these “ways”, the transatlantic community also needs the “means”, or solid financial support for deeper cooperation. The NATO summit should focus on this, too. Weapons for Ukraine will not be enough to counter long-term adversaries such as Putin’s Russia, whose alignment with China, North Korea, and Iran increases the ability of all four to attack the West with new destabilization campaigns, especially in the energy sector.