United in Hybridity - EU-NATO create a task force on resilience and critical infrastructure to face potential hybrid threats from Russia
As the proliferation of non-state actors, critical technologies, and energy markets have gained crucial leverage in international affairs, security concerns on both sides of the Atlantic have been multiplied and redefined. Hyper-connectivity between states has increased vulnerability worldwide. New emerging domains such as cyberspace have revisited fundamental ideas and concepts of security, conflict, and war. As a result, hybrid threats have become central to political agendas, particularly in the context of EU-NATO cooperation. According to Frank Hoffman, hybrid warfare mixes and blends conventional warfare with other sources of irregular warfare, such as cyber warfare, energy and financial markets, as well as disinformation, diplomacy, lawfare, and foreign electoral intervention. Unpredictability and transversality are fundamental characteristics of hybrid threats.
Hybrid threats have recently been recalled in the recent NATO and EU discourses. In fact, NATO 2022 Strategic Concept specifically mentions them 7 times as a priority for the Atlantic Alliance. That is why, on 10 January, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen agreed on a joint task force on resilience and critical infrastructure protection as part of their third joint declaration. “Resilience and the protection of critical infrastructure are a key part of our joint efforts, as we have seen both with President Putin’s weaponizing of energy and […] the sabotage of the North Stream pipelines,” Stoltenberg announced.
Both Stoltenberg and von der Leyen put this decision in the context of the sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines in September 2022, which was the result of the EU’s position in the face of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Hybrid warfare has fundamentally changed how war is waged - it now includes cyberattacks, export controls, economic sanctions, and disinformation, among other means. Nevertheless, the most concerning aspect of hybrid warfare is that Russia and China have increased their assertiveness through it. And NATO and the EU are aware of this.
As a direct response, both the Alliance and the EU have taken the initiative to ensure the energy security of the European continent. In 2021, the EU greatly depended on external energy markets, importing 83% of its natural gas. Since then, imports from Russia to the EU have been significantly reduced, and the EU has redefined and diversified its relations with other energy partners, such as Norway or Algeria. In order to support this decision, Washington has strategically increased its liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports to the EU by more than 137% in almost a year. The White House and the Commission also announced last year the creation of a joint Task Force to reduce Europe’s dependence on Russian fossil fuels. It is important to note that countries like Portugal or Spain are not as dependent on the Russian energy market as Germany, which has led to differences in how to find a common response to the energy crisis. Solutions like the ‘Iberian exception’ to cap energy prices have been fundamental in addressing these differences.
Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, NATO developed a new Strategic Concept at the 2022 Madrid Summit. It identifies Russia as the most significant and direct threat to the Allies’ security and to peace and stability in the Euro-Atlantic area, which is the strongest concept used to describe Russia since 1991. It is also not the first time the EU has acted on hybrid threats: in November 2016, the European Commission and the High Representative adopted a Joint Framework to counter hybrid threats to foster the resilience of the EU. The vulnerabilities of critical infrastructure may differ from one Member State to another. Nevertheless, NATO 2022 Strategic Concept, the EU Joint Framework, and the new EU-NATO task force have all agreed that energy security, space infrastructure, maritime security, public health, transport, cyber security, communications, and financial systems are the “critical infrastructures” vulnerable to hybrid threats.
The term hybrid is expected to be reinterpreted and revised over time. It should be perceived as an all-encompassing and evolving term aimed at addressing current security challenges, as opposed to conventional means. Hybrid threats break these well-defined guidelines of what is and what is not war. In 2010, when NATO introduced the term, there was no initial common understanding of what "hybrid warfare" meant within the Alliance.
This common understanding of hybrid threats is reflected in the document that the EU and NATO presented. The mutual understanding represents a political and diplomatic achievement, as it also integrates the EU’s strategic autonomy in the framework of Euro-Atlantic security and protection. Nevertheless, opinions within EU-NATO coordination have been diverse and often contradictory. Over the years, France has intended to boost the EU's defence industry with the clear aim of making the EU more strategically autonomous. Conversely, some Central and Eastern European countries, like Poland, do not agree with this. These Member States still see the US as the main guarantor of security on the European continent.
EU and NATO members (and allies) should expect to live with the uncertainty surrounding hybrid threats for some time, as there is now a risk of not measuring conflict and instability properly. Hybrid threats allow us to rethink some of the most pressing issues in international security under a different lens, such as the causes of terrorism and violent extremism around the world, as well as civil wars and social unrest in unstable political regimes.
If anything can be considered a threat, then what makes a threat significant? This question should be addressed in a transatlantic and comprehensive approach that can integrate deterrence and the military as well as the social and economic perspectives of states. What makes hybrid threats so unpredictable is that their causes are not short-term based, or solved by increased defence spending. They very often stem from structural causes: climate migration, economic inequality, unequal access to technologies, and lack of digital skills, as well as populism and far-right extremism, among others. In this sense, increasing national GDP in defence spending should not be the only solution to the development of European defence, as resilience in the face of hybrid threats requires a more integrated and transversal security perspective.
As a final assessment, the EU-NATO task force still needs to be properly developed, but a first step has been taken. As Madeleine Albright once stated, the debate on NATO's future has too often reduced the alliance's raison d'être to a one-dimensional international military organisation. Nevertheless, the political aspect cannot be forgotten. It is not only the EU that has served as a force for integration and reconciliation across the European continent. Not only did NATO contain the Soviet threat, but it also helped the EU deal with most of the internal conflicts within the Union: between France and Germany, Greece and Turkey, and Central and Eastern Europe in the post-Soviet space. Now, at the beginning of 2023, while the war in Ukraine is still going on, the EU and NATO have come together again with their third joint declaration. With a specific and dedicated space to harmonise all these differences, hybrid threats have become fundamental to political agendas, including creating a resilient European energy market and cyberspace. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has fostered the transatlantic partnership in an unprecedented way, making it clear that NATO remains the backbone of the collective defence of the European continent and the Euro-Atlantic area.