Abdullah Kabaoğlu

Why did NATO, despite commanding a nuclear arsenal larger and more capable than Russia’s, yield to Putin’s nuclear blackmail at the outset of the Ukraine War? This paper locates the source of that weakness in a structural transformation of NATO’s nuclear sharing framework. Drawing on the theory of collective deterrence, it argues that arrangements mounted by multiple states are burdened by problems of preference aggregation, implementation, and coordination that intensify as their multilateral character deepens. NATO’s nuclear sharing was originally devised to escape these pathologies, embedding a bilateral logic in the dual-key arrangement that lowered the commitment threshold for nuclear employment. The paper contends that post-Cold War enlargement, by importing Eastern European members whose threat perceptions toward Russia diverged sharply from those of the existing nuclear hosts, dismantled the consensus that had sustained the drawdown of forward-deployed weapons and, in halting it, quietly supplanted this bilateral logic with a multilateral one. Putin’s gambit, the paper concludes, was not an act of strategic recklessness but a calculated exploitation of these weaknesses, and one likely to recur.