Following the 2014 NATO Summit in Wales, NATO announced that it would be deploying its forces to the Baltic NATO countries as a tangible military deterrent to a resurgent Russian threat to those countries and the Alliance. This announcement invoked parallels to the Cold War in both NATO's conceptualization of Russia and the need to deter militarily, and the questioned NATO deterrent strategy and how it had failed to deter Russian attacks in Georgia in 2008 and Crimea in 2014. After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, NATO relied on its nuclear-armed members to provide its nuclear deterrent, and its expansionist Partnership for Peace program to enhance its conventional deterrent. However, when viewed through the lens of Cross-Domain Deterrence theory, the Partnership for Peace program did not provide NATO with either the linkages or the bargaining leverage to deter Russia from attacking Georgia and Ukraine. Using the commonalities from these two NATO failures to deter Russia, can NATO rely on the obligations of the North Atlantic Treaty, signaled with a token military force, to deter a Russian cross domain coercive strategy in the NATO Baltic Countries? Or must it recognize its limitations as a political-military alliance as a deterrent and expand its linkages with other transnational organizations, such as the EU, to truly deter Russia?
