Strategic empathy: Building political cohesion across NATO's flanks

Overcoming this military-political dichotomy when it comes to thinking about NATO’s flanks would arguably strengthen, rather than weaken, Alliance unity.

And what, precisely, is a flank? It is geography, of course. But geography is important because it drives exposure to threats, perception of those threats and, as a result, the security and defence interests of the Allies which make it their home. Finland, Lithuania and Poland will inevitably view European security differently from Spain, Italy or Türkiye. As they should. Geography has not been expunged from strategy. Seen this way, NATO’s flanks may be less a liability than an asset. They concentrate attention, capabilities, expertise and responsibility where they are needed most. The Northeast naturally centres on deterring Russia. The South has greater depth of knowledge and experience when it comes to the Mediterranean, North Africa and the Middle East, terrorism, maritime security, irregular migration, and instability across the wider neighbourhood.

NATO’s own defence planning is increasingly regional in its military assessment of threats and risks. There is little reason to believe its political geography should be so very different. The issue is therefore not that flanks exist. The issue is how the Alliance deals with the gap between them. Because here NATO confronts one of the scarcest resources in politics: attention. Every Ally wants its security concerns to receive due attention. By extension, so does every flank. That is neither surprising nor unhealthy. Attention shapes priorities, defence planning, capability development, infrastructure investment, public support and, ultimately, where Allies commit forces and political capital. The issue starts when differences in attention turn into differences in perceived importance—and differences in perceived importance turn into arguments about whose threats are more real. For NATO’s northeastern Allies, Russia is an unambiguously existential military threat. Viewed from Tallinn, Riga, Vilnius, Warsaw or Helsinki, some of the challenges emanating from the South can consequently seem less pressing and ultimately less threatening. Seen from the South, the picture is different. Russia remains a serious threat, but not a threat that has always been experienced with the same degree of immediacy and intensity. Destabilisation in North Africa and the Middle East, terrorism, migration, maritime insecurity, energy disruption, and rising geopolitical competition throughout the Mediterranean could have much more direct domestic and political consequences.

Both perceptions are understandable. Neither provides a particularly useful basis for Alliance politics. Perceptions, after all, are themselves part of reality. Governments allocate resources, build capabilities, and take political risks according not only to objective threats but to how those threats are understood by their societies and political actors. Trying to establish whose insecurity is more legitimate therefore leads NATO into an argument it cannot win. A better approach is to reconsider the meaning of the flanks themselves. It is not a sign of strategic incoherence. Differently viewed from each other, they are an expression of specialisation when adequately governed. This is significant as the line between NATO’s flanks is at the same time becoming more defined and less distinct. Russia is, and will remain, NATO’s main military threat, and deterrence and defence against Russia must continue to be the Alliance’s main military priority. Looking south does not change that.

There is, however, an important asymmetry in how insecurity travels across the Alliance. Destabilising trends from NATO’s southern neighbourhood have frequently found expression in the Northeast within a matter of days or weeks. Developments in the Middle East, for example, can shift energy prices, disrupt maritime trade and supply chains, amplify migratory pressures, impact critical infrastructure and reshape domestic politics within days. The recent conflict with Iran is a case in point: events playing out thousands of kilometres from the Baltic region have had near-instantaneous political, economic and security reverberations there. Threats coming from the Northeast often move south in a different way – and, usually, at a slower pace too. Russia’s military pressure is existential for the Allies in its immediate strategic environment. The impact it has on Southern Allies is equally real, but it is often delivered through longer chains: defence spending, energy security, economic disruption, support to Ukraine, force commitments or the creeping hollowing-out of the wider European security order. This asymmetry matters.

It may also help to account for why the two flanks can be looking at the same European security environment and still draw different conclusions about the urgency or intensity of the same challenges. In the Northeast, these threats may be underestimated because many are not primarily military or existential in character—even as their effects are felt almost immediately. In the South, by contrast, Russia may be perceived with less urgency precisely because the consequences of insecurity in the Northeast often reach it more gradually. Neither perception is irrational. But neither should be mistaken for the whole strategic picture. Russia’s destabilising role in the South adds another layer to this dynamic. In that region, Moscow places less emphasis on large-scale conventional force projection and more on military footholds, proxy networks, disinformation, political influence, and the gradual exploitation of instability. The instruments differ. So does the tempo. But the strategic effects do not remain neatly confined to the Mediterranean. Geography shapes exposure. It should not limit strategic attention. The East and the South are therefore neither synonymous nor rival theatres. They are separate security spaces linked by threats that crisscross the Alliance at different speeds, through different vectors and with varying degrees of visibility. That is a distinction with a difference.

NATO does not have to see a threat to every Ally everywhere all the time in order to understand that each Ally has legitimate security concerns. Nor does it need to dilute regional specialisation in the name of cohesion. Quite the opposite. The assumption of greater responsibility for conventional defence by the European Allies will lead to increasing regional specialisation. Allies will lead more where geography, expertise, capabilities and political engagement give them a comparative advantage. Northern and northeastern Allies will inevitably carry more of the burden for deterrence against Russia. Southern Allies will remain a critical component for security across the Mediterranean and its neighbourhood. This is not fragmentation. It is a more mature division of labour. Yet the division of labour demands a price: trust that specialisation does not entail a lack of concern. From military to political adaptation, NATO’s military adaptation is no longer in serious doubt. Its force posture has shifted significantly. Regional defence plans, higher readiness, a reformed force structure, increased defence spending and accelerating capability development all point in the same direction. The process is neither complete nor uniformly successful, but it is under way—and increasingly entrenched in the way the Alliance thinks about deterrence and defence.

The Arctic and the High North region provide one of the most recent and clear-cut examples. Finland and Sweden’s accession to NATO has effectively redrawn the Alliance’s northern military map. In late 2025, the Alliance brought the Nordic Allies under the area of responsibility of JFC Norfolk, thus also bringing the Arctic, the Nordic region and the North Atlantic into an increasingly coherent operational space. Arctic Sentry, which was launched in 2026, takes this logic one step further by bringing national and NATO activities across the Arctic into a single operational approach. Forward Land Forces in Finland further connect the Alliance’s northern and northeastern flanks. Military regionalisation, in other words, is happening, and it is accelerating.

Curiously enough, the political and institutional adaptation is going in the same geographical—but slower—direction. The EU’s 2021 Arctic policy was primarily focused on climate and environmental protection, sustainable development, and peaceful international cooperation. Its 2026 revision is being written against a markedly different geopolitical backdrop, with security, defence, connectivity, and economic security now explicitly among the new priorities. The trend is instructive. Geography is being relearned not just as an environmental or economic fact, but as a strategic one. This should not be understood as another form of compartmentalisation. On the contrary, the nascent High North–Baltic–Northeast space illustrates the reinforcing potential of regionalisation when it helps connect, instead of segment, different parts of NATO. The political challenge is to make the same logic applicable across the Alliance—including between North and South. The more difficult adaptation may therefore now be political. More precisely, it is an adaptation of perspective. A stronger, more European and more regionally specialised Alliance will not inevitably become a more cohesive one. The division of labour that makes NATO militarily stronger can create political distance if Allies become very good at understanding their own security environment and very bad at understanding everyone else’s. This is where NATO’s familiar 360-degree approach reaches its limits. The concept is still politically useful. It reminds Allies that security is indivisible. But it says relatively little about how political consensus should be sustained when geography produces genuinely different priorities and threat perceptions.

What is missing is a complementary habit of mind: strategic empathy. Strategic empathy does not require one Ally to accept another’s threat assessment. It does not require any Ally to pretend that all threats are equally grave, equally military, or equally existential. It means understanding why another Ally might see its security environment differently—and recognising that its willingness to support your priorities will inevitably be influenced by whether you take its own concerns seriously. That makes strategic empathy not a substitute for unity of purpose, but one of its pillars. Understand the South. For the Northeast, that is not charity on a geopolitical scale. That is statecraft. And the same logic applies in reverse. A bargain across the flanks.

What should this mean in practice? First, Northeastern Allies should more consistently acknowledge that security in the Mediterranean directly serves European security. This does not need to entail broadening NATO’s core mission or artificially inflating every Southern challenge to the existential scale of the Russian threat. It does, however, require acknowledging that turbulence in the South increasingly determines Europe’s resilience, maritime security, energy infrastructure, supply chains and domestic politics—and therefore the political environment in which deterrence itself must be sustained.

Second, Allies should resist the temptation to turn threat perception into a hierarchy of legitimacy. The argument that one flank faces „real” or existential threats while another faces merely secondary ones is strategically too sterile. Different geographies generate different vulnerabilities. NATO’s task is not to erase those differences but to organise them into a coherent division of labour.

Third, the Northeast should more generously assist selected Southern initiatives aimed at strengthening NATO engagement with the region. Closer cooperation with Southern partners, regular ministerial interaction with the Mediterranean Dialogue, NATO Liaison Offices and the work of the Special Representative for the Southern Neighbourhood should not be considered as projects which only serve Southern Allies’ interests. They are rather modest investments in the political cohesion on which support for priorities elsewhere ultimately depends.

Fourth, political solidarity must be visible at times. Contributions to missions, operations, exercises or expert activities on the other flank may be militarily limited but politically valuable. A Baltic contribution in the South—or a Southern contribution in the Northeast—says more than its numerical value: that regional specialisation has not become regional indifference.

Fifth, NATO should systematically invest in connective tissue between its flanks. Joint ministerial dialogues, firmer ties between regional initiatives, and more frequent exchanges among experts, parliamentarians, strategic communities and think tanks could help unmask how increasingly interconnected seemingly regional challenges are. This is important in public outreach as well. One of the easiest means to build and cement bridges across the flanks is for voices from the Northeast to speak more about the South—and vice versa. This may sound like a small thing, but public perceptions are shaped first and foremost by what feels closest and most immediate. Patiently explaining to different audiences why challenges elsewhere in the Alliance matter to us is part of building the political foundations of solidarity. NATO has spent vast resources on military interoperability. A more regionally specialised Alliance will also need more political—and public—interoperability.

Finally, Allies should get better at acknowledging what others already provide. The debate on burden-sharing and shifting, and Europe’s increasing role, has rightly centred on defence spending and capabilities. It should stay that way. But operations, regional security, support for Ukraine, maritime security, resilience, partnerships and political risk-taking all underpin the Alliance. Acknowledgement is cheap. The cost of its absence can be high. None of this requires balancing East against South. Nor does it require NATO to become everything to everyone. It needs something more orderly: the recognition that regional diversity is natural and useful, but a ban on its ossifying into political segregation.

NATO’s flanks are not a creation. NATO’s flanks exist because geography exists. Geography creates and shapes threats. Threats create and shape perceptions. Perceptions create and shape interests. And interests inevitably create and shape where Allies devote that scarcest of political resources—attention. The objective should not be to eliminate these differences. It should be to make them work for the Alliance. Europe taking on more responsibility for conventional defence will see NATO looking to regional expertise, regional capabilities and regional leadership more and more. That should make the Alliance stronger, not weaker. But only if specialisation comes with an ability to see the strategic priorities of those looking at the map from the other end.

About the author: Vytautas Leškevičius is a Lithuanian security and defence policy expert and analyst with 30 years of experience in international security, defence, transatlantic relations, NATO and EU affairs. His professional experience spans senior roles across security policy, international affairs, and strategic analysis, including service as Lithuania’s Permanent Representative to NATO. He also led the team coordinating Lithuania’s first-ever Presidency of the Council of the European Union. Throughout his career, he has been involved in major negotiations and policy processes related to NATO and EU security and defence policies, resilience and crisis management. Ambassador Leškevičius currently serves as Chief Policy Analyst at the Geopolitics and Security Studies Center, a Vilnius-based think tank. He is also a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.