Throwing Montenegro under the bus

So, how much do you know about Montenegro? Probably not a great deal if you are the average person in the street.

Most people would have difficulty finding it on the map.

Yet it could be the flashpoint that starts World War III. At least United States President Donald Trump seems to think so.

Or the break-up of the NATO alliance and the European Union and the spread of Russian hegemony over the European countries the old Soviet Union once dominated.

So it is worth knowing a bit more about this country of 640,000 people in south-eastern Europe, once part of the old Yugoslavia and a sovereign State for just 12 years.

Some analysists believe it will be the next staging ground in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s campaign to destabilise the Western alliance, a follow-up to his intervention in Georgia, annexation of Crimea, invasion of Ukraine’s eastern provinces and rescue of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.

At first sight this seems strange. Montenegro shares no border with Russia, and to get at it forces would have to cross countries that are members of both NATO and the EU, but a traditional invasion is not what Moscow has in mind.

The Balkan country would be just the test for Western resolution that Putin would like to exploit. It is a member of NATO, but not yet of the EU, although its current President, Milo Djukanovic, leans towards the bloc.

Russia tried unsuccessfully to engineer a pro-Russian coup there to prevent it from joining NATO, and has learnt from that mistake.

In addition, Putin has been virtually given the green light by Trump who in an interview on the Fox News network accused the Montenegrins of being “a very aggressive people…they may get aggressive and congratulations you are in World War III”.

Trump essentially threw Montenegro under the bus as far as supporting any NATO action against Russian interference in that country.

Without the US would other members of NATO be prepared to take action in support of the alliance’s newest and weakest member? Would the EU risk confrontation for a country outside its jurisdiction?

I hope they would, but I fear they would not.

The traditional thinking is that Putin’s next meddling will be in the Baltic republics of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia, which after all share a border with Russia, but the trio are more firmly established in the Western sphere, members of both NATO and the EU.

Putin knows any perceived Russian interference there would almost certainly provoke a response from both institutions, with or without US support. He is not ready for that.

Montenegro is a different case.

I do not believe, as Jeffrey Stacey wrote in a recent article in Foreign Policy magazine, that Putin would risk a military invasion using his air and sea power.

Far more likely is a program of continual destabilisation, using Moscow’s proven methods of hybrid warfare — pressure diplomacy, fake news and electoral intervention — building up to the right conditions for another coup, allowing the White House to dismiss it as an internal affair in a little country far away.

Haven’t we heard something like that before?