It depends for what. According to the House of Commons Defence Select Committee, NATO is not ready to deal with the ‘Russian Threat’. This Blog admires the Chairman of this committee more than almost any other MP. Rory Stewart is a writer, broadcaster, academic, historian and former soldier. He is perhaps the expert on Middle East history since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. It is therefore regrettable that he has led his committee to a wrong conclusion. This is that NATO needs to pull its socks up to confront potential overt and covert threats to former Soviet dominated states in Eastern Europe, sighting previously Georgia and South Ossetia and currently Ukraine and the Crimea as warnings to heed.
This Blog has argued extensively and exhaustively that Russia is not an enemy but the West is in danger of making it one. Russia is far more nervous of actual advances by NATO east than the West is of any supposed expansion of Russia westwards. Russia, faced with a relentless barrage of vitriol from people she still hopefully callers her partners, may indeed decide she has had enough and become an obstructive and belligerent rival in every sphere of foreign policy, forming an alliance with China and Iran and possibly India to form an alternative camp to resist and challenge western interests both financially and diplomatically wherever in the world they are asserted. Anybody in the West who supposes this would be a good thing is a fool.
Russia, with memories of invading armies going back to Napoleonic times, is paranoid about what it used to call its near abroad. It would not be difficult to find a formula for reassurance. As previously argued the best would be to bring Russia and all its former satellites into NATO. The threat to western civilisation comes from other quarters. Tony Blair was right to point that out.