<\/p>\n
\n\tPresident Donald Trump<\/a> is providing Russian President Vladimir Putin<\/a> a window of opportunity to break apart NATO<\/a>, analysts fear, even as the Kremlin searches for an elusive path to victory in its grinding war of attrition against Ukraine.<\/p>\n \n\tAmerican actions are accumulating into an existential crisis for the alliance. Trump and members of his administration continue to openly signal their contempt for allies and unwillingness to defend Europe, as the U.S. becomes bogged down in a costly war against Iran with no apparent exit. Putin may be emboldened by the increasingly strained relationship between NATO and its most important member nation.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tIntelligence reports from multiple countries have long warned that Russia<\/a> may be ready to widen the Ukraine war<\/a> into a direct test of NATO\u2019s resolve.<\/p>\n \n\tMichael Kofman, an expert on the Russian military and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, says it\u2019s important to interpret such assessments as \u201clow likelihood possibilities\u201d \u2014 noting that defense analysts are especially sensitive about omitting worst-case scenarios when it comes to Russia, given the number of wildly incorrect predictions that have surrounded the war in Ukraine.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cThe concern is: Should Putin decide that he wants to capitalize on the obvious tensions between the United States and its European allies within NATO \u2014 or miscalculate in an effort to coerce a NATO member \u2014\u00a0what are his military options and how might that challenge look in the future?\u201d Kofman says.<\/p>\n \n\tA secret American intelligence assessment leaked<\/a> to The<\/em> Wall Street Journal<\/em> earlier this month claims Russia could carry out a \u201climited incursion\u201d against a NATO member, with the goal of provoking a split within the alliance.<\/p>\n \n\tThere\u2019s little question about Putin\u2019s desire to neuter NATO, or his willingness to push the envelope in pursuing long-term goals. With the septuagenarian now in his fifth term as president, his worldview is growing increasingly apocalyptic, researchers say.<\/p>\n \t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n<\/section>\n \n\tBeatrice de Graaf and Niels Drost, Dutch academics who penned a soon-to-be published book called Putin\u2019s Czarist Dream: History as a Weapon in Russian Politics<\/em>, have compiled every public speech Putin has made since he first became president on the last day of 1999.<\/p>\n \n\tThey see a marked downward trajectory. While Putin has shown an obsession with the \u201cgreat czars\u201d of Russian history from his earliest days, his rhetoric began to darken around 2004. By the time he campaigned for a third presidential term in 2011, he had \u201cimmersed himself in the triad of Russian state power: nationalism, autocracy, and Orthodoxy,\u201d they say, and he now speaks primarily in Manichean terms of good versus evil.<\/p>\n \n\tThe Russian president regularly exalts his homeland as the \u201cThird Rome\u201d \u2014 after Imperial Rome itself, then Constantinople \u2014 the inheritor of the only \u201ctrue Christian\u201d empire. He describes the war in Ukraine as a fight against the \u201csatanic\u201d forces of the West.<\/p>\n \n\tWhether Putin truly believes this or not, he\u2019s made no secret of wanting to remove NATO from the geopolitical chessboard, and place Eastern and Central Europe firmly back in Russia\u2019s sphere of influence. And for many Russians sympathetic to the war \u2014 in particular the extreme nationalists sometimes called \u201cturbopatriots\u201d \u2014 the conflict in Ukraine is already viewed as a de facto<\/em> war with the West. While Ukraine is not part of NATO, it is allied with many of its member nations.<\/p>\n \n\tEven before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Kremlin carried out a sustained campaign of \u201chybrid warfare\u201d \u2014 covert action, assassination, sabotage, cyberattacks, and disinformation \u2014 against targets in Europe. Since the invasion, the steady drumbeat of provocative overt military actions and covert intelligence operations has increased in tempo and volume, both along NATO\u2019s borders and within its member nations themselves.<\/p>\n \t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n<\/section>\n \n\tThe war in Ukraine has bled across borders, bringing a small taste of the conflict to otherwise tranquil European cities. Authorities across the continent now regularly uncover plots they trace back to Russian intelligence, such as an explosive drone<\/a> discovered at Leipzig Airport in Germany last week, apparently meant to target a Ukrainian cargo plane; or an assassination attempt on a U.S. citizen<\/a> in Warsaw, Poland.<\/p>\n \n\tRolling Stone<\/em> asked a NATO official if there was any notable increase in activity by Russian conventional forces.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cI wouldn\u2019t say that we\u2019re seeing anything remarkably different than we\u2019ve seen before,\u201d the NATO official, who requested anonymity, says. \u201cRussia has been the most significant conventional threat to NATO for quite a while now. We don\u2019t see that changing. We see it as a threat today, and tomorrow, and into the long term.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tIt\u2019s clear that militaries across Europe take the Russian threat seriously. When Denmark deployed a mechanized battlegroup to Latvia last week via commercial ship, the movement was effectively conducted as a troop transport under wartime conditions. The MV Ark Germania<\/em>, carrying 800 Danish soldiers, their vehicles, and equipment, was accompanied by an armed escort of multinational warships, its passageway cleared beneath an umbrella of maritime patrol and anti-submarine warfare aircraft\u00a0to ensure its safety.<\/p>\n \n\tSuch heightened defensive postures are now commonplace, while an increasing pace of international operations is de rigueur<\/em> for NATO. Nine multinational battle groups have been posted along the alliance\u2019s \u201ceastern flank,\u201d where NATO member states border Russia and its ally, Belarus.<\/p>\n \n\tDozens of allied fighter aircraft patrol the skies from the Baltic to the Black Sea, too. Only days ago, an Italian fighter shot down<\/a> an apparent Russian drone that flew into Latvian airspace \u2014 and such violations are now a frequent<\/a> occurrence.<\/p>\n \n\tThe goal of NATO\u2019s activity, the official says, is deterrence.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cThis is a response to Russia getting more reckless along the eastern flank,\u201d the official says.<\/p>\n \n\tNATO forces in Europe are under the command of the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, or SACEUR \u2014 a role held by an American since the alliance was founded in 1949. The current commander is U.S. Air Force General Alexus Grynkewich.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cThere\u2019s been a lot of testing, and part of our pushback to that has been to take everything that we\u2019ve got on the eastern flank \u2014 so that\u2019s all those forward land forces, Baltic air policing, and other bits of air policing that we had in Romania and elsewhere \u2014\u00a0and basically connect all those dots, to give SACEUR a whole lot more freedom to move things where he needs them, to act much more quickly and flexibly,\u201d the official says.<\/p>\n \n\tMost military analysts assess that NATO, in its entirety, enjoys a substantial qualitative edge over Russia in terms of raw military, economic, and industrial power.<\/p>\n \n\tBut that edge is largely predicated on America\u2019s willingness to defend the alliance. The key provision in the North Atlantic Treaty\u2019s collective defense mechanism is Article 5, which says that \u201can armed attack against one member in Europe or North America is considered an attack against all members,\u201d and if invoked requires each member to assist with \u201csuch action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tTrump has routinely called NATO \u201cobsolete,\u201d and has criticized its members for what he perceives as a lack of support for the U.S. in the Iran war<\/a>.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cI always considered NATO, where we spend Hundreds of Billions of Dollars per year protecting these same Countries, to be a one-way street \u2014 We will protect them, but they will do nothing for us, in particular, in a time of need,\u201d Trump wrote on his Truth Social media platform in March, in a later post adding that \u201cNATO wasn\u2019t there when we needed them, and they won\u2019t be there if we need them again.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tTrump\u2019s antipathy didn\u2019t start with the Iran war, of course. After a trip to Moscow in 1987, he famously<\/a> purchased a full-page newspaper ad accusing U.S. allies of free-riding, saying it was time to make \u201cothers pay for the protection we extend.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tDuring his first term in 2018, Trump told Tucker Carlson that defending small NATO members like Montenegro wasn\u2019t worth the risk: \u201cThey may get aggressive, and, congratulations, you\u2019re in World War III.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tTrump\u2019s animosity toward NATO became such a cause for concern among U.S. lawmakers that in 2023, Congress passed a law<\/a> unequivocally preventing the president from withdrawing from the alliance without the approval of two-thirds of the Senate.<\/p>\n \n\tStill, if Russia wants to provoke a political crisis within the alliance, something like a \u201climited incursion\u201d against a small NATO member \u2014 invading and occupying a part of Latvia or Estonia, which border Russia proper \u2014 could fit the bill.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cIf you look at prospective scenarios, the higher likelihood is a limited incursion and it\u2019s closer to us timeline wise,\u201d Kofman, the military expert, says. \u201cA \u2018bite and hold\u2019 scenario is potentially more problematic, because that\u2019s a scenario in which the Trump administration might say, \u2018Well, it\u2019s not a large-scale invasion and occupation of a member state. Europe \u2014 take care of it yourself. Why don\u2019t you help yourself, the way you helped us in the war against Iran?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tMost frontline states are militant about the Russian threat. But there is no consensus across Europe about the danger that the Kremlin poses.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tCountries far from the action in Ukraine tend to be more sanguine than those that share borders with the two combatants. In some places, like Italy and Spain, a significant number of people view NATO members that warn about an \u201cimminent threat\u201d as unnecessarily provocative and bellicose.<\/p>\n \n\tSuch views were expressed succinctly by Marco Travaglio, the editor-in-chief of the Italian newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano<\/em>, at a prestigious conference in Puglia last month: \u201cThe Baltics are among the main provocateurs of this escalation \u2026 They\u2019re calling the shots. Why? Because they\u2019re aiming for World War III.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tSuch views are extreme but not uncommon.<\/p>\n \n\tMeanwhile, amid Europe\u2019s lack of solidarity, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced in June that the U.S. would conduct a \u201csix-month review\u201d of its military commitments to the continent. The review will conclude in December, and ties military commitments not only to each country\u2019s spending on NATO, but also to support for Trump\u2019s broader economic policies.<\/p>\n\n
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