Trump Has Opened the Door for Putin to Make a Move on NATO

By Mac William Bishop

Mac William Bishop

President Donald Trump is providing Russian President Vladimir Putin a window of opportunity to break apart NATO, analysts fear, even as the Kremlin searches for an elusive path to victory in its grinding war of attrition against Ukraine.

American 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. 

Intelligence reports from multiple countries have long warned that Russia may be ready to widen the Ukraine war into a direct test of NATO’s resolve.

Michael Kofman, an expert on the Russian military and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, says it’s important to interpret such assessments as “low likelihood possibilities” — 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.

“The concern is: Should Putin decide that he wants to capitalize on the obvious tensions between the United States and its European allies within NATO — or miscalculate in an effort to coerce a NATO member — what are his military options and how might that challenge look in the future?” Kofman says.

A secret American intelligence assessment leaked to The Wall Street Journal earlier this month claims Russia could carry out a “limited incursion” against a NATO member, with the goal of provoking a split within the alliance.

There’s little question about Putin’s 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.

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Beatrice de Graaf and Niels Drost, Dutch academics who penned a soon-to-be published book called Putin’s Czarist Dream: History as a Weapon in Russian Politics, have compiled every public speech Putin has made since he first became president on the last day of 1999.

They see a marked downward trajectory. While Putin has shown an obsession with the “great czars” 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 “immersed himself in the triad of Russian state power: nationalism, autocracy, and Orthodoxy,” they say, and he now speaks primarily in Manichean terms of good versus evil.

The Russian president regularly exalts his homeland as the “Third Rome” — after Imperial Rome itself, then Constantinople — the inheritor of the only “true Christian” empire. He describes the war in Ukraine as a fight against the “satanic” forces of the West.

Whether Putin truly believes this or not, he’s made no secret of wanting to remove NATO from the geopolitical chessboard, and place Eastern and Central Europe firmly back in Russia’s sphere of influence. And for many Russians sympathetic to the war — in particular the extreme nationalists sometimes called “turbopatriots” — the conflict in Ukraine is already viewed as a de facto war with the West. While Ukraine is not part of NATO, it is allied with many of its member nations.

Even before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Kremlin carried out a sustained campaign of “hybrid warfare” — covert action, assassination, sabotage, cyberattacks, and disinformation — 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’s borders and within its member nations themselves.

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The 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 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 in Warsaw, Poland.

Rolling Stone asked a NATO official if there was any notable increase in activity by Russian conventional forces.

“I wouldn’t say that we’re seeing anything remarkably different than we’ve seen before,” the NATO official, who requested anonymity, says. “Russia has been the most significant conventional threat to NATO for quite a while now. We don’t see that changing. We see it as a threat today, and tomorrow, and into the long term.”

It’s 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, 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 to ensure its safety.

Such heightened defensive postures are now commonplace, while an increasing pace of international operations is de rigueur for NATO. Nine multinational battlegroups have been posted along the alliance’s “eastern flank,” where NATO member-states border Russia and its ally, Belarus.

Dozens of allied fighter aircraft patrol the skies from the Baltic to the Black Sea, too. Only days ago, an Italian fighter shot down an apparent Russian drone that flew into Latvian airspace — and such violations are now a frequent occurrence.

The goal of NATO’s activity, the official says, is deterrence.

“This is a response to Russia getting more reckless along the eastern flank,” the official says.

NATO forces in Europe are under the command of the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, or SACEUR — a role held by an American since the alliance was founded in 1949. The current commander is U.S. Air Force General Alexus Grynkewich.

“There’s been a lot of testing, and part of our pushback to that has been to take everything that we’ve got on the eastern flank — so that’s all those forward land forces, Baltic air policing, and other bits of air policing that we had in Romania and elsewhere — and 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,” the official says.

Most military analysts assess that NATO, in its entirety, enjoys a substantial qualitative edge over Russia in terms of raw military, economic, and industrial power.

But that edge is largely predicated on America’s willingness to defend the alliance. The key provision in the North Atlantic Treaty’s collective defense mechanism is Article 5, which says that “an armed attack against one member in Europe or North America is considered an attack against all members,” and if invoked requires each member to assist with “such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force.”

Trump has routinely called NATO “obsolete,” and has criticized its members for what he perceives as a lack of support for the U.S. in the Iran war.

“I always considered NATO, where we spend Hundreds of Billions of Dollars per year protecting these same Countries, to be a one-way street — We will protect them, but they will do nothing for us, in particular, in a time of need,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social media platform in March, in a later post adding that “NATO wasn’t there when we needed them, and they won’t be there if we need them again.”

Trump’s antipathy didn’t start with the Iran war, of course. After a trip to Moscow in 1987, he famously purchased a full-page newspaper ad accusing U.S. allies of free-riding, saying it was time to make “others pay for the protection we extend.”

During his first term in 2018, Trump told Tucker Carlson that defending small NATO members like Montenegro wasn’t worth the risk: “They may get aggressive, and, congratulations, you’re in World War III.” 

Trump’s animosity towards NATO became such a cause for concern among U.S. lawmakers that in 2023, Congress passed a law unequivocally preventing the president from withdrawing from the alliance without the approval of two-thirds of the Senate.

Still, if Russia wants to provoke a political crisis within the alliance, something like a “limited incursion” against a small NATO member — invading and occupying a part of Latvia or Estonia, which border Russia proper — could fit the bill.

“If you look at prospective scenarios, the higher likelihood is a limited incursion and it’s closer to us timeline wise,” Kofman, the military expert, says. “A ‘bite and hold’ scenario is potentially more problematic, because that’s a scenario in which the Trump administration might say, ‘Well, it’s not a large-scale invasion and occupation of a member state. Europe — take care of it yourself. Why don’t you help yourself, the way you helped us in the war against Iran?’”

Most frontline states are militant about the Russian threat. But there is no consensus across Europe about the danger that the Kremlin poses. 

Countries 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 “imminent threat” as unnecessarily provocative and bellicose.

Such views were expressed succinctly by Marco Travaglio, the editor-in-chief of the Italian newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano, at a prestigious conference in Puglia last month: “The Baltics are among the main provocateurs of this escalation… They’re calling the shots. Why? Because they’re aiming for World War III.”

Such views are extreme, but not uncommon.

Meanwhile, amid Europe’s lack of solidarity, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced in June that the U.S. would conduct a “six-month review” of its military commitments to the continent. The review will conclude in December, and ties military commitments not only to each country’s spending on NATO, but also to support for Trump’s broader economic policies.

Over the weekend, Bloomberg News reported on a so-called “loyalty test” being sent by the Trump administration to NATO members. Among the questions it asks is whether or not a country has been “publicly supportive” of Trump’s foreign policy.

While European officials may endure such blatantly undiplomatic antics with tact, patience with the Americans is ebbing across the continent.

Trump’s threats to annex Greenland were an especially clarion wake-up call to many who previously believed that ultimately, America was a beneficial power. That view evaporated as the U.S. president showed a readiness to use military force to seize an ally’s territory. 

The NATO official gives low weight to concerns about a potential split, saying that while there may have been a “shift when it comes to style,” it was part of a long-running debate about burden-sharing within the alliance.

“What we’ve seen is that the U.S. is consistently committed to NATO,” the official says. “The Americans are here, each and every day.”

When it was pointed out that while the Americans may be there, it doesn’t mean they will stay if the president decides not to join a European conflict, the NATO official responded simply: “That has always been the case.”

“The bottom line has been consistent — administration after administration after administration — that America wants allies that are actually going to pull their weight, that are going to step up and share the responsibility fairly,” the official says.

Even if the transatlantic alliance holds strong, Russia may still believe it can eke out a victory against NATO by employing the right leverage — something which may encourage Putin to act.

While the war in Ukraine has taken a heavy toll on Russian industry, the country has successfully transitioned to a wartime economy, able to produce the advanced weapons it needs to carry on fighting despite years of sanctions.

Ultimately, despite battlefield innovations and advances in technology, the war in Ukraine is an infantry fight. Russia has even enlisted its ally North Korea to supply frontline troops — the number of which may climb to as many as 50,000 this year. Manpower has become a critical issue for both Ukraine and Russia. More than a million men have been killed and wounded in the fighting.

While some observers point gleefully at the carnage inflicted on Russia, its forces continue to advance in eastern Ukraine, and its missiles and drones continue to fall on Ukrainian cities.

“The Russian military is not as degraded from this war as we would like it to be,” Kofman says. “It has suffered a tangible degradation in quality, but it has also expanded significantly over the course of the war in size, in strike capabilities, mass employment of drones, and in defense industrial production capacity. The narrative about the war substantially degrading Russian forces is only partially true.”

The biggest problem for NATO, should Russia decide to use its military beyond Ukraine, is air defense.

Russia is producing around 60 Iskander ballistic missiles per month, even under sanctions, and last month its military launched a record 128 ballistic missiles against targets in Ukraine, according to that country’s Military Intelligence Directorate.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said that his country lacks the anti-missile interceptors needed to counter the threat, calling on allies to provide at least 300 Patriot missiles to save lives and protect cities.

But advanced missile interceptors were already in short supply, and the war in Iran has only made things worse. The U.S. fired an estimated 1,500 Patriot missiles to shoot down Iranian drones and missiles during 39 days of active conflict, leaving just 800 in its stockpiles. Lockheed delivered around 600 Patriot interceptors last year, and plans to increase production. But refilling stockpiles will take years.

In a conflict with NATO, the possibility that Russian ballistic missiles would be turned against undefended cities is a serious concern — and could determine the course of a conflict, even aside from any military outcomes.

“I want to be clear again — the conversation is not about ‘win or lose,’ because that is a simplistic way to interpret this. We won’t ‘lose,’ but that’s not the point,” Kofman says. “The point is that the cost of a conflict may be unnecessarily or unacceptably high for our allies and our own forces if we do not learn the right lessons and make the correct adaptations.”

Simply put, Europe is unprepared for the kind of war already seen in Ukraine.

“Russia has also been scaling up production of ballistic missiles, and I think it has certainly identified a major weakness in NATO’s way of war, and that is the dearth of interceptors,” says Franz-Stefan Gady, a defense analyst and consultant who specializes in the future of high-intensity warfare.

“Air defense, or the role of air defense, is very often primarily given to the air forces, and is tied to achieving air superiority — that is, NATO aircraft in the event of a major conflict would actually try to destroy TELs, transporter erector launchers, and missiles on site. So it’s a ‘shoot the archer’ strategy.”

This means that to protect European cities, the allies would have to carry out a massive air campaign inside Russia itself.

“But that would necessitate the United States actually stepping in, and stepping in quite early,” Gady says. “Because only the U.S. Air Force currently is effectively capable of conducting what’s called ‘suppression of enemy air defense’ and ‘destruction of enemy air defense’ campaigns — which would be the first step in order to breach, essentially, Russian defenses and go TEL-hunting so to speak, and to hit other launch sites.”

The NATO official says member states are keenly aware of the challenge posed by long-range precision strike munitions, such as drones and ballistic missiles.

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