Finally, an American Who Looks Like the Brochure 🇺🇸👏!
There is a particular kind of American that we Europeans were raised on, a man with a jaw like a filing cabinet who speaks quietly because he has never once needed to raise his voice, and on Monday in Warsaw one of them actually turned up. Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, NATO's top commander, explained that a Russian attack would be futile, and he did it with the mild patience of someone telling a toddler that the oven is hot.
His theory of victory, which all 32 allies back, is that NATO will destroy "anything and everything" keeping an attacking force alive, with land forces rushing to the breach while aircraft, ships, space and cyber units dismantle whatever sits behind it. War, he added, is neither imminent nor inevitable, and he said this only weeks after Moscow waved its nuclear arsenal about over Kaliningrad.
It was glorious, and it was also deeply embarrassing for the failed Trump regime, whose parade of beta males has spent years stamping its little feet, threatening its friends and flattering its enemies in the belief that this is what strength looks like.
Then a proper American walks into a room in Warsaw, speaks for a few minutes without shouting at anyone, and the whole lot of them are revealed as what they always were, which is frightened little men in oversized suits playing soldiers while the grown-ups get on with defending the continent.
NATO has finally put its conventional war plan into plain English.
If Russia attacks allied territory, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander says the alliance will block the assault, blunt its momentum, then break the military system sustaining it, including logistics, communications and command.
Good. Moscow now knows what a conventional war could cost.
But there is a glaring hole.
Russia is already attacking Europe below that threshold: sabotage, cyber operations, drones, proxy networks, infrastructure attacks and suspected assassination plots.
NATO knows how it intends to win the war Russia cannot afford to start.
What Europe still lacks is an equally clear theory for winning the war Russia is already fighting.
That is the problem our article tackles.