Europe worries it’s already at war - and America hasn’t noticed

Analysis by Stephen Collinson, CNN

"We are not at war, but we are no longer at peace either."

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz's warning last month might lack the fateful portents of Sir Edward Grey's lament on the eve of World War I that "the lamps are going out all over Europe." But they signalled a page of history turning amid a flurry of airspace incursions in NATO nations by suspected Russian drones and warplanes, alongside other threatening seaborne and cyber activity.

For 80 years Europe considered its peace inviolate. Now, it can no longer be sure. The buzz phrase for a new age of uncertainty is the "grey zone" - a state in which nothing is black or white; neither fully at war nor at peace.

Merz is not alone in his concern. Former NATO chief George Robertson, co-author of a British government defence review, bemoaned recent cyberattacks and warned civilian infrastructure was unprepared. "Can we imagine that it is just all coincidence that these things are happening, the sabotage is happening all across Europe?" Robertson said at a speaking event last week.

"We've got to worry about the grey-zone attacks. It'll be too late if the lights go out," Robertson continued. He asked his audience in idyllic Wigtown, in southwest Scotland, a world away from Ukraine's war: "Have you all got torches with live batteries in every room in your house? Have you got candles?"

Drone sightings, which closed mainland European airports and led to NATO jets being scrambled, exposed Europe's lack of readiness after decades of strategic slumber and cast doubt on whether governments weakened by populist uproar can muster the political will to rearm.

And there's never been more uncertainty about the strength of US security guarantees to NATO partners. President Donald Trump claims, ad nauseam, that the Ukraine war would never have begun had he been president. But the new alarm is on his watch. Has his ambivalence toward the Western alliance, confusion about his red lines, and psychodrama of flattery and rejection with President Vladimir Putin opened the way to dangerous Russian adventuresome?

Growing tensions across the Atlantic have hardly penetrated America's toxic political bubble. They have largely been overshadowed by the Charlie Kirk assassination; Trump's deployments of National Guard troops to American cities; and a government shutdown.

Russia has so far wisely not tested US security.

But Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski drew an analogy for American viewers. "Every sovereign country has the right to deal with intruders," he told CNN's Fareed Zakaria. "You wouldn't tolerate Cuban MiGs over Florida."

Poland was shocked when multiple Russian drones entered its airspace last month. US defence officials were unsure whether this was deliberate. It hardly mattered, since this was one of the worst-ever intrusions into NATO territory.

Notions of a mere mistake were undermined by subsequent events. Copenhagen International Airport had to be shut twice in a week after mystery drone sightings, with Russia suspected. Denmark is a major support of Ukraine. Flights at Oslo Airport in Norway were suspended for a short time last month and again this week after drone sightings. Munich Airport closed twice last week for the same reason. On 19 September, NATO jets intercepted three Russian jets that violated the airspace of alliance member Estonia.

Concern is growing over Russia's "shadow fleet" of ageing tankers and other vessels used to evade Ukraine war sanctions. The Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington reported this year the fleet was used for undersea attacks on cable infrastructure and sabotage and subversion.

Russia has mocked European NATO members' concern as paranoia intended as a pretext for a military build-up that it claims threatens Moscow. "I won't do it anymore," Putin said last week, with half a grin, and denied he had drones that could reach Germany, France or Portugal.

Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said on Monday that the origin of the drones was unknown but that he hoped the incursions would cause voters in France and Germany to turn against their leaders. "The main thing is that short-sighted Europeans feel the danger of war on their own skin. That they fear and tremble like dumb animals in a herd being driven to slaughter," Medvedev said.

Medvedev is more of an online troll than true Kremlin power player these days. But he is unrecognisable from the president who enjoyed a pally lunch with President Barack Obama at Ray's Hell Burger in Arlington, Virginia, at the height of an ill-fated US-Russia reset.

Russia is boiling the European 'frog'

Presuming all these incidents can be attributed to Russian grey-zone warfare, what is Moscow's military goal?

"It looks very much like it is Russian. And they have a lot of reasons to want to do this," said Kirsten Fontenrose, president of Red Six Solutions, which provides US-government-approved technical expertise on combating drones. "You're testing the limits of NATO countries' commitment to one another," Fontenrose told Becky Anderson on CNN International. "We have this analogy ... about boiling a frog in a pot where the frog doesn't jump out to save itself because the water is boiling so slowly it doesn't know it's being boiled. This is like Russia slowly increasing the heat on NATO countries. How far can it push?"

Russia is also playing a geopolitical game.

"Right now, Russia is testing just how protected Europe is," said Kristine Berzina, senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. "Is the European shift to harder power and defence real? Are the Europeans developing actual capabilities to stop Russia? And what is the US appetite for having Europe's back?"

Putin has long tried to tear divides between NATO members in Europe and between the US and the rest of NATO. This has especially been the case during the Ukraine war, when alliance members farthest from the battle zone seem less threatened than those on the old Cold War frontlines in Eastern Europe.

And another potential goal of grey-zone warfare for Moscow, hinted at by Medvedev, is to spark alarm among Western electorates that may weaken political resolve to continue arming Ukraine.

The West responded to Russia's wake-up call by bolstering airborne defences along its eastern flank. Britain and France both sent jets. Poland invoked NATO's Article 4 to convene discussions on what to do. Top European leaders have spoken of creating a "drone wall" against Russian unmanned aerial vehicles. And in a striking inversion of the wartime dynamic, Ukraine - which now has the most battle-tested military in Europe - sent personnel to school some NATO nations in Russian tactics and capabilities. More broadly, member states handed Trump a victory at the NATO summit this year by promising to increase defence spending to 3.5 percent of GDP.

The genius of the supposed Russian effort is that it managed to put its European foes on alert with comparatively little effort and expense.

Majda Ruge, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin, pointed out that Europe lacks an economical way to respond. "Using F-35s to shoot really cheap Russian drones has put on the radar of most European leaders that they need to be very quick in developing more efficient, and cheaper, technology."

Trump may be making the situation worse

But is all this really necessary? A few drones flying into NATO airspace have not killed anyone. Perhaps it's better to turn the other cheek since a NATO overreaction - perhaps if a member state shot down a Russian jet - might risk the escalation NATO has tried to avoid for the entire Ukraine war. Such a view, however, underplays the fact that the gravest threat is not from drone fleets but from hybrid, cyber and covert warfare - which has also included vigourous Russian sabotage operation across Europe.

Another issue is the US response, which would surely have been far more robust under any modern president but Trump.

"Here we go!" Trump wrote on social media after Russian drones flew over Poland, behaving more as a bemused commentator than the leader of the free world. He later mused the incursion might have been a mistake. But at the United Nations last month, he suggested that NATO states should shoot down Russian planes, depending on the circumstances.

Europe's NATO leaders are therefore left trying to parse exactly how the president expects them to respond and how much the US would help. Trump loves to preserve uncertainty as a tool of statecraft, but in this context ambiguity could be dangerous, especially if it caused Russia to increase provocations based on a misreading of American ambivalence toward allies.

It's also hard to untangle Trump's strategic intentions from his emotional gyrations of his relationship with Putin. Currently, he's disillusioned that his friend snubbed his Ukraine peace effort, part of a bid to win the Nobel Prize. But he's shown in the past, he's susceptible to the Kremlin strongman's manipulation.

Europe's steadfastness is also a question. Alarmed by Russian expansionism and Trump's "America First" hostility, centrist European leaders have vowed to supercharge rearmament and to do more to defend their backyard. But a political crisis in France, the political siege afflicting Britain's Labour government and political challenges looming for Merz will make it hard to raise cash from debt-laden economies and to ask for unpopular sacrifices from voters who've taken the US security umbrella for granted.

A "kinetic incident" or sudden escalation involving Russia might be the only thing that ends up shaking complacency, Berzina said. "That is very frightening, because there have been long enough signs, and this war in Ukraine has been dragged on for long enough, and Russia has learned far too much in the last three-and-a-half years, for Europe to be as underprepared as it is."

'Everybody has to know what to do'

Short-term preparedness is one thing. True security will only come when Western societies are hardened against grey-zone warfare, cyberattacks and hybrid tactics used by Russia and other adversaries.

As Robertson said, "Defence is not simply a matter of the armed forces of the country. Our report says it has got to be an all-of-country enterprise. Everyone has to be involved. Everybody has to know what to do in an emergency."

Nicholas Dungan, the Netherlands-based CEO of strategic advisory firm CogitoPraxis and a member of the European Leadership Network, agrees with Robertson. "The problem is not entirely military and the response is not entirely military," he said. "That response depends on the resilience of the whole of society including major companies which control the vast majority of the critical systems that allow our societies to function."

Dungan sees growing cooperation between military strategists, who are acutely aware of the risks, and the private sector, as evidenced by a recent NATO conference in The Hague focused on civil-military cooperation, or CIMIC.

Russia's threatening posture shows time is short. But perhaps it did NATO a favour.

-CNN