Russia’s escalating provocations across Europe may be intended to test Western resolve. But Vladimir Putin could be creating the opposite of what he wants: a stronger and more cohesive Nato.
There are several ways to interpret the growing number of provocations and low-level acts of aggression that Vladimir Putin’s Russia has directed at Germany and other countries along Nato’s northeastern flank. Incidents in the Baltic and Scandinavian regions have become so frequent that many barely make the headlines anymore.
One possibility is that Moscow is preparing to expand and intensify its war. After nearly five years of an invasion of Ukraine that was initially expected to last only weeks, the Kremlin may be seeking to divert attention from its failures by escalating the conflict.
If that is the case, Europe could be facing a gradual slide towards a third world war — provided, of course, that the countries targeted by these actions are willing and able to respond.
Another interpretation is that Russia is simply testing the preparedness of countries such as Germany, which spent decades pursuing disarmament, pacifism and a relatively passive approach to geopolitics. Moscow could also hope that such pressure strengthens neutralist and pro-Russian forces within those countries, including Germany’s far-right AfD.
But there is a third possibility that Putin may be overlooking — and it is becoming increasingly plausible.
By increasing pressure on Western Europe, the Russian president could revive an Atlantic alliance that many had considered to be in irreversible decline.
Few things are more effective at giving Nato a renewed sense of purpose than an active external enemy.
That argument has been put forward by two highly regarded American foreign-policy experts, Kurt Campbell and Rush Doshi, both associated with the Democratic foreign-policy establishment and both veterans of the Biden administration.
Campbell served as deputy secretary of state and coordinated Indo-Pacific policy at the White House. Doshi was responsible for China and Taiwan policy at the National Security Council.
In an essay for Foreign Affairs titled “How Alliances Survive”, the two challenge the increasingly widespread pessimism surrounding Nato’s future.
Alliances have survived crises before
Campbell and Doshi begin with a historical reminder.
In 1984, the Reagan administration decided to deploy Pershing II nuclear missiles in Western Europe in response to Soviet missile deployments. The decision triggered huge demonstrations across European cities.
Senior officials from France, West Germany and Italy confronted Nato Secretary General Peter Carrington outside his office in Brussels. Tensions were high, with European governments accusing Washington of arrogance, recklessness and contempt for allied advice.
Carrington listened before delivering a blunt assessment of the alliance’s dependence on American power: “Unfortunately, these are the only Americans we have.”
That episode provides the starting point for the authors’ analysis of the current crisis.
They do not underestimate the shock created by Donald Trump’s second presidency. But they argue that the political and psychological crisis in relations with Washington is too easily confused with the collapse of the institutions and structures that bind the allies together.
Those structures, they contend, are considerably stronger than the angry statements coming from European leaders might suggest.
Trump’s second term has tested allied patience even more severely than his first. Threats involving Greenland and Nato, troop withdrawals from Germany, interference in the domestic politics of allied countries and tariffs imposed on friendly economies have been accompanied by warmer rhetoric towards Beijing and Moscow.
The result has been increasingly stark warnings from European leaders that the old relationship with the United States is over and that the Western order as it was known has disappeared.
The authors do not dismiss those concerns as emotional overreactions. The damage to trust is real.
But they reject the conclusion that alliances are therefore doomed.
Their argument rests on three main points.
First, Western alliances have already survived crises that were as serious, and sometimes more serious, than the current one.
Second, the threats that originally brought those alliances together have not disappeared. Russia and China are, if anything, bringing European and Asian strategic perceptions closer together.
Third, beneath the spectacle of political rhetoric, deeper economic, technological, military and bureaucratic forces continue to pull America’s allies towards Washington.
The golden age of Nato never really existed
The first argument is particularly important because it challenges a distorted view of the alliance’s history.
There was never a perfect golden age of transatlantic unity.
In the 1950s, Washington threatened Britain with devastating financial consequences in an effort to force London to end its intervention in the Suez crisis.
In the 1960s, Charles de Gaulle’s France withdrew from Nato’s integrated military command.
During the 1970s, the US Senate came close to approving the Mansfield Amendment, which would have dramatically reduced the number of American troops stationed in Europe.
The shocks were even greater in Asia.
Under the Guam Doctrine in 1969, Richard Nixon warned allies that they would have to take greater responsibility for their own defence and withdrew 20,000 US troops from South Korea.
His dramatic opening to Mao Zedong’s China in 1972 caught both Tokyo and Taipei by surprise. The fall of Saigon in 1975 appeared to demonstrate that Washington could abandon a partner.
South Korea and Taiwan even explored clandestine nuclear programmes.
Yet the US alliance system in Asia survived.
Economic shocks did not destroy the alliances
There are similarly striking precedents on the economic front.
The Nixon shock of 1971 abruptly ended the dollar’s convertibility into gold, unilaterally disrupting the monetary framework on which America’s allies had built much of their postwar economic system. Washington simultaneously imposed a 10% surcharge on imports.
In 1985, the Plaza Accord forced America’s allies into a major currency adjustment. Within three years, the Japanese yen had roughly doubled in value against the dollar.
Seen from this perspective, Trump’s protectionism is less unprecedented than it may appear.
There is also a paradox at the heart of Trump’s approach.
His policies have weakened confidence in the United States, but they have also produced some of the outcomes Washington had demanded from its allies for decades.
They have accelerated European defence spending, pushed Japan towards doubling its defence budget and encouraged greater cooperation over China’s technological challenge.
During Biden’s presidency, some of the groundwork laid by these pressures also contributed to developments such as the AUKUS security partnership between the United States, Britain and Australia, the Quad in the Indo-Pacific, closer relations between Japan and South Korea, coordinated semiconductor export controls and a joint European-Asian response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Crises within alliances, Campbell and Doshi argue, can sometimes create the capabilities that will be needed in the next phase.
Europe and Asia are beginning to see the same threats
This is where the authors’ broader geopolitical argument comes into focus.
For three decades, Europe and Asia viewed the strategic landscape in markedly different ways.
European countries increasingly saw Russia as their principal security threat while continuing to regard China primarily as a market and an industrial powerhouse.
Japan and other Asian allies were much more concerned about China’s military rise, while Russia was viewed largely as a potential energy supplier.
That divergence benefited both Moscow and Beijing.
The war in Ukraine has begun to change the picture.
Europe’s perception of China has shifted as Beijing has become Russia’s most important economic, industrial, technological and diplomatic supporter.
Chinese manufacturing capacity is helping Russia rebuild the industrial foundations of its military power, which in turn threatens Europe.
At the same time, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore increasingly see the war in Ukraine as a precedent that could affect them directly. If the use of force is rewarded in Europe, the message could eventually reach Beijing.
Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea — Nato’s four main Indo-Pacific partners — now regularly participate in alliance summits.
The Atlantic and Pacific are therefore becoming less distinct as strategic theatres.
The same convergence is visible in economics.
Europe is increasingly recognizing what Washington has argued for years: China is a mercantilist power capable of using subsidies, excess industrial capacity and enormous economies of scale to undermine manufacturing bases elsewhere.
European leaders have begun warning of a new “China shock” as Chinese overcapacity becomes increasingly difficult to absorb.
That does not mean that the United States, Europe and Asia agree on how to respond.
Deep divisions remain over Taiwan, Ukraine, trade and the broader question of how to reduce strategic dependence on China.
But the diagnosis is becoming increasingly shared — and that alone could strengthen the alliance system.
The allies want less dependence on America — but remain deeply tied to it
European and Asian governments are simultaneously trying to reduce their reliance on the United States.
Yet powerful forces are pulling them in the opposite direction.
On trade, the United States now absorbs roughly 20% to 30% of many allies’ exports, a share that has grown rapidly as China’s share has declined.
Over the past five years, exports to China have fallen by around 15% for Europe and 20% for Japan, South Korea and India, while exports to the United States have increased by roughly 30% for Europe, South Korea and India.
The technological dependence is even more pronounced.
Europe may increasingly speak about “digital sovereignty”, but Amazon, Google and Microsoft control roughly two-thirds of the global cloud market. European providers account for only a small share of their own domestic market.
In 2026, America’s hyperscale technology companies are expected to invest more than $700 billion in artificial intelligence infrastructure, compared with roughly $13 billion in sovereign European public investment.
But interdependence works both ways.
The United States depends on Dutch lithography equipment, German optical technology, Japanese chemicals and Taiwan’s semiconductor manufacturing capabilities.
The military relationship is even harder to unwind.
While Europe increasingly talks about strategic autonomy, more than 80% of the new European rearmament programme, worth around $860 billion, remains open to American defence companies.
The share of European weapons purchases going to US manufacturers reportedly rose from 28% in 2019-21 to 51% in 2022-24.
Europe also lacks immediate substitutes for several critical capabilities in modern warfare, including satellite-based missile warning, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, and command-and-control systems.
Even German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has acknowledged that dependence on the United States will continue for a long time.
The invisible infrastructure of the alliances
There is another force at work, one that is far less visible.
Campbell and Doshi provocatively describe it as the real “Deep State” — not a conspiracy involving a secret group of elites, but the thousands of military officers, intelligence officials, sanctions and export-control specialists, central bankers, trade negotiators and other technocrats who keep the alliances functioning every day.
These networks have taken decades to build and cannot easily be dismantled in a matter of months.
Their uneventful continuity acts as a stabilizing force against the volatility of political leadership.
What comes after the Western alliance?
The authors then take the argument further by considering the alternatives.
A multipolar world in which every country acts alone could trigger new arms races and nuclear proliferation.
Spheres of influence would come at the expense of smaller states’ autonomy without eliminating competition between major powers.
A new concert of great powers — effectively dividing the world into rival zones of influence along the lines of the Yalta era — also appears unrealistic.
That leaves a fourth possibility, which Campbell and Doshi consider both more plausible and more troubling: partial Chinese hegemony.
This is where the central concept of their essay emerges: the scale of allied power.
China has roughly twice America’s manufacturing capacity, the world’s largest navy and a goods trade surplus of around $1.2 trillion.
No Western country, including the United States, can match that scale alone.
But the balance changes dramatically when America and its allies are considered together.
The coalition would have more than twice China’s GDP at purchasing-power parity, more than twice its military spending, a leading position in patents and highly cited scientific research, and would represent roughly half of global manufacturing output compared with about one-third for China.
The alliance of the future, therefore, cannot simply be a system in which America provides security while everyone else consumes it.
It would have to become a mechanism for pooling markets, capital, technology, industrial capacity and military power.
Building a less unequal alliance
The political perspective of the authors is clear. Their argument is essentially a post-Trump reflection that also looks towards the next presidential cycle.
Campbell and Doshi are not calling for a restoration of the old order.
Their message is that there can be no return to the past.
Instead, they argue that the Trump shock should be used to build alliances that are less dependent on a single power.
European and Asian allies should stop being passive consumers of American security and become joint producers of strategic power alongside the United States.
The approach should be pragmatic.
Start with concrete projects, such as pharmaceutical supply chains or joint ammunition production. Focus first on areas where dependence on China poses the greatest risks. Build limited successes before attempting to construct ambitious new institutional frameworks.
Above all, unilateral dependence should be replaced by two-way interdependence.
An alliance sustained by concessions from one country is inherently fragile. A system in which every member has something significant to lose from a rupture is far more resilient.
There is also a need for a positive purpose.
It is not enough to build a coalition simply “against China”. The new system must offer something that other countries want to join: a prosperous, technologically dynamic international order.
It may be the most idealistic part of an otherwise deeply realist argument.
Alliances do not survive because their members necessarily like one another. They survive because they need one another.
Campbell and Doshi ultimately return to Lord Carrington’s remark.
Europeans and Asians may be increasingly frustrated with Trump’s America, but those are still “the only Americans they have”.
The authors turn the logic back on Washington.
Faced with China’s sheer scale and the growing convergence among revisionist powers, the United States may need its allies more than ever.
And that means Americans, too, may have to learn Carrington’s lesson about patience.
After all, these are the only allies they have.
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