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

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. Editor’s picks The 250 Greatest Albums of the 21st Century So Far The 100 Best TV Episodes of All Time The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century

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.