Andrew Latham
Key Points and Summary – Baltic incidents—drones, airspace brushes, GNSS spoofing—could cascade into a NATO–Russia war driven by fear, honor, and interest.
-Opening phases likely favor NATO in air and sea with superior ISR, EW, and standoff fires; Russia counters with missiles, dense air defenses, cyber, and navigation attacks.
-Two plausible endgames emerge: a non-nuclear grind to an armistice shaped by attrition and political risk, or limited nuclear use to coerce termination, shattering the taboo and accelerating crisis instability.
-By Clausewitz’s test, NATO’s best “win” is defending territory without crossing the nuclear threshold; overall, no side truly wins—the result is a harsher, more brittle cold peace.
World War III? How NATO and Russia Could End Up At War
The Baltic has felt jittery again in recent days. Reports of alleged incursions into Polish airspace by Russian drones, a lumbering Il-20 buzzed by German and Swedish fighters, new allegations of navigation interference in crowded flight corridors.
None of it is a Hollywood provocation; all of it is friction—small, deniable, cumulative. If one of them snaps into gunfire the questions that follow are blunt: who wins, and how does it end? For Clausewitz, victory is the attainment of a political object at a cost your polity will endure; for Thucydides, honor, fear, and interest can drive leaders to gamble with calamitous stakes. By those measures a NATO–Russia war produces no true victor. NATO likely wins battles; politics, economics, and nuclear risk devour the gains.
NATO-Russia War: How the War Starts
The war’s opening would probably include several depressingly familiar incidents. Fighter crosses a line; interceptor fires; missiles answer; suppression missions fan out from Kaliningrad. Each move is justified in defensive terms; each one tightens the coil. Thucydides’ triad does the pushing—fear of being seen as weak, honor bruised by losses, interests tied to geography and alliance credibility. Clausewitz’s trinity does the pulling—passion in the street and the headquarters, chance in the fog, and policy in an escalatory bind.
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