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

Stephen Collinson

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“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 signaled 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 “gray 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 defense 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 gray-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 adventurism?