Washington's Absence Is Inviting the War Europe Fears Most

A war game convened by sitting members of Congress and former U.S. military, diplomatic and intelligence officials imagined the scenario Europe most dreads: it is 2028, the war in Ukraine has calcified into a bloody stalemate, and a Russian drone strikes a fuel depot in Romania after an attack on Moldova, killing NATO citizens on NATO soil. In David Ignatius's account for The Washington Post, syndicated this week by Foreign Policy, the simulated American response to that attack was tepid — tepid enough to suggest that Article 5's promise of collective defense has quietly become negotiable. The scenario is not idle speculation: Ignatius counts 63 Russia-linked hybrid incidents against European targets since March, including 43 drone or airspace incursions, six sabotage operations, six cyber or electronic-warfare attacks and five hostile maritime incidents. Each one falls just below the threshold that would trigger a NATO military response, which is precisely the point — Moscow is testing how much damage it can inflict without ever handing Washington a single incident clear enough to act on. Germany's formal attribution this week of a Russian drone plot at Leipzig airport, and Poland's now-routine fighter scrambles over Russian barrages on Kyiv, read in this account like early installments of the same campaign rather than isolated incidents. Ignatius argues the credibility gap, not a shortage of European hardware, is now the vulnerability an adversary is most likely to exploit — Washington's failure to signal it would actually fight over a burning fuel depot in Romania. Absent a clearer American commitment, he warns, the war game's tepid response may end up looking less like a worst-case scenario than a rehearsal.