This week we talk about Article 4, big sticks, and spheres of influence.
We also discuss Moldova, super powers, and new fronts.
Recommended Book: More Everything Forever by Adam Becker
Transcript
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, was originally formed in 1949 in the wake of World War 2 and at the beginning of the Cold War.
At that moment, the world was beginning to orient toward what we might think of as the modern global order, which at the time was predicated on having two superpowers—the US and the Soviet Union—and the world being carved up into their respective spheres of influence.
NATO was formed as the military component of that protection effort, as the Soviets (and other powers who had occupied that land in the past) had a history of turning their neighbors into client states, because their territory provides little in the way of natural borders. Their inclination, then, was to either invade or overthrow neighboring governments so they could function as buffers between the Soviet Union and its potential enemies.
The theory behind NATO is collective security: if anyone attacks one of the member nations, the others will come to their aid. Article 5 of the NATO treaty says that an attack against one member is considered an attack against all members, and while this theoretically would be applied against any would-be attacker, it was 100% created so that the Soviets and their Warsaw Pact allies knew that if they attacked, for instance, Norway, the other NATO nations—including, importantly, the United States, which again, was one of just two superpowers in the world at that point, all the other powers, like the UK and France having been devastated by WWII—would join in their defense.
NATO, today, is quite a bit bigger than it was originally: it started out with just 12 countries in Europe and North America, and as of 2025, there are 32, alongside a handful of nations that are hoping to join, and are at various points along the way to possibly someday becoming member states.
What I’d like to talk about today are recent provocations by the Soviet Union’s successor state, Russia, against NATO, and what these provocations might portend for the future of the region.
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In early 2014, Russia invaded—in a somewhat deniable way, initially funding local rabble-rousers and using unmarked soldiers and weapons—the eastern portion of Ukraine, and then annexed an important Black Sea region called Crimea. Then in early 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, massing hundreds of thousands of military assets on their shared border before plunging toward Ukraine’s capitol and other vital strategic areas.
Against the odds, as Ukraine is small and poor compared to Russia, and has a far smaller military, as well, Ukrainians managed to hold off the Russian assault, and today, about 3.5 years later, Ukraine continues to hold Russia off, though Russian forces have been making incremental gains in the eastern portion of the country over the past year, and Russian President Putin seems convinced he can hold the Donbas region, in particular, even if peace is eventually declared.
At the moment, though, peace seems unlikely, as Russian forces continue to grind against increasingly sophisticated and automated Ukrainian defenses, the invading force, in turn, bolstered by North Korean ammunition and troops. Ukraine’s exhausted soldiery is periodically and irregularly bulwarked by resources from regional and far-flung allies, helping them stay in the game, and they’re fleshing out their locally grown defense industry, which has specialized in asymmetric weaponry like drones and rockets, but Russia still has the advantage by pretty much any metric we might use to gauge such things.
Over the past three weeks, concerns that this conflict might spill over into the rest of Europe have been heightened by Russian provocations along the eastern edge of the NATO alliance.
Russia flew drones into Poland and Romania, fighter jets into Estonia, and aggressively flew fighters over a Germany Navy frigate in the Baltic Sea. Article 4 of the NATO treaty was invoked, which is the lead-up invocation to an eventual invocation of Article 5, which would be a full-fledged defense, by the bloc, against someone who attacked a NATO member.
And that’s on top of Russia’s persistent and ongoing efforts to influence politics in Moldova, which held an election over the weekend that could serve as a foot in the door for Russian influence campaigns and Russia-stoked coups within the EU, or could become one more hardened border against such aggressions, depending on how the election pans out. The final results aren’t in as of the day I’m recording this episode, but there are fears that if the pro-Russian parties win, they’ll turn the country—which is located on Ukraine’s borders, opposite Russia—into another Russian puppet state, similar to Belarus, but if the pro-Russian parties don’t do well, they’ll try to launch a coup, because Russian disinformation in the country has been so thorough, and has indicated, in essence, if they lose, the process was rigged.
All of which is occurring at a moment in which NATO’s most powerful and spendy member, by far, the US, is near-universally pulling out of international activities, the second Trump administration proving even more antagonistic toward allies than the first one, and even more overt in its disdain for alliances like NATO, as well. It’s probably worth noting here, too, that part of why things are so hectic in Moldova is that the US government has stopped pressuring social networks to tamp down on overt misinformation and propaganda from Russia-aligned groups, and that’s led to significant fog of war for this most recent election.
Considering the US’s recent unreliability, and in some cases complete absence regarding NATO and similar alliances and pacts, it’s perhaps prudent that NATO member states have recently agreed to up their individual spending on defense, all of these states meeting or exceeding their pre-2025-summit goal of 2% of GDP, that target increasing to 5% by 2035.
This is notable in part because it’s something Trump demanded, and that demand seems to have worked and probably been a good idea, but this is also notable because of what it represents: a cessation of leadership by the US in this alliance.
The US has long been the big stick wielded by its European allies, and this administration basically said, hey, you need to make your own big sticks, you may not have access to our weapons and support anymore. And while it will still take a while to both get their funding up to snuff and to spend those funds appropriately, outfitting their defenses and shoring up their numbers, this would seem to be a step in that direction—though there’s simmering concern that it might be too little, too late.
That concern is mostly held by Russia-watchers who have noted a big pivot by Russia’s leadership, and in the Russian economy.
Over the past 3.5 years since it invaded Ukraine, that invasion taking a lot longer than they thought it would, Russia has shifted into a total war stance, its entire economy becoming reliant on its continued invasion of Ukraine.
Should that invasion end or ebb, or should it continue to fail to give the Russian government enough successes, so it can brag about how well it’s doing to its citizenry and oligarchs, it would probably need another target—another front in the war that it can open to justify the continued churning-out of weapons and soldiers, and the continued spending of a huge chunk of its GDP toward the military. Lacking that churn, it’s economy would be in even worse straits than it’s in, today, and lacking that cause, it’s possible support for the government could collapse.
It’s also been posited that it could be a disaster Putin’s regime if too many Russian veterans, wounded and traumatized from their time on the front lines in Ukraine, were to arrive back in Russia all at once. That’s the sort of situation that could lead to an uprising against the government, or bare minimum a lot of turmoil that they don’t want to deal with. Having another front, another battle to send them to, would solve that problem; it would be an excuse to keep them fighting external enemies, rather than looking for internal ones.
Russia’s Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, recently said that NATO and the EU have declared a “real war” against Russia by participating in the conflict; by providing arms and financial support for Ukraine.
This is, of course, a silly thing to say, though it is the kind of statement an aggressor makes when they want to make themselves sound like the victim, and want to justify moving on to victimize someone else. You attacked us for no reason! We are thus completely within our rights to defend ourselves by attacking you; we are in the right here, you’re the bad guys.
This could be just saber-rattling, and it usually is. Lavrov says things like this all the time, and it’s almost always state-sanctioned bluster. The drone and jet flyovers, likewise, could be meant to send a signal to the EU and NATO: back off, this is not your fight, but if you continue supporting Ukraine, we’ll make it your fight, and we think we can beat you.
It’s also possible, though, that these actions are meant to test NATO defenses at a moment in which the US is largely absent from the region, China and Russia have never been tighter, including in supporting each other’s regional goals and militaries, and in which Russia seemingly has many reasons, mostly internal, to expand the scope of the conflict.
Show Notes
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/pistorius-russian-jet-flew-over-142629311.html?guccounter=1
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/19/world/europe/russian-fighter-jets-estonia-nato.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/07/business/russia-disinformation-trump.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/20/world/europe/poland-drones-russia-nato.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prelude_to_the_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5ygjv0r2myo
https://thehill.com/policy/international/5522862-lavrov-nato-eu-russia/
https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/27/europe/putin-hybrid-war-europe-risks-intl
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/27/world/europe/russia-europe-poland-drones-moldova-election.html
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-poland-drones-sanctions-rafale-429ff46431a916feff629f26a5d0c0da
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/denmark-has-no-plans-invoke-natos-article-4-foreign-minister-says-2025-09-26/
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2025/09/27/More-drones-spotted-Denmark/4031758983759/
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-poland-drones-defense-kyiv-ec284922b946737b98a28f179ac0c5a0
https://apnews.com/article/poland-airspace-drones-russia-airport-closed-cf7236040d8c7858104a29122aa1bd57
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-poland-drones-fa2d5d8981454499fa611a1468a5de8b
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-poland-drones-1232774279039f9e5c5b78bd58686cb9
https://apnews.com/article/british-intelligence-mi6-russia-war-443df0c37ff2254fcc33d5425e3beaa6
https://apnews.com/article/nato-article-4-explainer-russia-poland-estonia-26415920dfb8458725bda517337adb12
https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/nato-article-4-russia/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/28/world/europe/moldova-election-russia-eu.html
https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_49187.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO
https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_52044.htm
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