I don’t think Putin expects to conquer Europe. Russia has struggled enormously in Ukraine; occupying NATO territory on any meaningful scale is simply beyond its capabilities at the moment. The more plausible objective is to weaken the European security order without ever fighting NATO head-on: test its red lines, intimidate its publics, undermine support for Ukraine and, above all, create doubt about whether Article 5 would actually be honoured. There’s a game-theory logic to the drones, sabotage, cyberattacks and information warfare. Keep each provocation ambiguous and individually too small to justify escalation. If NATO responds forcefully, pull back. If it doesn’t, you’ve learned something about where the real red line lies and can push a little further next time. The obvious danger is miscalculation. Russia pushes too far, NATO misreads Russian intentions, or an incident causes casualties that demand a response. A strategy designed to operate below the threshold of war can then produce precisely the broader and more protracted conflict neither side necessarily intended. There are historical echoes here: Soviet “active measures” and the Berlin crises similarly sought to exploit Western divisions and test Western resolve without triggering a direct superpower war. There is also the more uncomfortable lesson of the 1930s: incremental revisionism can exploit opponents who regard each individual challenge as too small to justify confrontation. The West is particularly vulnerable today. European societies spent decades assuming major interstate war had become essentially obsolete, underinvesting in defence while becoming more politically polarised and susceptible to information warfare. Younger Western generations, who know no war and are overall mentally weaker than their predecessors and are distracted by nonsense, inhabit an information environment in which foreign actors can reach enormous audiences at negligible cost. We’ve already seen how effectively malign Middle Eastern actors and their proxies can exploit Western divisions; Russia has decades of experience doing the same. NATO itself recognises manipulation designed to create confusion, deepen divisions and weaken the alliance as part of the Russian threat (if only it were equally alert to the Trojan horse sitting within its own walls, on Europe’s southeastern edge...). The US is the key variable. European deterrence ultimately rests on Moscow believing that attacking a NATO member risks war with the United States. If Moscow begins to doubt American willingness to fight for Europe, the calculation changes dramatically. That uncertainty is particularly consequential at a moment when Washington is demanding that Europeans shoulder far more responsibility for their own defence. So Putin doesn’t actually have to dissolve NATO. If he can make Europeans doubt that America will come, Americans question why they should come, and individual allies wonder whether everyone else will honour their commitments, he has already weakened the alliance enormously. That is the real danger, I believe: not Russian tanks reaching Paris, but Moscow discovering, one small test at a time, that Western deterrence can be hollowed out politically without ever having to defeat it militarily.