By: Ken Robinson
There is a hard lesson moving through Europe now, and it did not arrive by armored thrust alone. It arrived through warning, doubt, delay, and the repeated realization that the continent has outsourced too much of its security psychology, too much of its military architecture, and too much of its strategic confidence to Washington.
Donald Trump has repeatedly cast doubt on the reliability of America’s security guarantee, at one point saying he would “encourage” Russia to do whatever it wanted to allies he believed were not paying enough, and in April 2026 publicly threatened to pull the United States out of NATO while denouncing the alliance as a “paper tiger” mirror imaging a Putin talking point, verbatim.
European leaders would be negligent if they did not take such statements seriously.
Planning for “NATO without America” is therefore no longer an academic exercise. It is prudent contingency planning:
The first point must be stated plainly. Europe cannot replace the United States quickly.
The U.S. role inside NATO is not ornamental. It is structural.
The United States supplies the largest share of alliance-level intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, strategic lift, aerial refueling, high-end command-and-control, missile defense, long-range strike, logistics, and nuclear assurance.
NATO’s 2024 annual report underscored both Europe’s progress and the continuing gap:
European Allies and Canada reached a combined USD 486 billion in defense spending in 2024, amounting to 2% of their combined GDP, with 22 Allies meeting the 2% benchmark, but the report also called for a “quantum leap” in capabilities and industrial output.
In parallel, the European Union’s Readiness 2030 and ReArm Europe framework, presented in March 2025, aimed to unlock up to EUR 800 billion in additional defense spending by 2030, while Security Action for Europe (SAFE) created a EUR 150 billion loan instrument for urgent procurement and industrial expansion. SAFE is an EU-level financial instrument designed to rapidly scale European defense capability
This is not cosmetic movement. It is the beginning of a strategic rearmament.
But rearmament is not the same as readiness. The most dangerous period is the transition window between an America that may become politically unreliable and a Europe not yet militarily self-sufficient.
That is the seam in which Russia operates best.
Moscow does not need to defeat Europe in a single Napoleonic campaign.
It needs to keep Europe anxious, divided, economically burdened, politically penetrated, digitally compromised, and strategically uncertain.
That is the essence of the Russian fifth-generation warfare threat:
Fifth-generation warfare, in this context, is not a slogan. It is the coordinated use of state power, deniable assets, cyber tools, covert action, criminal intermediaries, economic leverage, information manipulation, sabotage, political influence, and selective intimidation to achieve strategic effects without triggering a clean conventional response.
The objective is not merely to win a battle. It is to shape the environment so thoroughly that your target society misreads reality, mistrusts itself, hesitates under pressure, and begins doing your work for you.
Russia’s hybrid campaign against Europe is no longer theoretical.
The EU states plainly that Russia’s hybrid activity has intensified since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and includes sabotage, disruption of critical infrastructure, cyber-attacks, information manipulation and interference, and attempts to undermine democracy and elections on European soil.
NATO, facing repeated threats to Baltic undersea infrastructure, established a Maritime Centre for the Security of Critical Undersea Infrastructure in 2024 and launched Baltic Sentry in January 2025 to increase maritime surveillance, presence, and enforcement coordination.
The EU has since built a dedicated hybrid sanctions framework and repeatedly expanded it; by March 2026, restrictive measures under the Russia destabilization regime applied to 69 individuals and 17 entities, and in May 2025 the Council broadened the framework to target physical network assets, vessels, aircraft, real estate, and crypto-enabled finance:
Europe did not create those tools because of theory.
It created them because it was already under attack.
So what would “going it alone” actually look like?
It would not look like a dramatic European declaration that NATO is over. It would look like a layered emergency construction project.
Europe would have to preserve NATO where possible, but internally build a parallel capacity to fight, endure, and retaliate without assuming timely U.S. rescue.
That means five things at once:
First, Europe would have to build a genuinely European command spine for high-intensity defense. Today, too much of the alliance’s operational coherence depends on U.S. enablers. A Europe preparing to stand without America would need a standing multinational command structure with authority over continental air and missile defense, logistics prioritization, strategic mobility, cyber defense coordination, and emergency infrastructure protection.
This would not require abolishing NATO. It would require assuming that the first 30 days of any crisis may be a European responsibility.
Second, Europe would have to harden and disperse critical infrastructure at wartime speed. Russian fifth-generation warfare targets the systems that allow modern states to function: power grids, gas pipelines, LNG terminals, rail chokepoints, ports, telecom backbones, cloud architecture, satellite links, and especially undersea cables.
NATO notes that undersea cables carry an estimated USD 10 trillion in transfers every day and roughly 95% of global data flows. That tells you everything about target logic. Russia does not have to sink fleets to impose strategic cost. It can sever, disrupt, spoof, jam, burn, delay, infiltrate, or intimidate the arteries of a digital economy.
Third, Europe would have to militarize resilience, not merely discuss it. Civil preparedness can no longer be treated as a bureaucratic annex to defense policy. Energy redundancy, reserve fuel, cyber hygiene, port continuity, rail repair capacity, emergency communications, medical stockpiles, counter-sabotage teams, and reserve mobilization procedures would all become frontline capabilities.
In a real Russia-Europe confrontation below the threshold of declared war, the decisive opening engagements may take place inside ministries, substations, data centers, shipping registries, air traffic networks, and payment systems.
Fourth, Europe would have to become far more aggressive in counterintelligence and internal security cooperation. One of the most dangerous illusions in Western democracies is the belief that war begins when the shooting starts.
The war has already started. We are in it now.
Russia’s campaign began years ago through business fronts, intelligence cutouts, coerced emigres, recruited criminals, online proxies, corrupt intermediaries, shell companies, influence channels, and social-media amplification ecosystems.
The tradecraft pattern is familiar: low-visibility probing, patient access, compartmented deniability, coordinated narrative shaping, and opportunistic exploitation of legal seams.
Fifth, Europe would have to create political habits equal to military necessity. Russia studies coalition fracture as a discipline. It does not need every European government to bend. It only needs enough veto points, enough legal hesitation, enough partisan noise, enough procurement delay, enough moral confusion, and enough fear of escalation to blunt response.
Europe without America therefore requires not only more steel, ammunition, drones, and missile defenses. It requires a decision culture that treats hybrid attack as an act of war.
The Russian fifth-generation warfare threat itself can be broken down in a practical who-what-when-where-why-how structure:
Who? The strategic direction comes from the Kremlin, but operational execution runs through a layered ecosystem: the GRU, SVR, FSB, state media, cyber units, sanctioned oligarchic networks, criminal facilitators, diplomatic cover, front organizations, and online influence infrastructures.
The UK’s 2025 profile of GRU cyber and hybrid threat operations describes Unit 26165 as conducting advanced intelligence gathering and hack-and-leak operations against Ukraine, European partners, NATO allies, and the UK.
The same UK reporting linked Unit 29155 to cyber-attacks and digital sabotage, while the NCSC separately exposed Unit 74455, or Sandworm, for destructive cyber activity. These units do not operate sequentially. They operate in parallel, with cyber, intelligence, sabotage, and narrative manipulation reinforcing one another.
What? The threat is not one thing. It is a campaign family. It includes cyber intrusion, hack-and-leak operations, destructive malware, GPS jamming, undersea cable sabotage, arson, suspicious disruptions to transport or industrial nodes, intimidation of diaspora communities, covert financing, political cultivation, election interference, disinformation, assassination plotting, and pressure operations designed to erode public trust.
The EU’s own language is blunt: Russia’s campaign includes sabotage, critical infrastructure disruption, cyber-attacks, and attempts to undermine democracy and electoral processes.
That means Europe’s problem is not simply military invasion. It is cumulative strategic corrosion.
When? Constantly. Fifth-generation warfare is a persistent-contact battlespace. There is no clean peace and war dividing line. Russia probes in peacetime, tests during elections, exploits migration surges, manipulates energy shocks, amplifies protests, and escalates during moments of Western distraction. The battlespace is already active.
Where? Everywhere there is friction to exploit. The Baltic Sea. The North Sea. Black Sea-adjacent political space. Border states. Port cities. Finance hubs such as London, Frankfurt, Zurich, and Amsterdam. Digital infrastructure nodes. Defense industries. University labs. Media ecosystems. Electoral systems. Diaspora communities:
Clandestine action is geographic
The wider campaign is civilizational.
It targets the connective tissue of open societies.
Why? Because Russia understands that it cannot outproduce the aggregate West in a clean, conventional, long-duration contest. It therefore seeks asymmetric leverage. It wants to fragment NATO, weaken EU cohesion, impose economic costs, deter military support for Ukraine, normalize intimidation, and demonstrate that democratic societies are too divided and procedurally constrained to defend themselves:
Its ideal outcome is not necessarily conquest in the old sense.
It is political paralysis in the target and psychological advantage for Moscow.
How? Through deniability, tempo, ambiguity, and convergence. Small actions produce large strategic effects when timed and layered properly. A cyber intrusion alone is a problem. A cyber intrusion paired with a sabotage event, a bot-driven narrative, a paid influencer ecosystem, a legal disinformation fog, and selective intimidation of officials becomes a strategic operation.
That is how modern hostile intelligence work functions.
The target is made to argue over whether an attack was “really” an attack while the attacker moves to the next phase.
If Europe is to prepare seriously for NATO without America, then its response must mirror the character of the threat rather than the comfort of its institutions.
Europe should assume that the opening months of any major crisis will require independent action in six domains:
In air and missile defense, it must rapidly expand integrated continental coverage, prioritizing layered defense against cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, drones, and low-cost saturation attacks. Denmark’s April 2026 decision to buy the Franco-Italian SAMP/T NG system instead of the U.S. Patriot reflects the broader European push to reduce dependence on U.S. suppliers and grow indigenous capability.
In strategic enablers, Europe must invest heavily in ISR, lift, refueling, secure communications, space support, and battle-management networks. These are not luxuries. They are the machinery of modern war.
In industrial mobilization, Europe must treat munitions production, air defense interceptors, long-range fires, and drone manufacturing as national survival sectors.
Money alone does not produce deterrence. Production lines do.
In maritime security, Europe must defend cables, ports, seabed infrastructure, offshore energy, and chokepoints with persistent surveillance, unmanned systems, legal authorities for interdiction, and rapid repair capacity.
NATO’s Baltic Sentry is a start, not a finish line.
In internal security, Europe must fuse military intelligence, domestic security, customs, border authorities, financial regulators, cyber agencies, and law enforcement into real-time counter-hybrid cells. The old separation between external and internal security is now a vulnerability.
In strategic communications, Europe must move beyond passive rebuttal. Russian information warfare is not defeated by fact-checking alone. It is countered by pre-bunking, exposure of networks, rapid attribution, public discipline, and political leaders willing to name hostile activity before Moscow sets the frame.
What is Europe doing right now? It has created:
European External Action Service (EEAS) is the European Union’s diplomatic and foreign policy arm.
Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI) is a formal EU term describing coordinated efforts by foreign actors to manipulate information environments.
The EEAS 2025 mapping of FIMI infrastructure found more than 500 FIMI incidents across 2024, involving at least 25 platforms and 38,000 accounts.
The EEAS 2026 FIMI report warns that the greatest threats are state-sponsored operations designed to manipulate citizens and shape political choices.
What then is the likely shape of Europe if it truly prepares to go it alone?
It will become more armed, more integrated, more suspicious of dependency, and more willing to treat infrastructure security as military security.
It will spend far more.
It will push procurement toward continental suppliers where possible.
It will empower France and the United Kingdom more visibly as Europe’s nuclear core, whether formally or informally.
It will build joint financing mechanisms, joint stockpiles, and joint response frameworks.
It will also be more internally contested, because rearmament, intelligence integration, and resilience spending all carry political cost.
That is why the central judgment of this assessment is straightforward. Europe can build the capacity to defend itself without the United States, but not on political autopilot, not cheaply, and not before Russia tests the transition.
Reuters reported in March 2025 that Europe’s major military powers were already discussing a managed 5-to-10-year transfer of greater defense responsibility from the United States. Another Reuters report, citing Bruegel and the Kiel Institute, estimated that defending Europe without U.S. support could require roughly EUR 250 billion a year in additional investment and mobilization of about 300,000 troops.
Whether those exact figures hold over time, the strategic point does: Europe is rich enough to defend itself, but only if it behaves like a power and not a protected market.
My judgment is that Russia will not wait politely for Europe to complete this transition. Europe’s espionage operations must go into overtime:
It will intensify pressure in the gray zone precisely because gray-zone pressure is cheaper than conventional war and often more politically productive.
The Kremlin has watched the West argue over thresholds for years. It has learned that ambiguity is a weapon. And, their weapon of choice is 5th Generation warfare.
Europe must reimagine an intelligence architecture that does not include intelligence sharing with the United States. They must be prepared to go it alone against this active Hybrid Warfare Threat.
The Russian Threat:
Russia’s intelligence apparatus is best understood not as a collection of discrete agencies, but as a unified, adaptive system - a hybrid organism that blends foreign intelligence, military operations, internal security, and influence warfare into a single strategic instrument of the state.
The SVR (Russian Foreign Intelligence Service), GRU (Russian Military Intelligence Directorate), and FSB (Russian Federal Security Service) operate with distinct mandates, but in practice they function as overlapping layers of a coordinated campaign:
The SVR provides long-range penetration through deep-cover illegals and economic targeting
The GRU fuses cyber, signals intelligence, and special operations into offensive action
The FSB ensures regime security while extending its reach into neighboring states and domestic control.
This architecture is not accidental - it reflects a centuries-long evolution from the coercive state models of the oprichniki and the Cheka (Soviet secret police), where intelligence was never merely about information, but about control, manipulation, and preemption of threats before they fully emerge.
What distinguishes the Russian model today is its seamless integration of traditional espionage with what we now define as fifth-generation warfare.
The same directorates that recruit sources and steal secrets also conduct disinformation, cyber intrusion, financial targeting, and psychological operations as part of a continuous campaign against adversaries:
Within the SVR alone, units dedicated to scientific espionage, counterintelligence penetration, and “active measures” operate in parallel, aligning intelligence collection with influence and disruption objectives.
The GRU extends this further, combining cyber units, space-based intelligence, and Spetsnaz capabilities into a toolset that can move from reconnaissance to sabotage without crossing the threshold of declared conflict.
Meanwhile, the FSB’s pervasive domestic surveillance and its role in the near abroad ensure that Russia maintains both internal stability and forward intelligence positioning.
The result is a system that does not recognize the Western distinction between peace and war - it is always engaged, always probing, always shaping the environment.
At the operational level, this hybrid structure is executed through global residencies embedded within diplomatic missions, where intelligence officers operate under official cover with legal protections, supported by technical specialists and tightly controlled communications cells.
These residencies are not passive collection points - they are forward operating bases for influence, recruitment, and disruption, integrating political, economic, and technical intelligence into actionable campaigns.
A Russian officer abroad is not simply collecting information; he is assessing vulnerabilities, cultivating leverage, and preparing the battlefield in advance of strategic decisions made in Moscow.
This is the core of the threat:
a persistent, disciplined, and state-directed intelligence enterprise that exploits the openness of Western societies while operating from the protection of a closed system at home.
It is not episodic espionage - it is continuous competition, executed below the threshold of war, designed to weaken institutions, fracture alliances, and shape outcomes in Russia’s favor without ever firing a shot.
The answer is not panic. It is clarity.
Europe must proceed on the assumption that the U.S. commitment may be delayed, degraded, conditional, or politically contested in the decisive early stage of a crisis:
It must therefore build for independent action while preserving the alliance where possible.
It must stop treating sabotage, cyber disruption, election interference, and infrastructure attacks as separate policy files.
They are running one single campaign plan.
It must build a continental counter-hybrid architecture capable of finding hostile networks, fixing attribution quickly, disrupting operations lawfully and aggressively, and exploiting penetrations for follow-on intelligence.
The old European model assumed America would arrive first, carry the heaviest load, and restore strategic gravity. That era may not be over in law, but it is over as an assumption.
That is the shift.
That is what Trump’s unpredictability has done.
And that is the opening Putin believes he can use.
Europe’s task now is not to hope that Washington becomes predictable again. It is to ensure that Moscow never benefits from American unpredictability in the first place.
This is the moment Europe must decide whether it intends to remain a protected geography or become a self-reliant power:
Alliances do not die in a single declaration; they erode in assumptions that go unchallenged until they fail under pressure.
The United States may remain engaged, but Europe can no longer afford to plan on certainty where uncertainty now governs.
Moscow understands this transition better than most in the West, and it will probe, pressure, and exploit every seam it finds during this period of adjustment.
The question is not whether Europe has the resources to defend itself - it does. The question is whether it has the political will, institutional speed, and strategic clarity to act before those seams are tested in crisis.
If Europe succeeds, it will emerge stronger, more unified, and more credible as a global power. If it hesitates, it will invite exactly the kind of persistent, deniable, corrosive pressure that defines the modern Russian 5th Generation Warfare Threat.