In November 2021, then-CIA Director Bill Burns flew to Moscow to warn the Russians against invading Ukraine. Putin ignored the warnings and invaded anyway.
Flash forward to Aug. 25, 2026. CIA Director John Ratcliffe flew to Moscow to meet with Russian officials. Donald Trump called the flight "semi-routine."
Speculation by the New York Times centered on some new initiative by Trump to end the Ukraine war. Axios reported that Ratcliffe proposed having Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky meet to find a way to peace. The Washington Post reported that the CIA director warned Moscow that America was still strong despite the Iran war.
In fact, it now appears that Ratcliffe's mission was similar to Director Burns' trip in 2021: to warn Russia about attacking another European nation. The difference this time is that the nations that Putin is threatening are members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) — specifically, Estonia, Poland, and other Baltic states — and an attack on a NATO country would automatically trigger a military response due to Article V.
Article V is the only reason NATO still exists. The alliance is a paper tiger, but Article V guarantees that if any of the 32 NATO nations are attacked, the United States would rush aid (presumably troops) to the region to defend an alliance member. Without that guarantee, NATO is a gentleman's club, no more.
After decades of maneuvers, feints, and hot wars in Georgia and Ukraine, Putin is now ready to unveil his supreme gambit. It's his most dangerous gamble yet: attack and conquer states on NATO's Eastern flank without precipitating World War III.
He has carefully laid the groundwork for this move. It will begin, as PJM Media's Steve Green suggested, in Estonia.
It's eerie how Putin appears to be rerunning Adolf Hitler's playbook of bombast, bluff, probe, and testing the adversary before unleashing his armies. Like Hitler, he has spent years conducting a "shadow war" or hybrid/gray-zone warfare to weaken NATO's resolve. This has included directing arson attacks against warehouses, defense production plants, and logistics hubs servicing supply chains to Ukraine across Poland, Germany, Britain, and the Baltics, as well as the physical disruption, arson, and signal tampering along critical transport corridors, such as Polish rail lines transporting aid and civilian traffic. Russia is also suspected of severing undersea cables and sabotaging underwater pipelines.
There have been Russian airspace violations of Poland, Lithuania, and Romania. There have been strategic overflights, "accidental" missile or drone crashes near border areas, and fighter jet incursions testing NATO air-defense response times. NATO's feeble responses have emboldened Putin to the point that he now appears ready to stage the ultimate test in the alliance's 80 years.
Putin now has 100,000 troops massed on Estonia's border and will attempt to call up another 300,000 reservists. Putin has manufactured a crisis about "ethnic Russians" being oppressed in the border city of Narva. He wants Estonia "to grant regional autonomy to the “Narva People’s Republic” — a breakaway statelet purportedly declared by Estonia’s Russian minority, but which in reality has been invented by the Kremlin, then mercilessly promoted on social media," writes UnHerd's Michael Kranz.
Yet if a flashpoint on Nato’s borders appears increasingly likely, we equally shouldn’t expect a shooting war to start tomorrow. If he does indeed choose to throw his armies westward, Putin’s aim will first be to break the alliance’s internal cohesion, and to exploit its central weakness in an age of hybrid warfare: that the cost of actually honoring Nato’s self-defense clause is too much for most members to contemplate, until it’s too late anyway. It helps, here, that just like in Ukraine, Putin’s goal wouldn’t really be recovering lost territories. As always, rather, it’d be about control. Removing Nato as a cohesive bloc would allow Russia to once again dictate terms to its European neighbors, a generational shift in the balance of power on the continent, and marking the apotheosis of Putin’s decades-long political project. And, if all went to plan, the Russian premier could plausibly achieve all of this without triggering the world war many in the West have feared.
Like any good performer, Vladimir Putin has read the room and already knows NATO's response. Donald Trump is not going to ask American boys to die for Estonia, no more than he asked American boys to die for Ukraine. He will not send troops to defend Poland, Lithuania, Romania, or any European country, seeing the defense of Europe as a European matter.
When the NATO alliance was formed in 1949, the democracies in Europe were still prostrate, their economies smashed, their armies weak and small. It made sense then to keep Stalin and his insatiable appetite for land and power from achieving his goal of a Communist Europe.
Today, the 12 nations that originally made up the NATO alliance are the richest nations on Earth. They have no stomach to defend themselves, however, and herein lies the seed of NATO's downfall. By adding 20 nations to the alliance, many of whom are unable to defend themselves and add nothing to the strength of the alliance, NATO has guaranteed what's about to happen. It's the same miscalculation that Kaiser Wilhelm made in basing his World War I alliance on Austria, a paper tiger and a disintegrating empire.
An alliance is only as strong as its weakest link. Germany, the most powerful nation in Europe, let Austria, the weakest of the Great Powers, decide whether Berlin would go to war in 1914. It proved the Kaiser's undoing.
Today, little Estonia (and other small Baltic states) is determining the fate of NATO nations. Saving Estonia (or Ukraine) involves no major geopolitical issues. It could, however, precipitate a World War that could eventually lead to a nuclear exchange.
NATO has no one to blame but itself.