US President Donald Trump has derided Nato as a paper tiger and there will be many who agree with him.
A spate of recent incidents on the Nato frontiers would appear to give grounds to his charge.
Latvian Prime Minister Evika Silina has resigned after drones landed in the Nato member state in a spillover from the war in Ukraine. In the most recent development, a drone exploded in a Latvian lake.
No national or Nato-operated radar was available to detect the intrusion and authorities could not respond. Events in Latvia pose an ongoing embarrassment for the world's biggest military alliance.
The resulting political crisis is set to last for the rest of the year, handing a propaganda gift to Nato’s adversaries.
Nato is an alliance that stretches from the US and Canada in North America to Turkey on the edge of the Middle East. After five decades of Cold War stability followed by eastward expansion this has been a 21st century of tumult for Nato. The alliance took part in out-of-area operations in Afghanistan. It has a view on China as a strategic competitor. Middle East assistance missions and a definition of a southern arc of instability complete a “360-degree” strategic concept. It has even adopted a space policy. Many now dispute its characterisation as a strictly defensive alliance.
It has, since the Ukraine war was launched by the Kremlin in 2022, expanded its membership by taking in Finland and Sweden.
Its enlargement agenda in the Western Balkans, as well as in Ukraine and Georgia, was seized on by Moscow as a pretext for the deterioration in relations.
The prominence of drones in the Iran war underlined how Ukraine is increasingly seen as an asset to Nato rather than a liability.
Coupled with Kyiv’s recent battlefield gains, this has forced Russia to switch its offensive strategy towards exposing European Nato’s most glaring defensive deficiencies.
Mr Trump openly mocked UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer earlier this year when he asked whether British forces could take on Russia.
His frustration with European allies has only grown since, most pointedly over the lack of Nato backing for his Iran war campaign. The question now haunting capitals from London to Warsaw is whether, even if Nato members could defend themselves against Russia, they could still count on the US as a reliable ally.
Dependence on American arms supplies, particularly on missile and air capabilities, was tolerable when the alliance defined the threat of conventional attack as low. The threshold for that assessment is now being tested in Latvia and along the alliance’s eastern frontier.
Defence budgets are at long last rising. Even this creates vulnerabilities. Increased orders to American manufacturers expose how Washington has become only an intermittent friend. Deliveries from the US are under strain with Nato allies no longer at the front of the queue.
Beyond the eastern drone incursions, Nato is also divided over the GIUK gap, the stretch of North Atlantic between Greenland, Iceland and the UK through which Russian submarines must pass. Greenland itself, meanwhile, is in play with Washington.
An unchallenged Russian infrastructure build-up in the Arctic could allow Moscow to install nuclear warheads on the seabed under its “Skif” programme. Such deployments would breach the 1971 Seabed Treaty, which bars nuclear weapons on the ocean floor outside territorial waters. Nato says it is monitoring the situation.
The Oreshnik, the nuclear-capable hypersonic missile the Kremlin has now used against Kyiv, is a barely disguised signal of nuclear escalation.
Nato is still only talking about a credible pathway to its members spending 5 per cent of GDP on defence by 2035.
It remains susceptible to abrupt US deployment shifts, exemplified by the recently scrapped reinforcement of American troops in Poland. Nor does it yet have an answer to obvious capability gaps, such as the radar systems needed to detect drones.
Even Nato member Turkey saw several Iranian missiles intercepted in its airspace during the hottest days of the Iran war.
This is a long litany. It does not, however, make Nato “useless when needed, a paper tiger”, in Mr Trump’s words. The volume and variety of grey area warfare developments are telling not crippling. If they are designed for effect, then the narrative around them matters more than their military weight. There is greater potential for a strategic error in going after a perpetrator that treats escalation as a bargaining chip. To hand over the initiative in that way would be the graver error. The threshold remains uncrossed. The hardware Nato possesses is a deep reserve of defence that has not yet been tested.
Nato’s prioritisation of supplies for Ukraine’s defence is itself a stabilising factor, forcing the Kremlin to adopt a new strategy even though its bottom line clearly remains the Donbas.
All-out war remains distant, meaning Nato’s timeline for its own build-up could yet be vindicated.
The escalation may be intensifying, but the scale of Nato’s setbacks remains within tolerable limits. The tiger can still hold its own.
