NATO and Russia

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 cou