Europe Gets its First Land Attack Missile. They never had one.
“US has it” is not a great answer for Europe any longer.
NATO had a weakness built from within.
“Russian President Vladimir Putin didn’t invade Ukraine in 2022 because he feared NATO. He invaded because he believed that NATO was weak, that his efforts to regain control of Ukraine by other means had failed, and that installing a pro-Russian government in Kyiv would be safe and easy,” wrote Nataliya Bugayova, Kateryna Stepanenko, and Frederick W. Kagan for the Institute for the Study of War.
NATO was weak? What ever happened to NATO, the longest, largest, and strongest alliance in the world?
In many ways, you can make the case that NATO is strong and weak at the same time. They have strength in numbers as a bloc of 30 nations before the start of the war. They have economic strength, representing almost the entire developed world. They have access to the best talent pool in the world, something that no dictatorship — past, present, or future — will ever be able to match. As a result, the weapons they build are leaps and bounds better than others.
NATO’s strength was not the weapons, the structure, or their doctrines. Their strength has always been the alliance itself. But NATO was a defensive alliance…
