NATO unprepared for simultaneous Russia-China attack on two fronts

Western military planners have a nightmare scenario they rarely discuss in public: a near-simultaneous Russian attack on a NATO member in eastern Europe and a Chinese assault on Taiwan, forcing the United States to fight on two distant fronts at once. Until recently the prospect sat at the fringe of strategic thinking. Now, after a year of warnings from senior commanders and a series of classified and unclassified war games, the consensus among those who have looked at the problem is blunt. The alliance has no plan.

A planning vacuum at the heart of the alliance

General Alexus Grynkewich, the senior NATO commander in Europe, broke the silence roughly a year ago with a public call for European allies to help Washington prepare for a two-front war. His warning landed with a thud. When researchers and former officers were asked what the West would actually do, the answers ranged from bewilderment to embarrassment. Florence Gaub, who runs the research division at the NATO Defense College in Rome, put it plainly: "Let's just say this is the scenario we're currently not ready for." She added that strategists remain "keenly aware" of the gap but have taken no concrete steps to fill it.

The last time the US military seriously gamed a simultaneous confrontation with Russia and China was about fifteen years ago. Mark Montgomery, a retired rear admiral who has participated in high-profile strategic exercises, recalled the result: "It didn't go well." The exercises exposed insufficient weapons stockpiles, inadequate industrial capacity, and an inability to rely on allies to fill the void. Since then, Montgomery said, "Every one of those metrics has gone down. None of them has gotten better." European defence spending has risen under pressure from the Trump administration, but force readiness has not followed the budget increases.

The adversaries have improved while the West has stalled

Russia's invasion of Ukraine has not achieved its strategic aims, yet it has forced the Russian defence industry onto a war footing. Civilian factories now feed missile and tank production, and Russian forces have become proficient in drone warfare through battlefield experience. China, meanwhile, has not fought a war in decades and contends with corruption in its upper ranks, but it has overtaken the United States in the number of warships and long-range missiles. Beijing also produces the bulk of the world's drones. The two powers describe their relationship as a "no-limits" partnership, hold regular joint drills, and have deepened military-to-military ties. President Vladimir Putin has visited Beijing at least five times since the Ukraine invasion; another trip is scheduled for November.

From Moscow and Beijing, the window of opportunity may look wider than at any point since the Cold War. The United States remains heavily committed in the Middle East, having pulled ships and aircraft from Europe and Asia to backfill forces there. An estimated two-thirds of the American inventory of advanced air-defence missiles has been expended since February. At the same time, Donald Trump's repeated insults and threats against NATO have widened the transatlantic rift into what one former official called a yawning chasm.

Testing the tripwire in eastern Europe

Putin has long sought to fracture NATO, and the alliance's current disarray offers a rare opening. Russian drones, missiles and fighter jets have repeatedly violated the airspace of Romania, Poland and the Baltic states. Earlier this month German authorities discovered a suspected Russian drone loaded with explosives at Leipzig airport, apparently intended to destroy a Ukrainian cargo plane over NATO territory. Recent US intelligence assessments reportedly conclude that Russia could test the alliance's resolve within the next few years through a cyberattack or a limited incursion. Admiral Rob Bauer, who chaired the NATO Military Committee until January, said such a move would be far more effective if timed to coincide with a Chinese move on Taiwan. He was not aware of any concerted alliance effort to prepare for that "worst-case scenario." "What are we going to do? Who's getting which troops?" Bauer asked. "I think it would be wise to think that through."

War games reveal a consistent American pivot to Asia

The most detailed public exploration of a dual-theatre war comes from an unlikely source: the European Values Center for Security Policy, a Prague-based institute led by 35-year-old Jakub Janda. After opening an outpost in Taipei in January 2022, Janda began studying the possibility of coordinated aggression. The first war game took place in spring 2024; roughly twenty rounds have followed, drawing experts from Japan, South Korea and across Europe. The findings are stark. In almost every scenario, the United States prioritises the Chinese threat and shifts military resources from Europe to the Indo-Pacific, leaving NATO's eastern members to face Russia largely on their own.

One hypothetical sequence began with a Chinese embargo on raw-material exports to Europe's defence sector, maintained for five months until European production lines halted. Only then did Russia, fully supplied via China, launch an invasion of a NATO ally. The games also exposed a political fault line. When the United States demanded that Europe impose crippling sanctions on China in a Taiwan contingency, European capitals balked. "The problem with European capitals is that Taiwan is far away," Janda said. "They want to focus on the threat from Russia, and that's what scares me."

Institutional silos prevent joined-up thinking

Eric Heginbotham, a war-gaming specialist at MIT's Security Studies Program, argues the problem is not intellectual complexity but institutional inertia. "I just don't believe that anyone has done it," he said of a rigorous two-front simulation. The Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington published a lengthy report in June on countering a China-Russia axis, but Heginbotham noted that no prominent US or European institute has organised the kind of large-scale, simultaneous exercises the scenario demands. "You'd need two relatively big and elaborate games running simultaneously, with some sort of command authority setting priorities in the middle," he wrote. "Sounds very interesting."

The difficulty is structural. Most think tanks and research bodies maintain separate teams for Europe and the Indo-Pacific. "They work in their silos, with different expertise," Janda explained. Tabletop exercises tend to be tightly bounded to keep them manageable, which biases them against the chaos of a true multi-crisis environment. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte acknowledged the threat in a December interview with a German newspaper: "China is looking at Taiwan. And I am convinced that if China takes military action there, it will pressure its junior partner, Russia, under Putin's leadership, to keep us busy here in Europe."

The transatlantic fracture compounds the military deficit

The military shortfall is inseparable from the political one. Trump's hostility to NATO has eroded the trust that underpins collective defence. European governments, uncertain of American commitments, hedge by focusing on the immediate Russian threat rather than a distant Chinese one. That hesitation feeds the very outcome the war games predict: a fragmented response that plays into the adversaries' hands. David Santoro, president of the Pacific Forum in Hawaii, ran a 2023 exercise in which Taiwan and South Korea were attacked simultaneously. "We were struggling to keep up and divide labor," he recalled. "And we weren't even talking about Europe. I can only imagine what would happen if you threw Russia in there."

History warns against dismissing the improbable

Strategic surprise is a recurring feature of great-power conflict. Stalin ignored repeated warnings of a German invasion in 1941. Washington failed to anticipate Pearl Harbor. In 1914 Europe's alliance system produced a catastrophe no capital had planned for. The current gap in NATO's planning is not a theoretical curiosity; it is a measurable vulnerability that the alliance's own researchers acknowledge and its adversaries study closely.