NATO Leaders Warn: War with Russia is Coming

Alliance bigwigs are warning the public that it’s time to start thinking seriously about the unthinkable – before it’s too late

We’re barely a month into the new year and war is in the air. In Jordan, three American military members were just killed, alongside dozens of injured, by a drone strike launched by Iran’s proxies in Syria – the most recent of more than a hundred attacks on U.S. personnel in the region since the HAMAS assault on Israel on October 7. Another cut-out for Tehran, specifically its Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the Houthi rebels in Yemen, are keeping up their efforts to disrupt commercial shipping in the Red Sea with Iranian-provided missiles. On Friday, Houthis fired an anti-ship missile at a U.S. Navy destroyer, which was happily thwarted. How President Joe Biden will respond to such Iranian direct targeting of American personnel, which represents a significant upgrade in this proxy conflict, is this week’s big geostrategic question.

Although a broader Middle East war has yet to officially break out as an adjunct to Israel’s campaign against Islamist terrorists in Gaza, a war which recently passed its hundredth day, “officially” may be the key word there. The Israel Defense Force has kept its adjunct campaign against Hezbollah, the IRGC’s preferred proxy, on low boil since October, with regular mutual lobbing of shells and missiles between northern Israel and southern Lebanon. However, that long-running conflict could get hotter at any time.

Then there’s the Taiwan conundrum. That country’s recent elections brought Beijing’s condemnation but not military action, as some had feared. Nevertheless, there’s a growing consensus among experts that some sort of Taiwan Strait crisis is likely to unfold in 2024, although a People’s Liberation Army blockade is much likelier than outright invasion. This is hardly news to readers of Top Secret Umbra, which has reported on top-level U.S. military warnings about coming Chinese aggression against Taiwan in considerable detail. The recent move by the Biden administration to expedite weapons sales to Taipei, giving that country special status like Israel, may help the military equation – or it may be too late. Neither does recent North Korean aggressive rhetoric, bolstered by testing of nuclear-capable cruise missiles, bode well for peace in East Asia this year.

Then there’s the Ukraine quandary. After that country’s hyped counteroffensive last summer, which dragged painfully into the fall, it’s evident that Kyiv overpromised and underdelivered. In a few weeks, this war, Europe’s biggest and costliest since 1945, will enter its third year without any resolution. Put bluntly, Ukraine is running out of troops and munitions – and money. The Pentagon’s funds for Ukraine are spent and there’s no more in the pipeline thanks to poisonous American domestic politics paralyzing Congress on this issue as it has with so many others. It’s near-certain that a Russian offensive is coming in the spring, and whether Ukraine, with its tired, undermanned, and underequipped forces, can withstand that assault constitutes Europe’s biggest question this year.