The Doomsday Clock was started in 1947 at the beginning of the Cold War to signal impending global disaster. Today, it stands at a precipitous 85 seconds to midnight – capturing the dangers of nuclear warfare, climate change, and technological progress in the modern age. One wonders whether NATO should set its watch by the same clock.
With rising hybrid and shadow warfare from Russia directed at its European neighbors, the bloc is now facing a new kind of confrontation. The destabilizing tactics used against the bloc’s members – which are ambiguous, involve acts between war and peace, have uncertain perpetrators and disrupt society – test NATO precisely because they are not conventional warfare. They raise questions about the acceptable use of its famous Article 5, which considers an attack on one country an attack on all, and may precipitate military defense of the bloc.
Particularly, these tactics also test commitment – especially from countries becoming increasingly skeptical of NATO, such as the U.S., which has already questioned the triggering of other NATO Articles in cases of gray zone warfare. And they raise questions of risk in retaliation. Hybrid attacks in recent years – and especially since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 – are targeting both individuals and national infrastructure, and demonstrate the problem.
Most recently, a brazen plot to kill a US-Ukrainian citizen in Warsaw was uncovered – the first attack of an American inside a NATO country. There have also been cases of assassinations of anti-Russian figures in Europe, including of artist and caricaturist Semyon Skrepetsky, who died in Poland in June. Military sites are also being targeted.
Earlier this year, nuclear sites in Britain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands were reportedly targeted by Russian drone spies over a 15-month period, with the drones allegedly launched from shadow-fleet tankers. Russia has also routinely sent drones into NATO airspace, including over Romania, where a drone struck a residential building and injured two people in May; Poland, where in September 2025 the country’s and NATO’s air defenses were scrambled to shoot down drones; and Latvia, where a drone exploded at an oil-storage facility in Rēzekne. The Polish prime minister claimed the incursions meant Poland was closer to military conflict “than at any time since the Second World War”.
After the Poland incursions, the country invoked Article 4 of the NATO Treaty, which prompts consultation over military matters in case of emergency, when a country is threatened in its integrity, independence, or security. The same article was also invoked by the Estonian government in the same month, after the incursion of Russian fighter jets into Estonian airspace for 12 minutes. The Estonian prime minister Kristen Michal called on NATO to be “united and strong” in its response.
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