The Atlantic: the U.S. and NATO have no plan for a coordinated Russian–Chinese attack

The United States and NATO would not be ready to respond to a hypothetical coordinated attack in which China invades Taiwan and Russia simultaneously strikes a NATO member in Eastern Europe, Simon Shuster writes in The Atlantic.

For now, the scenario is treated as hypothetical: even if China and Russia did decide to act together, coordination on that scale would be impossible to conceal, and the United States and its allies would have time to prepare a defense. But the experts and strategists Shuster interviewed could not say clearly what the West would do in that situation, and they told him that almost no one studies these risks in detail.

Florence Gaub, the director of the research division at the NATO Defense College in Rome, told The Atlantic that the alliance’s strategists are “keenly aware” of this planning gap but have taken no steps to close it.

Mark Montgomery, a retired rear admiral in the United States Navy and a frequent participant in high-profile war games, said he and his colleagues last studied the possibility of a two-front war against Russia and China 15 years ago. “It didn’t go well,” he said. The exercises showed that the United States had neither the weapons stockpiles nor the industrial capacity to sustain prolonged fighting on multiple fronts.

As Moscow and Beijing see it, the window of opportunity to strike the West has probably never looked wider, The Atlantic writes. The United States, bogged down in its war with Iran, has had to move many of its ships and aircraft out of Asia and Europe and into the Middle East, and its stockpile of advanced air-defense missiles has shrunk by an estimated two-thirds since February. Donald Trump’s confrontational approach to Washington’s own allies has pushed the rift between the United States and its European NATO partners to its widest point in decades.

Many military threats of the past looked implausible until they happened, Shuster writes. He points to Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, when Joseph Stalin refused to believe repeated warnings from his intelligence services and his generals until the very last moment. He also points to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, which caught the United States completely unprepared.

A two-front war involving the United States now gets discussed among military experts “more than it used to be,” Eric Heginbotham, a war-gaming specialist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Security Studies Program, told The Atlantic. None of the leading research institutes in the United States or Europe has yet run war games on the subject, he said, though secretive units inside the Pentagon may have analyzed it without making their work public.

The risk of a multifront war has surfaced in the public statements of senior NATO officials over the past year, though not often. “China is looking at Taiwan,” Mark Rutte, the secretary general of NATO, said in a December 2025 interview with the German tabloid Bild. “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.”

In 2023, the Pacific Forum, a research institute in Hawaii, ran a series of theoretical war games, known as tabletop exercises, built on a scenario in which China attacked Taiwan while North Korea seized the moment to invade South Korea, and both American allies asked the United States for help. “We were struggling to keep up and divide labor,” David Santoro, the president of the Pacific Forum, told The Atlantic. “And we weren’t even talking about Europe. I can only imagine what would happen if you threw Russia in there.”

One of the most detailed public analyses of how the West might respond to an attack by Russia and China comes from the European Values Center for Security Policy, a research institute in Prague. It ran its first war game on the subject in the spring of 2024 and has since run about 20 rounds with experts from a range of countries, including Japan and South Korea.

The Atlantic describes the setup of one such game: China bans exports of the raw materials Europe’s defense industry needs. Five months later, once European manufacturers have exhausted their stockpiles and halted weapons production, Russia — now with full access to Chinese resources — invades a NATO member in Eastern Europe.

The results were alarming for Europe: in almost every scenario, the United States prioritized the Chinese threat and shifted substantial forces from Europe to Asia, leaving its NATO allies to face Russia alone. Jakub Janda, the center’s director, said all the scenarios demonstrate the need for Western unity. If Russia and China act in concert while the United States clashes with Europe, Shuster writes, the chances of a Western victory in a two-front war begin to look bleak.

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