Have you ever watched a boxing match where one fighter just keeps absorbing jabs, never throwing a counter-punch, until eventually he’s too battered to lift his arms? That’s pretty much how a growing chorus inside NATO has started to describe the alliance’s current approach to Russia’s hybrid warfare campaign across Europe.
Something changed recently. Very quietly, behind closed doors in Brussels, the conversation shifted from “how do we better defend ourselves” to “maybe we should hit first.” And not some random general whispering in a corridor— the actual chairman of NATO’s Military Committee put it on the record.
From Reactive Defense to Proactive Offense?
The idea is simple on paper, terrifying in practice. Russia has spent years probing, prodding, and occasionally punching NATO members and partners through means that stay just below the threshold of open war: cables cut under the Baltic Sea, GPS jamming over Finland, arson attempts on warehouses in Poland, relentless cyberattacks, fighter jets buzzing dangerously close to civilian airliners. NATO’s response, until now, has been to patch the hole, issue a strong statement, maybe expel a diplomat or two, and wait for the next incident.
That loop, some senior officers now argue, is exactly what Moscow wants. It’s cheap for them, expensive for us, and it slowly erodes trust in the alliance’s ability to protect its own territory. So the new question on the table is whether NATO should start disrupting Russian hybrid networks before the next attack lands— what lawyers would call “active defense” and what everyone else would call “striking first.”
What Does “Preemptive” Actually Mean Here?
Let’s be crystal clear: nobody is talking about rolling tanks toward Smolensk tomorrow morning. The conversation centers almost entirely on the gray-zone toolkit Russia has mastered— cyber, influence operations, sabotage teams, proxy actors. A preemptive move could look like:
- Taking down command-and-control servers used to coordinate GPS spoofing over the Baltic states
- Disabling drone fleets before they fly toward European refineries
- Exposing and neutralizing sabotage cells while they’re still in the planning phase
- Running counter-influence campaigns that make Russian disinformation networks collapse under their own contradictions
In other words, doing to Russian hybrid units what they’ve been doing to NATO countries for a decade— only better, faster, and with thirty-two nations coordinating instead of one acting alone.
“We are studying everything… Being more aggressive or being proactive instead of reactive is something that we are thinking about.”
— Chairman of NATO’s Military Committee
The Baltic Push Is Getting Louder
If you want to understand why this debate is heating up now, take a flight to Tallinn, Riga, or Vilnius. People there don’t see Russian hybrid attacks as theoretical case studies; they live with them every single day. GPS jamming has become so routine that local pilots joke about navigating by “Baltic intuition.” Farmers in Lithuania have found incendiary devices wired to parcels headed to online stores in Western Europe. The psychological toll is real.
One senior diplomat from the region put it bluntly: “If all we do is continue being reactive, we just invite Russia to keep trying, keep hurting us.” Another added that hybrid warfare is fundamentally asymmetric— it costs Moscow pennies and forces NATO countries to spend millions patching each incident. Over time, that math grinds down political will.
In my experience following these debates for years, the Baltic and Polish voices have often been dismissed as “hawkish” or “overly alarmist” in bigger capitals. That’s changing. When the chairman of the Military Committee starts echoing their language, you know the center of gravity inside the alliance is shifting.
The Legal and Political Minefield
Here’s where things get dizzyingly complicated. NATO is a defensive alliance built on Article 5— an attack on one is an attack on all. Preemptive action, almost by definition, happens before an attack crosses that threshold. So how do you sell that to parliaments, to publics, to international lawyers?
Several frameworks are being floated:
- Expanding the concept of “imminence” that already exists in international law
- Treating sustained hybrid campaigns as a slow-motion Article 5 invocation
- Creating a new “Article 4.5” process for coordinated active defense measures
- Simply acting unilaterally or in small coalitions and daring Moscow to escalate
None of these options are clean. All of them risk miscalculation on a scale we haven’t seen since the Cold War. And yet, doing nothing carries its own risks— chiefly that Russia concludes NATO’s red lines are drawn in disappearing ink.
Timing Could Hardly Be Worse— Or Better
Think about the broader context for a second. Washington is trying to broker some kind of ceasefire in Ukraine. European armies are finally starting to rearm after decades of neglect. Energy prices are still elevated from the 2022 shock. And across the Atlantic, a new administration is sending unmistakable signals that Europe needs to do far more for its own defense.
Paradoxically, this chaotic transition moment might be exactly when NATO needs to show it still has teeth. Credibility isn’t abstract— lose it once, and every future deterrent threat rings hollow. I’ve covered enough security conferences to know that smaller nations watch how the alliance responds to hybrid pinpricks the same way investors watch earnings reports. Miss too many quarters, and the stock crashes.
The Escalation Ladder Nobody Wants to Climb
Moscow’s response was predictably furious, labeling the entire discussion “extremely irresponsible.” That’s rich coming from a country that has turned hybrid warfare into a national sport, but the Kremlin’s outrage is also tactically useful— it reminds everyone that any proactive step carries the risk of retaliation in kind, or worse.
Imagine a tit-for-tat cycle that starts with NATO quietly disabling a Russian troll farm and ends with unexplained explosions at European ports. That’s not science fiction; it’s the exact dynamic that has driven the Ukraine war from a “special military operation” to a meat grinder claiming tens of thousands of lives.
And lurking behind every calculation is the nuclear shadow. Russia has made very clear that it views large-scale Western interference in what it considers its “near abroad” as potentially crossing a strategic red line. Preemptive hybrid strikes might feel surgical and deniable in Brussels, but they could look very different from the Kremlin’s war room.
What Happens Next?
Nothing is decided yet. Studying options is not the same as executing them. But the fact that the idea is being studied at the highest levels— and publicly floated— tells you the Overton window inside NATO has moved further and faster than most observers realize.
My sense, after talking to people close to these discussions, is that any shift toward proactive measures will happen incrementally and probably in the cyber domain first, where attribution can be fuzzy and damage is reversible. Physical sabotage is a much harder sell.
In the end, this debate forces NATO to confront a question it has avoided for thirty years: in a world where war no longer announces itself with tanks crossing borders, what does Article 5 actually mean? The alliance that figures out the answer first— and convinces both its adversaries and its own publics— will shape European security for decades.
One thing feels certain: the era of absorbing hybrid punches without throwing counter-punches is drawing to a close. Whether that leads to smarter deterrence or a dangerous new escalation spiral is the most important European security question of our time.
Sometimes the most consequential shifts in strategy start with a single uncomfortable sentence spoken out loud. We may have just heard it.
