The same people who have spent the last five years doing everything in their power to get the United States and NATO more directly involved in the ongoing Ukraine War are at it again. 

A recent incident involving upwards of 19 suspected Russian drones—specifically Gerbera-type unmanned aerial vehicles—breaching the airspace of NATO member Poland has triggered a cascade of recriminations and accusations. The drone swarm, successfully downed by Polish and Dutch warplanes, did not cause any injuries in Poland and did not last very long in Poland’s well-defended airspace.

For whatever the Kremlin’s word is worth, it has denied intentionally launching the drones at Poland.

Both Poland and the rest of NATO’s leadership, having met after the drone incident under the auspices of a NATO Article IV declaration, determined that for “the first time in history NATO planes have fired on potential threats in allied airspace.”

This comes on the heels of weeks of posturing from key NATO members, like Britain, France, and Germany, all of whom are making noise about increasing their defense spending for the first time in since the end of the Cold War and threatening to deploy their troops to Western Ukraine as “peacekeepers” of some kind.

Hawkish former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who President Donald Trump declined to include in his second administration, wrote on X (formerly Twitter), “Putin’s tests of Western resolve are growing bolder. We cannot afford a weak response.”

Multiple defense intellectuals have been brought out across Western media outlets and echoed similar talking points. The consensus both from official NATO sources and the defense punditry class is that the Russians deliberately launched the attack at Poland’s borders as a means of testing NATO’s resolve. Of course, the Gerbera drones—which, remember, are notoriously inaccurate—were easily detected and shot down in short order. 

Yet what precisely did Moscow have to gain from such an attack? More importantly, what evidence does NATO have that the drones were deliberately deployed into Polish airspace as part of a larger provocation strategy by Russia? In other words, what does the Kremlin have to gain by expanding the war in Europe at this moment?

There is an anxiety today among the NATO class that Ukraine’s loss to........

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