NATO at the Breaking Point: War in Ukraine, American Uncertainty, and the Future of European Securit

NATO has never been stronger on paper - and never more exposed in practice.
Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Alliance has rearmed, expanded, and rediscovered the seriousness of territorial defense. Finland and Sweden have joined. Defense budgets are climbing toward a historic 5% of GDP. Eastern-flank battlegroups have grown from four to nine. And yet the hardest question NATO faces isn't whether it has enough power - it plainly does - but whether it can move that power to the right place fast enough, before a limited attack becomes a fait accompli.
Drawing on official NATO and national strategy documents, defense-spending data, legislative and audit reports, and the record of the war in Ukraine, this book argues that NATO's real vulnerability is temporal: the danger sits in the gap between announced spending and delivered capability, between summit unity and the ability to act under surprise. It examines the infrastructure that deterrence actually depends on - railways, fuel networks, repair capacity, industrial contracts - and the gray-zone and infrastructure attacks already testing it. It confronts an American security strategy that now asks Europe to lead its own defense. And it steelmans the strongest objections to its own argument before answering them.
NATO at the Breaking Point is not a case for alarm or for complacency. It is a diagnosis - of where deterrence may fail, and what can still be measured and changed before a crisis tests the Alliance for real.