Introduction: The End of a Clear-Cut Peace
In the corridors of power at NATO headquarters in Brussels and in the strategic command centers from Norfolk, Virginia to Brunssum, Netherlands, a powerful and sobering phrase has become the defining mantra of the 21st century: “We may not be at war, but we’re not at peace.” This statement, echoed by senior military officials and political leaders, encapsulates the unnerving reality of the modern geopolitical landscape. The clear-cut dichotomies of the Cold War—a tense but stable standoff—and the optimistic “end of history” that followed its collapse, have been replaced by a murky, persistent, and multi-domain state of confrontation. This is NATO’s “new normal.”
This is a strategic environment where adversaries, primarily a revanchist Russia, operate deliberately below the threshold of conventional armed conflict that would trigger NATO’s famed Article 5 mutual defense clause. It is a battle waged not with tank divisions crossing borders in a blitzkrieg, but with malicious code targeting critical infrastructure, with troll farms sowing societal division, with economic coercion weaponizing energy supplies, and with the shadowy deployment of mercenaries in far-flung conflicts. This is the era of the “gray zone,” a contested arena where the lines between war and peace are not just blurred, but purposefully erased by those seeking to destabilize the international order without provoking a full-scale military response.
The full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was not the beginning of this new era, but rather its most brutal and undeniable manifestation. It was the culmination of a decade of escalating hybrid aggression that forced the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to awaken from its post-Cold War focus on out-of-area crisis management and pivot back to its original, core mission: the collective defense of Europe. This article delves into the origins of this new normal, dissects the complex nature of gray zone warfare, analyzes NATO’s profound strategic adaptation, and examines the enduring challenges the Alliance faces in a world where it must be prepared for everything, all the time.
The Origins of the New Normal: From Post-Cold War Optimism to Renewed Confrontation
To understand the seismic shift in NATO’s posture, one must first appreciate the strategic environment it left behind. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 ushered in an era of unprecedented optimism. The primary existential threat to the Alliance had vanished, seemingly overnight.
The ‘Peace Dividend’ Era and a Shift in Focus
The 1990s and early 2000s were characterized by what was termed the “peace dividend.” Defense budgets across the Alliance were slashed as nations redirected resources toward domestic priorities. Conscription was ended in many member states, and the vast armies that had stood guard at the Fulda Gap were significantly downsized. The prevailing belief was that large-scale, state-on-state conventional warfare in Europe was a relic of a bygone century.
NATO’s strategic focus shifted accordingly. The Alliance’s purpose was reimagined, moving from collective defense to collective security and crisis management. This led to major “out-of-area” operations, most notably in the Balkans in the 1990s to stop ethnic cleansing, and a decade-long, complex counter-insurgency and nation-building mission in Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks. While these missions were demanding, they were fundamentally different from preparing to deter a peer-competitor. The muscle memory for high-intensity territorial defense began to atrophy.
The Wake-Up Call: Georgia, Crimea, and the Donbas
The first tremors of this new era were felt in August 2008, when Russia launched a short, sharp war against Georgia. Moscow’s use of cyberattacks in concert with conventional military force was a clear precursor to its future playbook. While the conflict was a shock, many in the West viewed it as an isolated incident, an aberration in an otherwise cooperative relationship.
That illusion was shattered permanently in February 2014. Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea was a masterclass in hybrid warfare. It utilized a combination of special forces without insignia—the infamous “little green men”—along with a sophisticated disinformation campaign, local proxies, and political subversion to seize a sovereign part of another nation with minimal bloodshed. It was a strategic coup that left NATO and the West stunned, as it fell squarely in the gray zone—an act of aggression that was undeniable but carefully calibrated to avoid a conventional military response.
Simultaneously, Russia fomented and sustained a separatist war in Ukraine’s Donbas region, using a mix of its own covert forces, local collaborators, and a steady supply of heavy weaponry. This created a bleeding wound on Ukraine’s eastern flank, destabilizing the country and serving as a constant lever of influence for Moscow. These actions were the definitive end of the post-Cold War era. They demonstrated that Russia was willing to use military force to redraw borders in Europe and that it had developed a new doctrine of conflict that NATO was ill-prepared to counter.
Defining the Gray Zone: The Battleground Between War and Peace
The “not at peace” reality is defined by constant activity within this gray zone. It is a strategy of perpetual competition, aiming to achieve strategic objectives—such as weakening alliances, undermining democracies, and establishing spheres of influence—without crossing the red line of a declared war. The playbook is diverse and tailored to exploit the open, interconnected nature of Western societies.
Cyber Warfare and Critical Infrastructure
The digital domain is a primary front in this new conflict. Long before the 2022 invasion, Ukrainian power grids were targeted by sophisticated Russian cyberattacks in 2015 and 2016, causing widespread blackouts in the dead of winter. The 2007 cyberattacks on Estonia, a NATO member, crippled government, banking, and media websites, demonstrating the vulnerability of a highly digitized society. Today, NATO networks and the critical infrastructure of its member states—from energy grids and financial systems to transportation and healthcare—are under constant threat of espionage, disruption, and sabotage. The challenge for NATO is determining when a cyberattack is merely espionage and when it constitutes an “armed attack” that could merit a collective response.
Disinformation and Political Interference
The information space is another key battleground. The goal of adversarial disinformation is not necessarily to convince people of a specific falsehood, but to erode the very concept of objective truth. It aims to amplify existing societal divisions, fuel polarization, and destroy trust in democratic institutions, the media, and alliances like NATO. This is achieved through state-sponsored news outlets, vast networks of automated social media bots, and armies of paid trolls. Documented Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and other elections across Europe are prime examples of this strategy in action, designed to weaken the political cohesion of the Alliance from within.
Economic Coercion and Energy Politics
Economic interdependence, once seen as a guarantor of peace, has been weaponized. For years, Europe’s reliance on Russian natural gas provided Moscow with a powerful lever of political influence. Russia repeatedly used the threat of cutting off gas supplies in winter to exert pressure on Ukraine and other Eastern European nations. The Nord Stream pipeline projects were widely seen as a geopolitical tool to increase Germany’s dependence and bypass traditional transit routes through Ukraine. This form of coercion extends to control over critical raw materials, manipulation of global food supplies, and the use of targeted economic sanctions to punish and pressure nations.
Unconventional Military and Paramilitary Actions
Below the threshold of a formal invasion, adversaries employ a range of unconventional military and intelligence tactics. The use of private military companies like the Wagner Group allows for plausible deniability while projecting force in conflict zones from Syria and Libya to Africa and Ukraine. State-sponsored assassination and sabotage operations on NATO soil, such as the 2018 Salisbury nerve agent attack in the UK and the 2014 explosion at a Czech arms depot, are brazen acts of aggression designed to intimidate and demonstrate reach without triggering a military retaliation. Constant provocations like GPS jamming in the Baltic Sea region, violating Alliance airspace, and unsafe intercepts of NATO aircraft and ships maintain a high level of tension and test the Alliance’s reaction times and resolve.
NATO’s Paradigm Shift: Adapting to Perpetual Competition
Faced with this multi-faceted and persistent threat, NATO has undergone the most significant transformation since the end of the Cold War. The Alliance has been forced to relearn the language of deterrence and defense while simultaneously developing new capabilities to counter hybrid threats.
The Return of Collective Defense
The 2014 Wales Summit marked the formal end of the “peace dividend” era. For the first time in a generation, the summit’s final declaration was dominated by the threat from Russia and the need to bolster collective defense. Allies made the Defense Investment Pledge, committing to spend 2% of their GDP on defense by 2024—a target that had been largely ignored but suddenly gained critical urgency. A new “spearhead” force, the Very High Readiness Joint Task Force (VJTF), was created, capable of deploying thousands of troops to a crisis zone within days, not weeks or months.
Forward Presence and Deterrence by Tripwire
To make deterrence credible, NATO moved from a strategy of reinforcement to one of forward presence. At the 2016 Warsaw Summit, the Alliance established four multinational Enhanced Forward Presence (eFP) battlegroups in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. Led by the UK, Canada, Germany, and the US respectively, these forces are not large enough to defeat a full-scale invasion on their own. Instead, they serve as a “tripwire.” An attack on any of these nations would mean an immediate engagement with troops from across the Alliance, including its major military powers, making an Article 5 declaration an almost automatic certainty. After the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, this model was expanded, with four new battlegroups established in Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia, effectively extending the tripwire from the Baltic to the Black Sea.
Building Resilience and Countering Hybrid Threats
Recognizing that military strength alone is insufficient, NATO has placed a massive emphasis on building national and societal resilience. This is the “first line of defense” against gray zone attacks. The Alliance now assists member states in securing their critical infrastructure, preparing for mass casualty events, ensuring continuity of government, and shoring up vulnerable energy and communication networks. Counter Hybrid Support Teams can be deployed to an allied nation upon request to help it identify vulnerabilities and bolster its defenses against non-military threats. Specialized entities like the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence in Riga, Latvia, and the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats in Helsinki, Finland, have become crucial hubs for researching and sharing best practices in combating disinformation and hybrid tactics.
The 2022 Strategic Concept: Russia as the Primary Threat
The full-scale invasion of Ukraine served as a brutal and final confirmation of the new reality. At the Madrid Summit in June 2022, NATO adopted a new Strategic Concept, its first in over a decade. The document’s language was stark and unambiguous. While the 2010 concept had described Russia as a “strategic partner,” the 2022 version labeled the Russian Federation as the “most significant and direct threat to Allies’ security and to peace and stability in the Euro-Atlantic area.” This document codified the paradigm shift, outlining plans for a New Force Model that will place hundreds of thousands of troops on a higher level of readiness, pre-assigning specific allied forces to defend specific regions, and pre-positioning vast amounts of equipment and munitions on the eastern flank. It is the blueprint for deterring and defending against a peer-competitor in the 21st century.
The Challenges and Dilemmas of the New Normal
While NATO’s adaptation has been swift and substantial, navigating this new era of perpetual competition is fraught with complex challenges and dilemmas that will test the Alliance for years to come.
The Escalation Ladder: Responding in the Gray Zone
One of the most difficult challenges is calibration. How should NATO respond to an attack that is damaging but deliberately ambiguous? A massive cyberattack that shuts down a nation’s stock exchange or a disinformation campaign that incites civil unrest is clearly hostile, but does it constitute an “armed attack” in the traditional sense? NATO has affirmed that a serious cyberattack could trigger Article 5, but the threshold remains deliberately vague. Responding too weakly invites further aggression; responding too forcefully risks miscalculation and unintended escalation into a conventional conflict that both sides want to avoid. Mastering this “escalation ladder” in the gray zone requires a delicate balance of resolve, restraint, and clear communication.
Maintaining Alliance Unity in the Face of Divergent Threats
NATO’s strength is its unity, but its 32 members do not all perceive threats identically. For the nations on the eastern flank—from Estonia to Romania—the Russian threat is existential and immediate. For southern flank allies like Italy, Spain, and Greece, issues of terrorism, instability in North Africa, and migration often feel more pressing. While the war in Ukraine has forged unprecedented unity against Russia, maintaining this cohesion over the long term will be a challenge. Political winds can shift within member countries, potentially bringing to power governments less committed to collective defense or more sympathetic to Moscow. Sustaining consensus on defense spending, strategic priorities, and burden-sharing will require constant political effort.
The Economic and Societal Cost of Constant Vigilance
Living in a state of “not peace” carries a heavy, long-term price. The increased defense spending required to fund new equipment, larger forces, and higher readiness levels places a significant strain on national budgets, competing with other domestic priorities like healthcare, education, and climate change. Beyond the financial cost, there is a societal cost. The need for a “whole-of-society” approach to resilience requires citizens to be more aware of threats like disinformation and to participate in civil defense preparations. This can foster a sense of persistent anxiety and erode the feeling of security that citizens in NATO countries have long taken for granted. Sustaining public support for a high-alert posture in the absence of a “hot” war will be a critical test for democratic leaders.
Conclusion: Navigating a Permanently Altered Security Landscape
The declaration that “we are not at peace” is not a prediction of future conflict; it is a description of the current, ongoing reality. The post-Cold War holiday from history is definitively over. For NATO, this new normal is a demanding, 360-degree, 24/7 challenge that requires a fundamental shift in mindset, from reactive crisis management to proactive, perpetual competition.
The Alliance has demonstrated a remarkable capacity to adapt, rediscovering its core purpose of collective defense while developing new tools to fight in the gray zone. The road ahead, however, is one of constant vigilance. It demands sustained political will, robust economic investment, and the enduring resilience of its societies. The blurred lines between war and peace are not a temporary feature of the international system; they are its new operating principle. In this permanently altered security landscape, NATO’s ability to deter aggression across all domains—conventional and hybrid—will be the ultimate guarantor of the security and stability its one billion citizens depend on.
