Bishop's Putin-NATO attack thesis undercut by own sources — SkimNews
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- Rolling Stone's Mac William Bishop argued in a recent report that Trump has given Putin a window to wage war on NATO by undermining the transatlantic alliance, with Putin driven by what Bishop's sources called 'megalomania' and a desire to 'remove NATO from the geopolitical chessboard.'
- Bishop's own sourced experts undercut the thesis: one NATO official told him 'I wouldn't say that we're seeing anything remarkably different than we've seen before,' and military analyst Michael Kofman characterized direct Russian assaults on NATO states as 'low likelihood possibilities.'
- Estonian Foreign Minister Margus Tsakhna said last week that 'Estonia's threat assessment has not changed,' citing two reasons: 'Russia is struggling in Ukraine and currently lacks the capability for such an attack. And Russia is deterred by NATO.'
- The 'limited incursion' model — a lightning Russian advance to chop off part of a NATO state, with Estonia commonly cited as the easiest target — is the scenario Bishop treats most extensively in the piece.
- Bishop's historical evidence traces Trump's NATO criticisms back to a 1987 full-page newspaper ad accusing U.S. allies of free-riding and saying it was time to make 'others pay for the protection we extend.'
- The critique frames the Rolling Stone report as a 'cynical attempt to hinder a much-needed recalibration of the U.S. role in NATO' by inflating the threat to Europe 'almost to the point of caricature.'
- European NATO is described in the critique as 'more than capable of assuming the responsibility for deterring Russia without the U.S. acting as the region's primary security provider.'
Why it matters: By treating a Russian assault on NATO as imminent, the Rolling Stone narrative — which Bishop's own NATO-source contacts say doesn't match what they observe on the ground — could obstruct what the author calls a 'much-needed recalibration of the U.S. role in NATO' and distract from managing transatlantic relations during the most destructive European war since 1945.
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