Could Russia and China Attack America's Allies Together?

It is the kind of question defense planners do not like to be asked out loud, because the honest answer is uncomfortable: could Russia and China deliberately coordinate to attack America’s allies at the same moment, splitting Washington’s attention until it cannot adequately defend either theater? The chance is not high. But it is not zero. And when the scenario in question would draw in six of the world’s nine nuclear-armed nations at a bare minimum, a non-zero probability is not a comfort. It is a warning.

That warning has been front of mind for global militaries — above all the military of the United States — for years. A significant portion of American defense thinkers have argued that the US force, in its present shape, simply could not sustain major war efforts on two or more fronts simultaneously. Try it, the argument runs, and Washington overextends, left without enough combat power to deter aggression from both directions at once.

The thesis is contested, and not narrowly. But it is held by prominent figures, including from America’s Heritage Foundation, several of whom have since taken strategically oriented posts in the second Trump administration.

This is the analysis behind much of what Washington is currently doing: pressing its allies to rearm, pivoting money toward large-scale procurement, and trying to make itself capable of fighting in parallel rather than fighting alone. The thesis examined here is that the most dangerous moment is not when America is strong, but in the narrowing window before its allies become strong enough to share the load — a window Beijing and Moscow have every incentive to exploit.

The Two-Front Nightmare That Shapes American Strategy

Start with the question as it is usually posed: Russia has a decent chance of invading a NATO nation within the next few years. Given the working relationship between Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong Un, could such an invasion be paired with a simultaneous move — China against Taiwan, or North Korea against South Korea — designed to split the American ability to respond to either crisis, and to fracture the West as a whole?

The unwelcome answer is yes, it could. Not because it is probable, but because the probability cannot honestly be set at zero. That is the entire reason the scenario has consumed so much planning attention. The fear is concrete: if the United States has to battle Russia in Europe while simultaneously confronting China and North Korea in the Pacific — and has to do so essentially by itself — then even a victory would be exceptionally costly. Worse, victory would be far from as certain as Washington would want.

This is the structural anxiety that explains a great deal of current US behavior. Under Trump, the United States is trying to offload some of the burdens of collective defense onto partners while funneling money into procurement and military reform. The logic is that a one-superpower, two-theater war is a trap, and the only way out of the trap is to make sure America never has to spring it alone.

Sharing the Load: Why Washington Is Pushing Allies to Rearm

The escape route runs through the allies. If Germany, France, Britain, Poland, Finland, and Italy can fight competently at scale in Europe, and if Japan, South Korea, Australia, Taiwan, and others can rally together in the Indo-Pacific, the strategic picture changes completely. In that world, the United States no longer has to take the lead and operate alone in both theaters at once. Instead it can do the far easier job of bolstering capable allies inside each parallel conflict.

That is why Washington’s strategic worries translate into pressure — encouragement where possible, coercion where necessary — on its European NATO partners to jack up defense spending, re-arm, and adopt a posture of war-readiness most European states are not currently displaying. The same impulse drives American support for military expansion in South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and Australia, along with other Indo-Pacific nations that could help hold the line against China.

The goal is not abandonment but redistribution. A self-sufficient ally in each theater converts an impossible two-front war for one nation into a manageable set of supported conflicts for a coalition. The unanswered question is whether the allies will build that capability fast enough — and whether America’s adversaries will let them.

The Adversary’s Inverse Logic: The Incentive to Act Now

Every strand of American strategic logic has a mirror image for the other side, in this case Russia, China, and — mostly as an appendage — North Korea. If the United States is actively shoring up its own military, forcing its allies onto a war footing, and making itself more capable of fighting several conflicts at once, then Moscow and Beijing must assume their respective adversaries will be stronger in a few years than they are today.

That assumption puts both into an awkward position, though the pressure is sharper on Moscow than on Beijing. Russia has bought itself short-term strength by pivoting entirely into a war economy, but it is a shadow of the military power the Soviet Union was at its height. It lacks much of the production capacity — especially in sophisticated warfighting equipment — needed to sustain a war against NATO. China is the opposite case: strong and growing stronger, and if its advanced hardware performs as advertised, it could pose a sustained threat to any other Indo-Pacific nation.

But even China’s calculus has a ceiling. If all those Indo-Pacific nations brought their latent military-industrial might to bear against Beijing together, with the full backing of even a distracted United States, China would face a much harder problem. So if both Russia and China worry — as they probably should — that America and its allies are on a trajectory to grow stronger over time, then both are incentivized to act now, before that transformation is complete.

Probing NATO and the Critical Window for China

This incentive helps explain why Russian attempts to probe and test the NATO alliance have come at an unprecedented rate. If those probes go the way Moscow hopes — if Russia comes to believe it can genuinely challenge NATO or force it to abandon its commitment to collective defense — then China faces a decision of its own.

The calculation for Beijing turns on cost and timing. China wants Taiwan, and it would much rather take it expending as little blood and as few lives as possible. But Beijing also understands that taking Taiwan tomorrow will be more costly than taking it today, as the island and its backers grow harder to overcome. Even if America could eventually beat both Russia and China while splitting its attention between them, China’s odds of victory are best precisely when Russia is also fighting the United States — and vice versa.

The implication is unsettling. Should Russia engage NATO nations, including the US, in a conflict that looked likely to drag out for a while, China might conclude that it had a critical window to strike. The two crises would not need to be planned in lockstep to be mutually reinforcing; each would simply make the other more tempting.

Manufacturing Chaos: How the Pressure Could Spread

The line of thinking extends further still, because a North Korean attack on South Korea is also a live possibility — and that is only the start. The United States currently backs so many nations with so many distinct security guarantees that the most efficient way to break Washington is not a single blow but a flood of simultaneous demands, in more places, all at once. Chaos and confusion are the most valuable assets Russia and China could have, because the goal is not to win any one fight outright but to divide American attention until it frays.

The menu of pressure points is long. China and Russia could coordinate with Iran, Yemen’s Houthi rebels, or other volatile actors to threaten Saudi Arabia or Qatar, jeopardizing the world’s oil supply and forcing Washington to respond. In Europe, Putin and Xi might encourage Hungarian leader Viktor Orban to cause problems, or attempt to cajole Turkish President Erdogan into his own decisive move in the Middle East. In East Asia, China could lean not only on North Korea but on Pakistan, potentially drawing India into the conflict and multiplying the chaos.

The list keeps going. Abiy Ahmed in Ethiopia could receive a quiet signal that it is time to pursue his ambitions; Azerbaijan’s Ilham Aliyev could be invited to show what he really thinks of a sovereign Armenia. With the clock ticking toward both European and Indo-Pacific rearmament, the danger is that the optimal time for action, from the adversary’s point of view, is right now.

The “Asian NATO” That Must Never Call Itself That

This brings us to a question that recurs whenever the Indo-Pacific is discussed: what is the progress on the so-called Asian NATO? Participants openly deny wanting one, yet the web of unilateral and multilateral treaties can make it look inevitable. The key point — and it is a real one — is that for the nations involved, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and others, it is critically important that they never, under any circumstances, refer to themselves as an Asian NATO.

The reason lies in the nature of the adversary each arrangement is built to deter. In Europe, the way collective security is discussed is dictated by Russia, and previously the Soviet Union: brash, highly confident, expansionist states that threaten hostile action, wait to gauge the response, and then proceed if the response does not look frightening enough. Deterring that kind of adversary is like deterring an actual bear — you yell and bang on things to make clear how scary you are.

China is a different animal, and so the Indo-Pacific arrangements built to contain it look different too. Beijing reads the world in a fundamentally different way than Moscow does, which means the same loud, demonstrative posture that works against the Russian bear could be actively counterproductive against China.

Buying Time: The Long Game and the Net to Contain China

Beijing excels when it plays the long game, especially under Xi Jinping, and its preference appears to be to keep playing that long game unless forced to move quickly. When China’s adversaries strengthen themselves or form new alliances, China adjusts, keeps accumulating power, and waits for better circumstances. America and its allies think in political administrations and fiscal quarters, with strategies that shift to meet the moment; China, by its own apparent logic, thinks in decades and even centuries, and stays focused on its objectives long after its adversaries have been distracted.

That difference dictates the strategy. Where NATO is built to scare off the Russian bear through visible, noisy resolve, the alliance-building underway in the Indo-Pacific is aimed at making sure China keeps playing the long game. The objective is not to force China to back down. It is to buy time — and buy time, and buy time — so that Beijing never feels the moment to act aggressively has arrived. Keep convincing China to delay, and it might delay for decades; it might delay forever.

This is why the silence matters. The nations of the Indo-Pacific are working quietly, almost invisibly, to weave a net around China’s ambitions. Stand up and shout, christen the project the “Asian NATO,” and you give the whole game away — you tell Beijing the containment is real and the clock has started. Keep quiet, avoid spooking the thing, and the long-term strategy just might work.

Moldova: A Kremlin Influence Campaign That Backfired

For once, there is also a piece of good news, and it comes from an unlikely place: the former Soviet state of Moldova. A country of 2.3 million people on the periphery of Europe, it is the kind of place most Europeans would until recently have struggled to find on a map. So why would its election matter?

The answer is in that phrase, “until recently.” In 2022, Moldova became another frontline in Russia’s war against the West — one into which the Kremlin has poured staggering resources to keep Chișinău within its orbit. Moldova does not merely sit on the border between NATO member Romania to the west and Ukraine to the east.

Since a short 1992 war it has also been partially occupied, with a thin wedge of land declaring itself the unrecognized state of Transnistria, a statelet whose independence is guaranteed by roughly two thousand Russian soldiers. Keeping Moldova from drifting too close to the West has long been in Moscow’s interest, and the late-September election was the perfect opportunity to act on it.

The conditions favored Moscow. The pro-European ruling party, PAS, had presided over an economic crisis brought on by the war in Ukraine. The Rosa Luxemburg Foundation describes inflation up 60 percent since 2021, soaring living costs, and a third of the population below the absolute poverty line — punishing for a nation already among Europe’s poorest. The discontent showed: in an October 2024 referendum on deeper EU integration, the government-backed pro-Europeans squeaked through with a mere 50.35 percent, the pro-Russian-oligarch-backed “No” campaign falling within ten thousand votes of an upset.

The Full Kremlin Toolkit — and Its Failure

That made Moldova fertile ground for a classic Kremlin influence operation. As the Centre for European Policy Studies put it, “Moscow deployed the full toolkit at its disposal: illegal funding, cyberattacks, mass disinformation campaigns, widespread vote-buying practices and even bomb threats on election day – primarily targeting embassies and diaspora voting sites.” The violence did not stop at bomb threats: there were arrests of men accused of preparing acts of unrest should PAS win, and the BBC uncovered a Kremlin-linked network paying people to post fake, pro-Russian stories on social media.

As election day approached, the fear was that the Kremlin would tip the result to the pro-Russian Patriotic Electoral Bloc. WarFronts had earlier warned of the attempt to rig the vote. So the result came as a genuine surprise. After all that effort — the outright purchase of votes, the bomb threats used to shut down diaspora voting sites — the Patriotic Electoral Bloc won a middling 24.18 percent.

PAS took slightly over 50 percent, down from its 52.8 percent in 2021 but still a majority of all votes cast. Far from a close race, it was a blowout for the pro-Europeans.

The aftermath was just as deflating for Moscow. Before the votes were even counted, opposition leader Igor Dodon declared victory and called for massive protests outside parliament. In the end, a few dozen pensioners turned up with placards. In a month when Russian drones kept intruding into NATO airspace, it was the good-news story the West needed — and to call it a humiliation for the Kremlin undersells how embarrassing it really was.

The Bleaker Reading: A Nation Split Into Two Tribes

But the story is more nuanced than “the Kremlin lost.” While PAS’s victory was a major relief, the circumstances around it do not necessarily bode well for Moldova’s future, and the campaign rhetoric shows why. As Balkan Insight noted, “Each campaign was marred by alarmist rhetoric, instances of hate speech, and fearmongering from both sides.”

The opposition claimed a PAS victory would see President Maia Sandu join forces with George Soros and Volodymyr Zelensky to invade Transnistria and drag Moldova into the war. PAS was little better, darkly hinting that an opposition vote could see Moldova occupied by Russian tanks or pulled into the Ukraine war on the Kremlin’s side.

Then there were the voting controversies. Days before polls opened, five polling stations in Transnistria were summarily closed, forcing residents of the pro-Russian enclave to travel long distances into Moldova to vote — a factor that may have lowered turnout there. These closures stemmed from a very real fear that pro-Russian officials might engage in ballot stuffing, but the overall impression was of President Sandu making it harder for her opponents to vote legally. The overseas vote raised similar concerns: Germany hosted 36 stations for the overwhelmingly pro-EU local diaspora, while a comparable population of Moldovans in Russia had only two, far fewer than the 17 granted in 2021.

There is nuance here as well. Around 100,000 Moldovans live in Russia, but the New York Times notes that only six percent of them voted in 2021, far below Western turnout — so seventeen stations for six thousand likely voters would make little sense. Even so, it looked as though Moldovan citizens were being denied the right to vote based on how they were likely to cast it, and that perception is itself the danger.

Why Even a Win Carries a Warning

This is the bleakest part. According to the Centre for European Policy Studies, the Kremlin’s main goal may have been to swing the vote, but its secondary aim is to undermine long-term trust in Moldova’s democratic process. That can be achieved by buying votes or pushing false narratives — but it can also be achieved simply by pointing to real instances of the ruling party appearing to put its thumb on the scales.

None of this is to say PAS was wrong to act as it did. This is not Republicans and Democrats gerrymandering their way to victory. Moldova really is being targeted by a predatory nation more than sixty times its size, one that is not only waging a brutal war of imperial conquest against Moldova’s eastern neighbor but is also occupying Moldovan territory. In such circumstances, caution and extraordinary measures are warranted.

The flipside is that Moldova’s political scene is now split into two major tribes, each viewing the other as an existential threat and each accustomed to framing every single vote in apocalyptic terms. That polarization could cause serious problems down the line. So while it is genuinely good that PAS won so decisively, the September vote was not the end of Moldova’s political troubles. With Russia still working to sow division, and with living standards still falling under energy shocks, things from here may only grow more volatile.

Where the Three Threads Meet

Pulled together, these strands describe a single strategic environment. The two-front problem gives Russia and China a shared incentive to move before American allies harden into a coalition that can fight in parallel. The Indo-Pacific’s quiet, unnamed alliance-building is a bet that patience and silence can keep China in its long game long enough for that hardening to finish. And Moldova is a reminder that the contest is already being fought — not only with drones over NATO airspace, but with bomb threats, bought votes, and disinformation aimed at the soft target of public trust.

The Kremlin’s failure in Moldova shows that influence campaigns can be beaten. But the deeper lesson cuts the other way: even a decisive defeat for Moscow left behind a more polarized, more fragile democracy, which is its own kind of victory for an adversary whose secondary aim is corrosion rather than conquest. The window of maximum danger is the one in which allies are not yet strong enough to share the load — and that window is open now.