Firstly, publicly doubting Art.5, as one of the key NATO powers, have little upside and a big deterrence disadvantage.
Per @MarkGaleotti, Russia seems to believe in Art5 economist.com/europe/2019/11…
Bilaterally, Russia has so much better opportunity to gets its way than dealing with a united EU. Macron should know this.
One of my students said Ukrainian crisis and I asked them to list all the definitions of war they could think of.
The war in Ukraine fulfilled all of them, except one as Ukraine hasn’t declared it (the student still used crisis in the essay tho...).
Nonetheless, as a Russia analyst, there’s little to nothing to be happy with in here.
Fin.
Rather there’s a good argument that Trump is a problem himself, but that the US remain committed to NATO.
“If Macron had felt that the diagnosis he made [of NATO] was so evident – he had all the right to state it. He knows NATO better than me, since he represents a nation which is a member of the alliance”