The Great Conversation: When Does a Red Line Stop Being Red?
Hello everyone, and welcome to The Great Conversation.
Some boundaries are easy to recognize when they are crossed.
Others disappear one small step at a time.
For years, European governments and NATO have faced what security officials describe as Russian “hybrid warfare”: actions designed to create disruption or pressure without necessarily looking like a conventional military attack.
Cyberattacks.
Disinformation.
Damage to undersea infrastructure.
Incendiary devices hidden in cargo.
Sabotage against railways, weapons factories, and depots.
These incidents have often occupied an uncomfortable space between peace and open conflict.
But Julianne Smith, who served as the United States permanent representative to NATO from 2021 to 2024, argues in Foreign Affairs that something has changed.
The incidents are becoming more frequent, more visible, and potentially more dangerous.
Smith points to a series of recent events.
A Russian cruise missile crashed into Polish territory.
Explosive-laden drones were discovered at and near an airport in Leipzig, Germany.
Romanian fighter jets scrambled to intercept Russian drones over Romanian airspace.
A Spanish jet shot down another near the Moldovan border.
And these events followed years of cyberattacks, sabotage, airspace violations, and other incidents attributed to Russia or Russian-linked actors.
Smith argues that Moscow's objective is to weaken NATO's unity, test the alliance's commitment to Article 5, and increase the cost of supporting Ukraine.
But perhaps the most interesting part of her argument is not simply what Russia is doing.
It is how NATO has been responding.
NATO has investigated incidents, strengthened infrastructure, increased patrols, improved intelligence sharing, intercepted aircraft and drones, and developed new capabilities to respond to cyber and hybrid threats.
But many incidents are still evaluated individually.
One damaged cable.
One cyberattack.
One drone.
One act of sabotage.
One airspace violation.
Each event can appear serious without necessarily appearing serious enough to justify a dramatic collective response.
And that creates a peculiar problem.
What happens when no single incident crosses the line, but the accumulation of incidents begins moving the line itself?
Smith describes how Russia's hybrid activity has intensified since the invasion of Ukraine.
According to research she cites from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Russian incursions in Europe quadrupled during the first year of the war.
The tactics also diversified.
By 2023, NATO itself acknowledged that Russia had intensified hybrid activities against allied countries.
Yet NATO faces a structural challenge.
The alliance was created to respond to recognizable armed attacks.
Hybrid warfare deliberately complicates that distinction.
A missile crossing a border is visible.
A tank crossing a border is unmistakable.
But what about malware attacking an electrical grid?
A damaged undersea cable?
A criminal network paid to burn a warehouse?
A drone entering foreign airspace?
At what point do separate incidents become one larger pattern?
And who decides?
NATO has long maintained that a sufficiently serious cyber or hybrid attack could trigger Article 5, the principle that an attack against one member can be treated as an attack against all.
But the threshold has deliberately remained flexible.
That flexibility has advantages.
It prevents an automatic escalation every time an ambiguous incident occurs.
But flexibility creates another risk.
If every event is judged separately, an adversary may learn how far it can move without triggering a larger response.
A little farther this time.
A little farther next time.
Until behavior that once would have seemed extraordinary begins to feel strangely familiar.
Smith's concern is that this process may already be occurring.
She argues that Russia's gradual escalation has allowed increasingly dangerous actions to take place without producing a correspondingly larger collective response.
Her proposed solution is a stronger NATO strategy that looks at patterns rather than isolated incidents and imposes clearer costs for continued hybrid attacks.
Whether one agrees with those prescriptions or not, the underlying dilemma extends far beyond NATO and Russia.
Human beings and institutions often respond differently to sudden change than to gradual change.
A dramatic event attracts attention.
A slow accumulation becomes background noise.
Standards can shift that way.
Expectations can shift that way.
Risk can shift that way.
Even our definition of what is normal can shift that way.
There is a familiar thought experiment about a frog sitting in water that slowly becomes hotter.
The biology behind the story is questionable.
The metaphor is not.
Gradual change can be difficult to perceive precisely because there is no single moment when everything obviously changed.
And perhaps geopolitical boundaries can face the same problem.
If an action would have produced alarm five years ago but produces only another investigation today, has the threat changed?
Or has our perception of the threat changed?
That distinction matters.
Because deterrence depends partly on boundaries.
A boundary tells another actor:
Beyond this point, something changes.
But a boundary that can repeatedly be approached, tested, and crossed without predictable consequences may eventually stop functioning as a boundary at all.
At the same time, responding too aggressively to ambiguous incidents carries its own danger.
Misjudgment between nuclear-armed powers could have enormous consequences.
Restraint can prevent escalation.
But excessive restraint can potentially encourage further testing.
And so the problem becomes one of the oldest and most difficult problems in human affairs.
How do you prevent escalation without teaching someone that escalation is safe?
There may be no simple formula.
But there is a larger lesson worth considering.
Sometimes the greatest change does not arrive with a dramatic announcement.
Sometimes it arrives through a series of small events that individually seem manageable.
Until one day we look backward and realize that the boundary has moved.
Which raises a deeper question...
When a line is crossed gradually rather than all at once, how do we recognize the moment when patience and restraint stop preventing escalation and begin normalizing it?
Take a moment to reflect.
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