A New Nightmare Scenario Emerges

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, November 05, 2024

 

In remarks to the New York Times, Western political officials confirmed the rumors swirling around the national-security community over the last several days indicating that Russia is behind an attempted terrorist attack on commercial airliners in Europe.

 

“Russia has been plotting to place incendiary devices on cargo planes in Europe and even performed a test run this summer, setting off fires at shipping hubs in Britain and Germany,” the Times reported on Tuesday.

 

The incendiary devices were planted at DHL shipping hubs in Leipzig, Germany, and Birmingham, England, the Western officials said. The fires caused minimal damage and no injuries, they said, but the blazes raised the frightening specter of bombs potentially being loaded on aircraft.

 

That experiment may have been a prelude to something far more destabilizing: an operation aimed at “destroying planes on American runways, setting off bombs at U.S. warehouses or even blowing up aircraft midair.”

 

That plot, had it been carried out, would have instantly established a state of war between the Russian Federation and the NATO alliance, the formalities notwithstanding.

 

The dire implications of this development are hard to overstate. Despite its recent, albeit limited, battlefield successes in Ukraine, Russia’s halting and unsteady response to the Ukrainian incursion into Kursk Oblast and the introduction of North Korean forces into the conflict are suggestive of a more unstable dynamic inside the Kremlin. “I think the Russian intelligence services have gone a bit feral,” Richard Moore, the former head of the U.K.’s foreign-intelligence service, speculated ominously. The West takes for granted its stable deterrent relationship with Russia, a belligerent but rational actor. This plot calls a lot of the assumptions that underwrite that status quo into question.

 

“Feral” or otherwise, an attack like this on the United States or its allies by agents linked to the Russian government would not be plausibly deniable for long. Nor would Western public officials be able to talk their respective constituencies out of the panic it would produce. Relatively covert acts of espionage — from sabotage and vandalism to targeted assassinations — are subversive and unacceptable but nevertheless discreet. Unlike such acts, the attack that the Times’ reporters outline would not be so discriminating. It would sow terror, and it would demand a response.

 

Whoever is responsible for this provocation, they are operating under the assumption that the West can be terrorized into placid compliance. With its regular deference to its paralyzing fear of escalation, the Biden administration has given those Russian actors every reason to believe their assessment is an accurate one. And as the Biden White House enters its lame-duck phase, the temptation to take advantage of the transition period will prove hard for anti-American actors abroad to resist.

 

Be it through skill, luck, a combination of both, or the intervention of fate, Western intelligence services benefited from auspicious good fortune here. But skill only goes so far, luck runs out, and our enemies only have to succeed once. And Russia is growing more and more comfortable with risk.