We Are Being Tested

By Seth Mandel

Wednesday, August 12, 2026

 

Vladimir Putin has never shied away from assassinating Russian critics who have fled to the West. But recent events suggest Moscow is expanding its violation of Western sovereignty in new and volatile ways, and the revelations should change how we view everything from the war in Ukraine to the Middle East conflict to the street protests here at home.

 

Last week, a drone carrying explosive material was discovered near a Ukrainian plane at an airport in eastern Germany. A police bomb squad disarmed it. A second drone was found flying near the airport. It flew right into a landing cargo plane.

 

The term “drone” has a hobbyist’s ring to it, and for a long time the main reason to use a drone was reconnaissance and observation. But a drone with explosives is not a toy plane or a motorized kite. It is a bomb. A Russian bomb was planted at a German airport near a Ukrainian jet. If the implications are true, then that would mean Russia has taken its active war against Ukraine into German territory and planted a bomb in a NATO country.

 

It’s an escalation of an existing strategy. Russia is poking and prodding at NATO’s defenses. “Hybrid attacks are taking place every day in NATO countries,” German Gen. Carsten Breuer told the Wall Street Journal. “Russia is testing us and looking at how we respond.” Moscow is also, he said, “shifting its economy and military to prepare for a wider conflict with the West.”

 

It’s not just Russia. I thought the airport drone was the most important geopolitical story of the past week until I read this one:

 

“Royal Navy spy drones used by Britain’s elite special forces secretly sent data to China, The Telegraph can reveal.

 

“The cameras on the K3 Scout surveillance drones had components made in China which were transmitting information to a device in the country.

 

“The Royal Marines have been using the £12m fleet since March and the Ministry of Defence (MoD) was forced to remove all internet connectivity from the cameras after discovering the breach.”

 

So China’s been watching British Special Forces for five months now. That sounds bad enough, but the full picture is probably worse, though we can’t know for sure. After all, how likely is it that this is the only case in which Chinese parts were sending data back home?

 

Testing the West’s defenses this way is typical behavior from the wider China-led bloc. The Iranians, for example, use proxies to prod the good guys and look for weaknesses.

 

Leading up to the October 7, 2023, invasion of Israel, the Palestinian government in Gaza wanted to see what Israel’s “smart and lethal” border security system, made up of a high-tech detection system around the border fence, was really made of. The Jerusalem Post described the findings of an Israeli report on the failures: “According to the report, Hamas carried out several test operations on the fence weeks before October 7, using motorcycles, small bridges, and explosives. One key test, conducted one week prior, involved blowing up a structural beam critical to the fence’s integrity. It succeeded. The report states this activity did not trigger an IDF response.”

 

And that’s only the border system. Analysts say that many of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s rocket attacks during that time were meant to test Israel’s missile defense but also to see how the IDF responded: who went where, which bases responded to alarms, about how many soldiers were regularly at these bases, etc. It’s common sense when you think about it—but apparently not enough higher-ups in the Israeli security sector were thinking about it.

 

Iran directly tested Israel’s defenses as well. Some of its missile salvos over the past few years were intended to see what Israel’s shield capacity looked like and what it would take to overwhelm defenses with a swarm of drones and missiles. Iran is also now testing Israel via Hezbollah, which has been using fiber-optic drones against Israeli targets. Such drones are a key component of Russia’s war on Ukraine, and both China and Iran are paying close attention to each innovation in military hardware.

 

Finally, the propaganda campaigns that fuel anti-Western activism are a key part of this as well. These campaigns are intended to isolate members of the alliance of democracies to prevent them from sharing military knowhow and intelligence the way the China-Russia-Iran axis is. It’s why pro-China activists and political figures argue against arming Ukraine. It’s also why anti-Israel activists want to make the Jewish state radioactive: to hamstring countries like Germany from obtaining the best defenses against Russian attacks.

 

The United States is the leader of the alliance that stands in the way of a new authoritarian hegemony over the global economy. We should be clear-eyed about the motives of those seeking to drive a wedge between us and our allies.