Warburg and the Prisoner’s Dilemma of NATO
- john raymond
- Sep 10
- 2 min read
Paul Warburg’s latest analysis of Russia’s drone incursions into Poland deserves credit. He correctly starts from the minimax assumption: if an enemy is acting, it is not by accident. It is deliberate, designed to maximize harm. Russia is not “testing” NATO blindly; it already knows the alliance’s patterns of response. What it is doing is shaping NATO’s political decision-making space to induce hesitation and self-deterrence.
Knowing this much alone is laudable. Warburg has pulled apart the political layers of Article 5 and shown how Moscow is targeting not NATO’s hardware but NATO’s will. His argument is clear: Russia ties down Western systems by making publics fear for their own defense, and that fear keeps vital weapons out of Ukraine. It is a good read of the battlefield of perception, where Moscow is far more effective than in its direct military campaigns.
But to deepen the picture, we can take Warburg’s logic and extend it with a game-theoretic basis. Once you do that, the pattern snaps into focus as a classic prisoner’s dilemma.
Each NATO member faces two choices: send scarce air defense forward to Ukraine where it matters, or hold it back “just in case.” If all members cooperate and send, the alliance gains maximum advantage—Russia is weakened, Ukraine strengthened, NATO’s credibility intact.
But if even one member defects and hoards systems, it may feel individually safer while still benefiting from others’ contributions. But that temptation to defect can spread, and then the alliance converges on the worst equilibrium: everyone holds back, Ukraine starves, and Russia buys time.
This is exactly what Moscow’s red teams would have gamed out. They don’t need to destroy Patriot batteries on the battlefield if they can make Warsaw and Berlin keep them in warehouses. They don’t need to confront Article 5 head-on if they can reduce it to a political ghost, never activated because each member is calculating in isolation.
Warburg is right that Russia already knows NATO will do little in response to these incursions. The point isn’t discovery, it’s exploitation. By applying the prisoner’s dilemma framework, we can see how the Kremlin not only identified the weakness but can even estimate the likely equilibrium of the alliance: fragmented, hesitant, and tending toward self-deterrence.
The lesson for NATO is stark. If the game is allowed to play out naturally, defection dominates and Ukraine loses. The only way out is binding cooperation—credible commitments to forward-deploy defenses and treat Ukrainian territory as the effective shield of Europe.
That is how to collapse the prisoner’s dilemma, deny Russia the self-deterrence dividend, and restore deterrence where it belongs: on the battlefield.
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