The West Is Not Ready for a Two-Front War
An analysis by The Atlantic reveals that the US and NATO have no plan for a simultaneous Chinese attack on Taiwan and a Russian assault on an eastern NATO member. War games show Europe would be left alone.
An analysis by The Atlantic reveals that the US and NATO have no plan for a simultaneous Chinese attack on Taiwan and a Russian assault on an eastern NATO member. War games show Europe would be left alone.
Western nations would not be prepared to respond to a hypothetical coordinated aggression by China and Russia, concludes journalist Simon Schuster in an extensive analysis for The Atlantic. A scenario in which Beijing attacks Taiwan while Moscow simultaneously strikes an eastern European NATO member exposes serious gaps in the alliance's defense planning. Although such an attack is currently considered hypothetical, even if China and Russia were to decide on joint action, the scale of that coordination would be too large to hide, giving the US and its allies time to prepare their defenses.
Florence Gaub, director of the research division at the NATO Defense College in Rome, told The Atlantic that alliance strategists "keenly feel" this planning gap but are not taking steps to address it. Former US Navy Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery, who specializes in large-scale war games, revealed that he and his colleagues last studied the possibility of a two-front war 15 years ago and that "nothing good came of it."
The analysis showed that the US lacks sufficient weapons stockpiles and industrial capacity for prolonged multi-front theaters. According to The Atlantic, the Pentagon had to shift a significant portion of ships and aircraft from Asia and Europe to the Middle East due to the war with Iran, while air defense missile stockpiles fell to two-thirds.
NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte had already warned of such a scenario in December 2025 in an interview with the German tabloid Bild. "China is looking at Taiwan, and I am absolutely convinced that if China takes military action against Taiwan, it will push its junior partner, Russia under Putin's leadership, to occupy us here in Europe," Rutte said.
The Atlantic reminds us that many military threats in the past seemed implausible until they materialized. It cites the German attack on the Soviet Union, when Joseph Stalin did not believe intelligence reports until the last moment, and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which caught the US completely unprepared.
One of the most detailed public analyses was conducted by the Czech institute Values Center for Security Policy, which has organized about 20 rounds of war games since spring 2024 with experts from various countries, including Japan and South Korea. In one scenario, China bans the export of raw materials crucial to the European defense industry, and after five months, when European companies exhaust their stockpiles, Russia, with full access to Chinese resources, attacks an eastern European NATO member.
The results were alarming: in almost every scenario, the US prioritized the Chinese threat and shifted forces from Europe to Asia, leaving European allies alone against Russia. Jakub Janda, director of the Values Center, warns that if Russia and China act in concert and the US is in conflict with Europe, the West's prospects "begin to look grim."
Eric Heginbotham, a war game expert from MIT's Security Studies Program, says the topic of a two-front war is now mentioned "more often than before," but no known research institute in the US or Europe has yet conducted public war games on the subject. This does not rule out the possibility that such scenarios have been analyzed within the Pentagon's classified structures. Despite the increase in mentions, the topic remains rarely present in public discourse.
Particularly illustrative is the series of command post exercises by the Pacific Forum in 2023. In that scenario, China attacked Taiwan, and North Korea took the opportunity to invade South Korea. "We could barely keep up with reacting and assigning tasks. And we weren't even talking about Europe. I can only imagine what would have happened if they had added Russia to the mix," said David Santoro, president of the Pacific Forum.
