On the latest episode of Breaking Battlegrounds, host Sam Stone and guest host Sean Noble sat down with Noah Rothman, senior writer at National Review and author of The Rise of the New Puritans, to discuss one of the most underreported but significant developments in recent weeks.
The topic? Nineteen Russian one-way attack drones crossing into Polish airspace — NATO territory — in what many believe was a deliberate provocation designed to test the Alliance’s readiness.
For hours, NATO assets scrambled across Eastern Europe, airports near Warsaw were shut down, and civilians were forced into bunkers. Then, silence. No official word came for more than an hour.
“It was a scary moment,” Rothman said, noting that once the Polish government confirmed the drones were real, NATO was forced to engage Russian combat forces over its own territory — a sentence that, as Sam Stone pointed out, should make every American stop and think.
Rothman broke down the stakes: Poland and the Baltic states are some of NATO’s most fortified members, spending more on defense (as a share of GDP) than many Western allies — in Poland’s case, even more than the United States. If Moscow is willing to risk provoking these nations, it’s sending a message: We’re willing to call your bluff.
This incident raises the specter of Article 4 consultations — the formal process NATO members use when one of them is threatened. While this doesn’t mean automatic war, it could lead to a debate over a military response, from moving more NATO assets to the border to potentially creating a no-fly zone over parts of Western Ukraine.
“A no-fly zone wouldn’t be to protect Ukraine per se,” Rothman argued, “but to protect NATO civilians. Polish citizens were forced into bunkers. That’s exactly what NATO exists to prevent.”
What makes this moment even more dangerous is the possibility that hesitation could fracture the alliance. Rothman warned that if Washington, London, Paris, and Berlin appear weak, Poland, Romania, and the Baltic states may take unilateral action — raising the risk of a less coordinated and more dangerous confrontation.
And while some analysts are debating whether this incursion was accidental or deliberate, Rothman dismissed the distinction as irrelevant:
“Whether it was a mistake or not, it was treated like a deliberate attack — and NATO cannot afford to pretend otherwise.”
Sam and Sean asked the question on many listeners’ minds: Could this escalate into something far more serious? Rothman was careful but clear — this was an opportunity to show strength now, before being forced to respond to a more severe provocation, such as Russian troops crossing into Estonia or Latvia.
“This is the moment to demonstrate resolve,” Rothman concluded. “Because if we don’t, the next test could be far costlier.”
Transcript
**Sam Stone: **Welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds. Our next guest up today, Noah Rothman, senior writer at National Review. He is the author of The Rise of the New Puritans, Fighting Back Against, Rise of the New Puritans and Fighting Back Against Progressive's War on Fun and Unjust, Social Justice and the Unmaking of America. I think, Kylie, we're actually messing up those book titles on Noah. We have to get that sorted a little bit. Noah Rothman, thank you so much for joining us once again.
**Noah Rothman: **My pleasure. Thank you for having me.
**Sam Stone: **We have, there's been kind of obviously with everything that's happened in the news the last few days, something that I've kind of been following that flew under the radar, the reason we reached out to have you on the program is there seems to be sort of a lot of churning in the conflict with Ukraine between Poland and Russia right now. We've heard about Russian drones striking or ending up somehow on Polish soil.
Ukraine has announced that they are going to be having some munitions factories operating directly in Poland So can you give us a little bit of more information? What's going on there? Where? Why is Poland? Are they taking the lead now for the West in the engagement with Ukraine and Russia?
**Noah Rothman: **Well taking the lead is a subjective assessment. But certainly the nations on NATO frontier with Russia, the Baltic states and Poland in particular, but also Romania and Bulgaria, have deep investments in the outcome of the Ukraine conflict. And all of them spend more on defense in terms of equivalent to GDP than Western Europe.
Not the United States, but close, and in Poland's case, more than the United States. These are very hard targets, which is why it was curious when we had a volley of 17 Russian one-way attack drones enter Polish airspace this week, if you were going to test the NATO response, which would be the objective of such an operation, see how these assets perform in the midst of some sort of a crisis.
That's a hard target to test. You know, know what you're going to get. But there is a logic there, you know, if you were going to see how assets respond to an incursion, Russian armed incursion, you would know where the assets are, and they're in Poland. And that's what they saw. What we witnessed on, I believe it was Tuesday night, was a volley of these drones over the course of several hours, going deep into Poland, into close to Warsaw even, closing airport after airport. It was kind of a scary moment because we got these reports of a strange activity in NATO's border, a lot of NATO air assets hitting the air and scrambling and acting frantically and then silence.
No information for the better part of an hour, even more than an hour, until we started to hear what was happening from Polish officials who confirmed that a Russian incursion had taken place and NATO military assets were engaging Russian combat forces over NATO soil. That's a scary sentence.
**Sam Stone: **That's a really scary sentence because that would technically at least trigger a full NATO response that requires the US to become directly involved, correct?
**Noah Rothman: **Well, not necessarily. What it triggers is NATO's mutual defense provisions, which doesn't necessarily mean right to World War III full-to-gap style invasion. What it means is the party that has been aggressed against can invoke Article 4, which leads to consultations across all the members.
So and it's a step that is a prerequisite to get to Article 5, which is the mutual defense provisions, which itself has a lot of wiggle room. It doesn't necessarily mean Armageddon. It can be a tailored response, if there's a response at all. But NATO's Article 4 has been invoked in this century alone seven times by Turkey. It does not mean that there's necessarily going to be a response that's a military response. But Poland will invoke Article 4. Article 4 consultations will take place.
I suspect the alliance has no appetite for a military response to this incurtion that a response must be made there's some argument about whether or not this was accidental whether it was on purpose and you know that people are saying well how could it possibly be accidentally another took place over hours involving nineteen drones launched from multiple locations.
I don't know one way or the other but it would not be a remarkable for under to be an accident on the Russian part of the part of the Russian military that unfolds over a long period of time in multiple independent ways we're talking about the Russian military here.
**Sam Stone: **Yeah right.
**Noah Rothman: **Never underestimate its capacity for error. If it was that accident it doesn't matter it's an academic question Moscow would never act like it was an accident. They wouldn't say whoops sorry and NATO can afford to treat it like an accident. So it doesn't even matter whether it was or not and and frankly everybody in the region now says it was deliberate designed to test NATO's response and the response therefore must be robust, not just scrambling air assets, but moving material to the front lines, closer to NATO's border, and there is going to be real debate over whether or not it's absolutely crucial now for the Western Alliance to create some sort of a buffer zone inside Ukraine over the air and something like a no-fly zone, not to protect Ukraine, but to protect NATO.
Because NATO's civilians were forced into bunkers over the course of this incursion by a hostile foreign power. That's exactly what NATO was designed to do, and if we don't want to see more of that, we should respond to it pretty aggressively. And we're kind of fortunate, in fact, that it happened in this way here, as opposed to, say, for example, some sort of a provocation on the ground in Estonia or Latvia, where Russian forces find themselves inside NATO soil, present a de facto condition on the ground and dare the Alliance to do something about it.
Present everybody with a die for Danzig scenario. You're really going to go to war with the world's largest nuclear power over tiny Tallinn? That's the nightmare scenario. That's what kept me up at night. And this isn't that. So this is an opportunity to demonstrate resolve, I dare say on the cheap, compared to the other nightmare scenarios we could be facing. And it would be lovely if we saw some kind of a real debate around what that would mean.
And that could mean shoring up Western Ukraine. It's always going to be a possibility that if Ukraine lost this war, that it would destabilize the NATO frontier, and NATO would have to take ownership of that. And if the United States doesn't lead that effort, then all those states we were talking about on the frontier that are really nervous, spend a lot of money on their defense for good reason, might take matters into their own hands. That's another scary scenario.
Washington's job, number one, is to keep all these 33 member states all rolling in the same direction and that's a huge chore and if the bar are Paris in Berlin and London and Washington to start look weak need then Warsaw and Tallin and Rega and you know half of the other states from the frontier will take the measures of their own hands which introduces infinite number of variables more transfer conflagration it's just a harder situation.
So responding in a concerted, in unified fashion, with resolve commensurate with the nature of the threat is job number one.
**Sam Stone: **I haven't heard people talking about a no-fly zone before and that's, I think, really intriguing. Is there a concern that if the US were to attempt to establish a no-fly zone, it's obviously worked very effectively for us in the past given our air dominance, is there a concern about putting our fourth and fifth generation technologies up in a theater with drones that may result in the loss and handing of those technologies to the Russians?
**Noah Rothman: **Yeah, that's a huge concern.
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Check out Noah Rothman’s New Book The Rise of the New Puritans: Fighting Back Against Progressives' War on Fun HERE