사진 확대 If Russia Wins: A Scenario by Carlo Masala, translated by Lee Ji-yoon, SIF Publishing, 17,500 KRW
“Yes. I would say it goes beyond simply reconsidering it.”
This was how President of the United States Donald Trump answered a question on 1 February in an interview with the British daily The Daily Telegraph, when asked whether he would reconsider withdrawing from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). He derided NATO, the cornerstone of Western collective security for 77 years, as a “paper tiger.” His remarks signaled a fundamental shift in the liberal international order.
Exactly one year earlier, a book had anticipated such a development. Carlo Masala, a German military strategist and professor at the University of the Bundeswehr Munich, depicted a scenario of NATO being neutralized in his book If Russia Wins: A Scenario. Upon publication, it immediately topped the bestseller list in Germany and has since been translated into 12 languages.
The book presents a fictional scenario in which Russia, having prevailed in the Russo-Ukrainian War, launches a surprise seizure in 2028 of Narva, an Estonian border city. Faced with this, NATO falls into paralysis over whether to invoke its collective defense clause, Article 5. Confronted with a Russian invasion of a member state, the alliance ultimately fails to respond and sets itself on a path to self-destruction.
Masala cites the Russo-Ukrainian War as the basis for his prediction of NATO’s collapse. Despite a clear violation of international law, the West was unable to mount a robust response in the face of nuclear threats, and miscalculated that economic pressure alone would bring Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin to the negotiating table. He also notes that while Russia’s political system allows for rapid decisions on aggression, democracies struggle to forge unified public support for war efforts.
As European countries successively refuse to cooperate with United States–Israel military operations against the Islamic Republic of Iran, the very foundations of the NATO alliance are now being shaken. Opening this book in such a moment inevitably produces a sense of déjà vu. The author’s prescription is unequivocal: deterrence must be built up to such a level that Russia cannot even contemplate an invasion.
The rapidly unfolding scenario, told from the perspectives of everyone from ordinary citizens indifferent to Russian politics to Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) of German defense companies and even the President of the United States, reads almost like a war novel. One limitation, however, is that the depiction of the invasion of Estonia feels overly smooth and frictionless.
The questions raised in this book by a sudden fracture within NATO are also our own. Once the United States begins to treat alliances as bargaining chips, no alliance can be an exception. The world order has entered a path of irreversible upheaval. It can no longer be dismissed as the whim of a single leader.
[Koo Jung-geun]
This article has been translated by GripLabs Mingo AI.