Wargaming a Second Trump Term

I found this story at Business Insider, reported by Michael Peck, interesting:

If Donald Trump wins a second term in the White House in November, NATO may fall apart, a recent wargame found.

As a presidential candidate, Trump has threatened to quit NATO unless European allies contribute more, and should he carry it out Europe may decide to go it alone on defense, the game suggests. “A US policy of frustrating NATO has the potential to cause the alliance to collapse, with the EU as a candidate for eventually replacing NATO’s ultimate function — defending Europe from Russia,” wrote Finley Grimble, the British defense expert who designed and ran the game.

The US doesn’t have to withdraw from NATO to imperil the 75-year-old alliance. Technically, the US is barred from leaving NATO after Congress voted in 2023 to prohibit withdrawal without congressional approval.

But the game showed how Trump — the presumptive Republican presidential nominee who said on the campaign trail that he’d encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” with NATO allies who spend too little on their militaries — could undermine NATO simply by doing as little as possible to support the alliance. “What Donald Trump can do is just really hollow out what NATO does,” Grimble told Business Insider. “He doesn’t need to leave NATO to ruin it. He can ruin it from within.”

The details of the wargame are described here by its designer, Finley Grimble:

The wargame commenced on a successful Trump Inauguration Day: January 1, 2025, and running for two years into the presidency. All 32 NATO members, Ukraine, and Russia were represented by participants. These countries with ‘dedicated representation’ were given time to:

1. Develop a strategy.
2. Negotiate with allies to cohere strategy.
3. Negotiate with adversarial countries.
4. Take a series of military, diplomatic, economic, and intelligence actions for a turn that represented two months.
5. Any military actions were then carried out using an operational wargame map with bounded adjudication rules. This ran as a minor facet of the wider geo-political wargame to establish correlation of forces and battlefield situations.

Once these phases had occurred, the non-military actions were freely adjudicated by a ‘wargame control team’, then the next turn would begin with a new set of starting conditions based on the outcomes of the previous intertwining actions.

I suggest skipping the BI story and jumping directly to the post about the wargame. Most interesting and unreported by BI was that one of the conclusions of the wargame was that Russia would not invade the Baltics within the period of the wargame:

• The Ukraine conflict was still using much of Russia’s resources, so it could not open a second conflict on its border.
• That the US would not commit itself to defend Europe in full was still uncertain despite 6 months of dormancy.
• Russia assessed that the Baltic States could potentially resist an effective occupation, even without support from NATO.
• Russia assessed that the European NATO Allies could defeat Russia in the Baltic Sea & come to aid the Baltic States.
• Russia assessed that Finland and Poland alone, not to mention with support from other NATO Allies, possess the ability to counterattack into Russia, cut off Murmansk (Where Russia’s main nuclear deterrent and Northern Fleet are based), encircle Saint Petersburg, and have a path to Moscow.
• Russia risked becoming increasingly isolated globally by performing another ground invasion in Europe.

which I believe to the case.

I wish that there were a comparable wargame showing the outcome of a Biden re-election.