‘We Are at War Whether We Admit It or Not’. Conversation with William Alberque | LFPR Vol. 44, 2026

This text is excerpted from Lithuanian Foreign Policy Review, Vol. 44 (2026).

William Alberque argues that the global non-proliferation system has not collapsed – but that the West is dangerously naïve in how it plays the game. The former NATO official and leading arms control expert warns that Russia and China are “gaming” the very institutions designed to constrain the spread of weapons of mass destruction, from the UN to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and beyond – while deepening military ties with regimes such as Iran and North Korea. In his view, simply defending the status quo and opposing all proliferation in absolutist terms is no longer sufficient; the West must learn to use the rules, institutions, and partnerships more strategically to strengthen allies and penalize adversaries, without abandoning its core principles.

In this conversation with Linas Kojala, Alberque dissects the shifting landscape of nuclear deterrence – from Seoul and Tokyo’s growing doubts, to Riyadh’s hedging, to Donald Trump’s evolving instincts on arms control and testing. He explains how NATO’s new standing defense plans and the Deterrence and Defence of the Euro-Atlantic Area (DDA) concept have finally begun to close the gap between military reality and political rhetoric, while exposing persistent capability shortfalls, fragile political cohesion, and unresolved questions over who authorizes the first move in a crisis.

For Alberque, Russia’s long-running hybrid campaign and China’s calibrated pressure amount not to “grey zone” ambiguity, but to war by other means – demands for clarity for countries like Lithuania, he argues, can answer not only with more troops and hardware, but with people, concepts, and new partnerships, especially with South Korea, Australia, and Japan.

Linas Kojala: How would you describe the current state of the global non-proliferation regime? Would you characterize it as fractured, adapting, or fundamentally collapsing?

William Alberque: The non-proliferation regime is still something we should be investing in. It is in our interest to continue to support it. A completely uncontrollable situation in terms of nuclear proliferation is certainly not in our interest.

But we should think more strategically. We have to be much more mindful that Russia and China are gaming systems of arms control, non-proliferation, and risk reduction really, really hard these days.

Expectations that the United States, the UK, France, Russia and China – the Nuclear Weapon States as defined by the NPT, and the permanent members of the UN Security Council – could find ways to cooperate on the most important security threats, such as nuclear non-proliferation, are hugely diminished.

For instance, the 2024 Treaty on Comprehensive Strategic Partnership between Russia and North Korea includes provisions on mutual assistance and political coordination, including in international organizations – effectively signaling that Russia will defend North Korea’s interests in bodies such as the UN and the IAEA. So how do we continue to support the non-proliferation regime while understanding that Russia and China are shielding proliferators for their own narrow self-interests?

We have to ask some really hard questions for ourselves. Are there ways that we can use this system more effectively for our own interests while remaining within the rules? If, for instance, South Korea decides to go nuclear, is that something we simply oppose outright, or is that a debate we at least need to have in terms of our longer-term interests? I’m not saying we should help South Korea acquire nuclear weapons – but we are going to have to look at the system and our role in the system with a broader view, because Russia and China already are seeking to use the system against us and accountability for countries like Iran and North Korea. China is very openly using the non-proliferation regime and UN bodies to advance its interests, walking away from the rule-based order we created, and seeking to coerce countries to support its positions.

So just supporting the regime blindly – saying we must preserve everything exactly as it is and oppose all proliferation in all circumstances – is no longer enough. We need a more sophisticated approach to counter Russia’s and China’s moves, and to look at ways to strengthen our friends and disadvantage our adversaries through the very rules they exploit.

Linas Kojala: So do you think that South Korea and Japan are the countries to watch if the Western world revisits some of its previous assumptions in this area?

William Alberque: South Korea wants and needs more deterrence against North Korea. Anything we can do to strengthen South Korea in the longer term also increases deterrence vis-à-vis China and Russia, which is good.

South Korea is also the country among our close partners where there is the most public support for options “in the nuclear space” – whether that’s the return of U.S. nuclear weapons to the peninsula or, in a more distant scenario, a domestic capability. They have clearly said to the United States: we need more deterrence. Washington responded with the Washington Declaration in April 2023 and the creation of the Nuclear Consultation Group to deepen consultations on nuclear and strategic issues. That helped, but the pressure from parts of South Korean politics and public opinion to see U.S. nuclear weapons back on the peninsula remains strong.

I want to reiterate that helping South Korea build its own bomb would be wrong. But there are many things we can do short of that – stronger conventional capabilities, tighter consultations, visible reassurance. Because if South Korea were to go nuclear, pressure on Japan would spike. Taiwan would also look at it and ask: why not us?

And there are other aspects also. South Korea’s support to Poland on conventional arms is enormously in our favor. South Korean development of sophisticated missiles can seriously help and turbocharge European efforts. Europeans should be looking at South Korea much more closely.

Remember: South Korea has developed very sophisticated conventional counterforce options against a nuclear-armed foe (such as the “Kill Chain,” “Korean Integrated Air and Missile Defense,” and “Korean Massive Punishment and Retaliation”). They have tactics, technologies, and techniques aimed at defeating such an adversary. There is a lot NATO allies can learn from South Korea – and a lot they can gain by cooperating with us.

Japan, too, is looking at better hypersonic missiles and deep-strike options. On the conventional side, we need to encourage and work really closely with Japan and South Korea. Their interests are remarkably aligned with those of the United States and Europe. Russia is putting Japan under serious military pressure with air and naval activities, just as it pressures Lithuania and others. So there is real scope for cooperation.

You also have to look at the Middle East. Saudi Arabia has been hedging – investing in enrichment options that are civilian on paper but clearly preserve a weapons potential. They say openly this is about ensuring deterrence and leverage with Washington. Then you have occasional, more ambiguous statements from Turkey. I don’t overreact to every line from Ankara, but you always have to keep an eye on President Erdoğan.

Linas Kojala: President Trump has suggested that the United States might consider resuming nuclear testing. Beyond the headlines, how do you interpret that? What strategic message is he trying to send?

William Alberque: Trump’s engagement on nuclear issues has always been interesting. During election campaigns, he talked about nuclear arms control, about wanting to replace New START with a “bigger, better” treaty. At the same time, like every U.S. president, he learned that the Russians are extraordinarily difficult to deal with seriously on arms control.

People mythologize a golden era of U.S.–Russia cooperation in the 1990s – Boris Yeltsin as a democrat. It’s nonsense. Yeltsin was vehemently anti-NATO on key issues, pursued the war in Chechnya, and built the centralized system he handed to Putin. Every U.S. president – Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama – has tried to “do business” with Moscow and run business with Moscow into structural reality.

Trump also tried. And he was stunned by how little he got. Then, every autumn, you get this choreography of nuclear signaling: NATO’s Steadfast Noon exercise, French drills such as Poker, and U.S. strategic drills such as Global Thunder for U.S. Strategic Command. On the other side, Putin is personally overseeing exercises, in uniform, filming by Shoigu and Gerasimov, unveiling new systems, awarding designers, boasting that Russia has the most advanced nuclear arsenal in the world.

Trump watched Putin publicly embrace nuclear theatrics and felt betrayed. He thought (wrongly) that there could be a path to peace in Ukraine by engaging the Kremlin. Moreover, Russian and Chinese activities suggested to him they might be resuming or preparing for low-yield tests. His instinctive reaction was: If they are testing, maybe we should test too.

But when he spoke to his advisers, it became clear that a U.S. test could actually advantage Russia and China politically and diplomatically. So his messaging modulated. Still, the broader trajectory is that Trump moved from a naïve belief in personal deals with Putin and Xi towards a recognition that U.S. and Russian interests fundamentally diverge; coexistence is possible, deep cooperation is limited, but Russia “remains a scorpion” by nature. Those are hard lessons for any president.

Linas Kojala: In your analysis you wrote that SACEUR’s efforts and the DDA have created “a credible and dynamic deterrence posture,” but that three main challenges remain: capability shortfalls, political cohesion, and command authority. What should NATO do in the next year to address these?

William Alberque: On capability shortfalls, NATO has been talking about them since the early 1990s. But from the end of the Cold War until very recently, without agreed standing defense plans and without clearly naming Russia as an adversary, the entire defense planning process became, frankly, a kind of cosplay. We set capability targets; capitals negotiated them down; and often they were not delivered at all – because there were no standing plans that truly depended on those forces.

That has now changed. With the Concept for Deterrence and Defence of the Euro-Atlantic Area (DDA) approved in 2020 and the new regional plans agreed in 2023, NATO has real standing defense plans and concrete force requirements in peacetime.

Now, at “zero state” peacetime, SACEUR can say: we need this many deployable brigades, this much integrated air and missile defense, this many aircraft able to fly sorties from day one. If a country says, “We’re 5,000 troops short,” SACEUR can respond: “That’s unacceptable; we now have a real gap in the line.” That forces a culture shift in NATO headquarters and in capitals from symbolic promises to deliverable capabilities. People who know how to plan, procure, and generate real forces have to replace those who were comfortable with the old fiction.

On political cohesion, what’s remarkable is how the military side helped drag politics to reality. Since 2014, SACEURs understood that the 2010 Strategic Concept – calling Russia a “partner” after Crimea – was untenable. They began developing strategies and plans that treated Russia as an adversary in practice, presenting political leaders with a coherent military blueprint and forcing a conversation. Military consensus enabled the 2022 Strategic Concept’s clearer language on Russia and China.

The question now is: can we sustain that consensus through elections and coalition changes? Will governments of very different stripes still agree that Russia is an adversary and China a systemic challenge? If yes, NATO is fine. Consensus is NATO’s greatest strength; when you have it, it is rock solid. Diluting it with “consensus-minus” gimmicks would be a mistake.

On command authority, this is the oldest and hardest debate: when is SACEUR authorized to act, and how far can that go – especially pre-emptively? During the Cold War, there was pre-delegation of certain nuclear options – nuclear artillery, atomic demolition munitions along the inner-German border – because you could not wait for the North Atlantic Council (NAC) to convene under a Soviet attack.

Today, under Article 51 of the UN Charter, you are not required to absorb a first strike if you have clear indications one is imminent; Today, under Article 51 of the UN Charter, you are not required to absorb a first strike if you have clear indications one is imminent; you are allowed to defend yourself so that you don’t have to suffer a surprise attack. Are we willing to give SACEUR the authority to strike first? It’s a big question.

If he sees that we’re going to be attacked, does he have to convene the NAC? Does the Lithuanian ambassador have to run into the NAC and then run out and get on a WhatsApp chat and say, “Hey guys, what do you think? Should we say yes or no to war?” It’s a tough question.

And that push-and-pull between the political and military sides over who gets to decide what and when in terms of the authorization of force – especially in the face of a Russia that will consistently probe for weaknesses, and where we may not even know we’re at war by the time we’re under attack.

That’s another issue allies will have to confront directly. It’s the question long framed through the PPGs – the Political Planning Guidelines for nuclear use in the Cold War. This was the central controversy, repeatedly, from the 1962 Athènes decision through the 1966 creation of the Nuclear Planning Group, through the adoption of flexible response and subsequent debates. How far to delegate authority to the military command is a challenge for any democracy, but it is an especially acute one for NATO. And I don’t mean “problem” in a pejorative sense – it is simply a dilemma we must work through. It’s an inherent feature of how democracies function and how war is conducted in the 21st century.

In short, can we marshal forces and destroy a Russian attack before it kills our civilians?

Linas Kojala: Let’s turn to the grey zone. With so-called hybrid attacks, drones, sabotage, attacks on Russian opposition figures in Europe – are we at war with Russia? How should we name what’s happening?

William Alberque: Russia is at war with the West. Full stop. They have been for a long time.

In the 1990s, they were too busy collapsing internally to fight us effectively. The 2003 Iraq War and rising oil prices helped them re-fund their security apparatus and come back. Putin has always understood that institutions like the UN and OSCE can constrain Russia, so he has worked to hollow them out, and he has always believed Russia’s best chance of survival is to go on the offensive.

We in the West spent years pretending otherwise, downplaying the 2007 cyberattack on Estonia, rationalizing the war against Georgia in 2008, and looking away from the annexation of Ukrainian territory. Lithuania and others on the frontline saw it clearly; many in Washington and Western Europe chose not to. By 2022, the illusion shattered. Finland and Sweden dropping non-alignment was a symptom of something that had been boiling for years.

Our unwillingness to call a spade a spade and say Russia is at war with us – whether we say we are at war with them almost doesn’t matter for understanding the reality. We don’t have to agree that we’re at war. That’s okay. They’re still going to conduct war.

That’s why it’s always fascinating to me that we came up with the term “hybrid warfare.” I’ll never forget the day it came up in the NAC and the Allies were so proud of their about NATO’s definition of hybrid war and of efforts to counter it. You can imagine the Finnish Ambassador, hearing the Allies describing something Finland is all-too-familiar with: “Hybrid warfare.” It’s so great NATO has a word for it now. We’ve been facing this since our independence, but now you have a word for it. Hybrid war is just a euphemism for interstate conflict. The term lets us feel like we’re responding without fully acknowledging the severity of the conflict Russia is waging against us.

It was one of those humbling moments. Hybrid war is just a euphemism for interstate conflict. The term lets us feel like we’re responding without fully acknowledging the severity of the conflict Russia is waging against us. Whenever anyone uses the phrase “hybrid war” in a serious way, I think: no, you mean war. It’s war; it’s just not yet in the kinetic phase.

I think China is at war with us as well. They are more cautious about it, but they’ve been prepping the battlefield for decades and will continue to do so. And this isn’t about something Trump said; it’s the result of long-term decisions in Beijing, including during the Obama years with relations that were supposedly on their best behavior. The adversary gains a huge advantage when you have them to shape the battlefield.

Fantastic! It is no wonder that Finland insisted on hosting the Centre of Excellence on Hybrid Warfare. I wouldn’t trust us either…

Linas Kojala: Finally, what is your advice for countries like Lithuania? What should be prioritized in the coming years to stay safe and strengthen deterrence?

William Alberque: Ten years ago, when I was asked this in Vilnius, I said: stop treating prestige platforms as the main metric of seriousness. Invest in people.

Instead of buying one very expensive aircraft, use that money to hire 100–500 additional professionals in your Ministry of Defence, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, intelligence services. They are force multipliers.

Lithuania did a lot of that. You created mechanisms to manage careers, opened pathways between thinking and government, and sent volunteers in key NATO posts – in intelligence, in Russia analysis, in defence planning. NATO loves high-quality voluntary national contributions. It allowed Lithuania, with its size, to punch far above its weight.

That has to continue and be constantly reviewed. Every Lithuanian official in Brussels, at NATO, in the EU, working on trade or economics, should understand deterrence and national strategy. Nobody is exempt.

Lithuania should also open a structured dialogue with South Korea on conventional counterforce – on how to use conventional means to hold an adversary’s nuclear forces at risk. South Korea has developed concepts like Kill Chain, KAMD and KMPR, and layered offensive and defensive tools – thinking through how to defeat a nuclear-armed adversary from day zero.

This is not primarily about money; it is conceptual. Lithuania could become a hub – like the Forest Brothers story, but for 21st-century deterrence – showing how a small state, without its own nuclear weapons, can meaningfully contribute to blunting Russian and Belarusian nuclear threats through conventional capabilities, deep strike, targeting, and integration with NATO planning.

That points towards creating a Centre of Excellence on Deterrence and Conventional Counterforce, outside NATO HQ, so it can do hard thinking, war-gaming, and politically sensitive conceptual work without being trapped by consensus rules – much like the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats (Hybrid CoE) in Helsinki.

Talk to South Koreans and other friends and partners that live under constant threat and think seriously about pre-empting or neutralizing that threat. Not everything will translate one-to-one; your geography and adversary are different. But they have decades of experience we can learn from, just as they can benefit from European know-how and production capacity.

Lithuania should invest in language skills, cultural literacy, officer exchanges, and visible political outreach – yes, even “Korea days” in Vilnius if that’s what it takes to build durable ties. Start now. It will be hard and slow, but the payoff – in concepts, not just hardware – could be transformative.

Read the full publication here.