A group of foreign policy experts recently ran a war game to simulate a potential second Trump presidency, and Business Insider reports that the result was a "collapse" in the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance (NATO).
Finley Grimble, a British foreign policy expert who designed and ran the game, said the results show how Trump could gradually wreck NATO without formally abandoning 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 game started with Trump abandoning Ukraine after failing to negotiate a settlement with Russia to end the war.
After this, Trump would massively reduce American participation in NATO and would remove U.S. troops out of Europe en masse.
From there, the game projected that "the Trump administration also institutes a new policy called 'dormancy'" that "includes a variety of go-slow tactics, such as less US participation in NATO exercises" and also "a particularly damaging move... to bar the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) — the second-highest military position in NATO, and always a US officer — from acting without prior consultation with Washington."
America's slow-motion abandonment of NATO also causes other key players in the alliance to rethink their commitment.
"If I'm Italy, for example, I'm certainly guaranteeing the security of Estonia," Grimble said. "But I'm not really expecting to have to play such a prominent and crucial role in this."
In the end, Ukraine is forced to sign a peace treaty that installs a pro-Kremlin puppet government while also formally ceding the eastern half of the country to Russia.
The fear in Europe then becomes that Russian President Vladimir Putin could turn his eye to the Baltic states that are NATO members.