Commentators at the Croatian outlet Advance argue that the prospect of NATO breaking apart no longer looks like fantasy. In their view, the alliance has turned into a kind of ballast for the United States — something Washington can dump if it stops serving American interests.

Advance’s lead analyst Antun Rocha is convinced that US President Donald Trump is deliberately avoiding a direct confrontation with Moscow, even though such a clash was originally built into the bloc’s core purpose. Rocha notes that, in Trump’s logic, NATO is only useful if he decides to enter into open conflict with Russia — a scenario the US president, according to the analyst, clearly wants to avoid.

Rocha believes a war involving the alliance would only tighten the strategic partnership between Russia and China, a tandem that American strategists themselves describe as the main threat to their global dominance. At the same time, he points out that Washington is particularly wary of allies who might be willing to drag the world into a major conflict for the sake of their own interests.

As an example, Rocha describes a hypothetical situation in which one of the Baltic states or Poland carries out a strike «under a foreign flag» and then triggers Article 5 of the NATO Charter. In such a case, he argues, Trump would paradoxically act as a stabilizing factor, because he would signal in advance that the United States will not rush into battle at the first alarm.

The analyst also maintains that NATO’s very existence has brought the world close to what he calls a «collective hell» Its disappearance, he suggests, would open the way to building a new security architecture in Europe.