NATO’s Shift to Shadow War: No Choice, No Rules

NATO Doubles Down on Unconventional Warfare on Three Fronts — Russia, Iran, and South Caucasus

America’s wars against Russia and Iran epitomise the West’s now established doctrine of unconventional warfare — economic strangulation, sabotage campaigns, assassinations, and outsourced attrition by proxy forces.

Against Russia, it bleeds Moscow via a NATO-armed proxy war in Ukraine — sidestepping belligerent status whilst feigning mediator. Against Iran, it subcontracts aggression to Israel and internal proxies, escalating to direct air strikes only when proxies falter. Two fronts, the same warfare doctrine.

Both conflicts leverage NATO member states and regional ‘partners’ to further unconventional warfare — arming, training and supporting client states (Israel against Iran; Ukraine against Russia) whilst deploying deniable proxies for infrastructure sabotage and leadership assassinations; systematically pursuing economic and institutional collapse.

This approach stems from necessity — hyper-financialisation and rentier structures have gutted the West’s industrial base, rendering prolonged conventional warfare against near-peer rivals next to impossible.

Thus, it defaults to unconventional warfare without limits – assassinations, infrastructure sabotage, proxy combat – shielded by a nuclear umbrella. Rules of war constrain adversaries alone; the hegemon, its allies, and proxies ignore them.

When unconventional warfare falters, it risks conventional warfare as a last resort, deploying its gold-plated, fragile, high-maintenance weapon platforms masquerading as decisive force.

But are Russia and China — fortified against conventional and nuclear threats — prepared for the West’s institutionalised unfaith? Where "hands extended, blades concealed" are now standard currency; Iran stands as a wake-up call: Washington is not just agreement-incapable — it is profanely vowless.

Whilst Washington has signalled it will finally curtail supplying key armaments to Kyiv, this is more likely because its own weapons stocks are running low, there is simply not the manufacturing capacity to produce weapons at scale, and the priority is supplying Israel.

Yet just as this is announced we learn the sabotage of vessels linked to Russia is becoming a campaign — at least five oil tankers have been damaged by magnetic limpet mines, soon after calling at Russian ports in what can only be a state-backed sabotage campaign. London is suspected, as ever, of being behind the sabotage.

Another front in the West’s unconventional warfare is the South Caucasus, ramping up despite the failure to subordinate Georgia. Long-targeted nations Armenia and Azerbaijan – Russia and Iran’s historic buffer against Turkish expansion – now face intensified efforts to bring them under NATO’s sphere of influence at the cost of extinguishing Armenian sovereignty. The objectives — secure Caspian Sea access, establish a Western-controlled energy corridor, contain Russia and Iran, and fracture Eurasian integration.

Azerbaijan, historically a core part of Iran’s northwestern province, was severed after the Russo-Persian wars. Its very name — deliberately imposed in 1918 by Ottoman Turkey and European powers — constituted toponymic warfare, appropriating "Azerbaijan," identical to Iran’s northwestern administrative region, to plant the seed of separatism.

An act of containment laid over a century ago — designed to sabotage the inevitable ascendancy of the region’s historical preeminent power — was formalised by Soviet dissolution in 1991, institutionalising a geopolitical tripwire against Iran.

That imperial seed now bears poisoned fruit.

As journalist Alison Tahmizian notes, Azerbaijan now brands Armenia "Western Azerbaijan," and demands a puppet religious authority for Armenians — “a direct assault on the Armenian Apostolic Church, founded in 301 AD by St. Gregory the Illuminator”.

This institution safeguards unbroken apostolic succession and national identity for all Armenians. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan — accused of treason for surrendering Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) to Azerbaijan — ”acts less like a national leader and more like a manager for foreign interests,’ as political analyst Kevork Almassian precisely remarks. Pashinyan’s push for a state-appointed Catholicos of the Apostolic Church — under anti-corruption and upholding democracy pretexts — risks schism.

The goal? Shatter Armenia’s last pillar of independence.

Make no mistake: beneath the South Caucasus’ tortured history — where Russian, Persian, and Ottoman ambitions clashed for centuries — a familiar constant emerges — energy and transport corridors.

Despite buried grievances, colliding interests, and histories that won’t sleep, Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran face a unified threat — NATO’s unconventional war to seize control of Caspian energy and transport corridors to Europe. The Great Game never ceased; today’s stakes are pipelines — and by extension, Europe’s gas supply.

NATO’s strategic prize remains the Zangezur Corridor — a proposed Turkish-Azeri-controlled land bridge bisecting Armenia’s Syunik province, with its periphery already occupied by Azerbaijan.

This corridor would — by design — sever Russia’s North-South Transport Corridor, nullify Iran’s critical Aras Corridor (a linchpin of China’s Belt and Road Initiative), and neuter Armenian sovereignty by granting a NATO member (Turkey) Caspian access.

In effect, it reduces Armenia to a landlocked Bantustan — an enforced transit zone, devoid of agency, much as Alsace‑Lorraine became a pawn between Paris and Berlin.

Allowing the West to prioritise the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) crude oil pipeline and the Southern Gas Corridor (SGC) natural gas pipelines — bypassing Russia and Iran — to monopolise Caspian energy flows to Europe.

Perhaps more contemporarily important is Azerbaijan’s construction of three airbases in occupied Armenian territory bordering Iran — with Israel planning to develop ‘smart cities’ nearby — marking the country’s transformation into a forward operating base for Israeli-NATO operations against Iran.

No surprise then, Azerbaijan stands accused of facilitating Israeli stand-off strikes against Iran — permitting overflight en route to launch zones. Suspicion deepened when an Israeli jet’s external fuel tank washed ashore near Ramsar on Iran’s Caspian coast — suggesting some strikes originated from the Caspian’s disputed airspace, where unresolved demarcation under the 2018 Convention would provide operational cover for such attacks. The extensive use of air-launched missiles, carefully avoiding sovereign boundaries, highlights how this legal grey zone could be exploited.

US, UK, and Israeli investment, combined with Turkey’s security cooperation, has turned Azerbaijan into a geopolitical dagger aimed at Russia and Iran’s underbelly — a landlocked equivalent of Israel, Washington’s ‘unsinkable aircraft carrier’ in the Middle East, now replicated in the South Caucasus.

The same old playbook is being used — exploit Azeri minorities in Iran and Iraq to incite unrest, amplify territorial revanchism, and Balkanise the region. Baku’s repression of Shīʿī loyal to Iran’s Khomeini or Iraq’s Sistani — despite its own Shīʿī majority — exposes its role as a Western client state.

That the UK has appointed its first permanent defence attaché to Azerbaijan since the Cold War signals the direction of travel the region is heading.

As Ukraine’s systematic dismantling accelerates toward inevitable defeat, Russia has won the kinetic war, won the financial war, and won the diplomatic war. Yet, as Iran has recently learned, unconventional tactics can breach even a hardened state’s inner citadel — sabotage, proxy assassinations, and drones launched from within its borders.

Like the Pyrrhic triumph at Kulikovo, a decisive victory may conceal fatal vulnerability. Has Russia mobilised for yesterday’s war at the expense of tomorrow’s? Oreshnik missiles, SU‑57s, and S‑500s are designed to knock-out peer threats — but they are doctrinal artefacts when the battlefield is hidden in plain sight: a Trojan Horse parked in the backyard, drones smuggled in civilian trucks, poised to shatter airfields and refineries. In this new age, the mightiest fortress falls not to siege engines, but to shadows slipping through its gates — unseen, unheralded, and apocalyptic in consequence.

If Moscow contends with shadows at the gate, Tehran woke to the blade pressed against its throat.

That Iran inflicted heavy damage on Israel in the twelve-day war is now firm consensus among objective observers — its full scale still obscured by West Jerusalem’s strict censorship. Israel launched its offensive seeking a knockout blow within forty-eight hours — assassinations, sabotage, proxy strikes — and it failed.

When Iran’s ranks, sundered by that opening onslaught, retaliated by nightfall on Day One, they exposed a fatal asymmetry: Tehran configured for attrition; West Jerusalem for decisive strikes. By Week Two, Israel’s military-industrial spine was being smote upon the anvil — dwindling interceptor stocks leaving strategic assets defenceless — and Washington, alarmed at Israel’s near-certain ruin and fearful of the economic fallout as Iran prepared to close the Strait of Hormuz, solicited a ceasefire. Yet Iran’s prevailment masked a near‑rout  —  its sovereignty hanging by a thread, nearly extinguished by Israel’s unconventional warfare in those opening hours.

With conventional warfighting capacity outpaced by peer adversaries and no industrial base for sustained conflict, the turn to unconventional warfare is not a preference — it is a structural imperative for the United States and NATO.

Unconventional warfare is neither insurgency nor improvisation. It is brutally efficient, cost-effective, and engineered to bypass the very platforms in which modern militaries have invested most.

Targeted assassinations, sleeper cells, and deniable proxy operations form its architecture: consumer electronics repurposed into precision explosives, drones launched domestically from unmarked civilian vehicles; senior officials, scholars, and journalists assassinated; civilian infrastructure systematically dismantled.

Not shock and awe, but bleed and vanish.

Were we naive to believe war has rules? The very notion is an oxymoron — a relic of treaties signed in peacetime and broken in despair.

For those spending our national wealth on tanks, fleets, and fighters — they are funding monuments, not weapons, for a battlefield that no longer exists.

As if Ypres taught nothing — and the Maginot Line still held.