The AI-Assisted Strategic Own Goal in the Kill Chain

For eighty years, the Western alliance has anchored its strength in moral legitimacy, shared values, and the resulting credibility to shape international norms. NATO’s durability through the Cold War rested on more than nuclear deterrence alone: a shared conviction that the alliance represented a rules-based order worth sustaining, in which the use of force was bounded by law, constrained by democratic accountability, and subject to independent scrutiny. Dozens of nations aligned with a framework in which power was subject to restraint.That framework is now under pressure from several di