This week, there is an unintended double-speak at the core of Washington's Russia policy and it is coming directly from the president himself. Donald Trump denies Vladimir Putin will attack a NATO territory in Oval Office on Thursday. In a phone call earlier, with Axios, he went further, saying that CIA Director John Ratcliffe's high-profile visit to Moscow two days earlier was nothing special, just a "catch up" with an "old counterpart" who is seen once a year. But nearly every media outlet that broke the story from the Wall Street Journal to CBS News to CNN, reported that Ratcliffe had come to Russia to try to convince Russian officials not to test a NATO member state, when American intelligence agencies were convinced the risk of just such a test was increasing.

The discrepancy between the president's public reassurance and his own agencies' private assessments is the true story here, and it's best not to gloss over. It was not a minor journey to which Ratcliffe needed to make his trip. This is the first time that a CIA director has traveled to Moscow for an unpublicized meeting since then, when Bill Burns traveled to the Russian capital in November 2021 to remind President Biden of his warnings to Putin about invading Ukraine. Three months later, the invasion took place. That's what makes the news of the week so resonant in European capitals: That's a senior American spy chief showing up in Moscow without a word of fanfare behind his back is a pretty good sign that the White House is feeling a serious pinch at the moment, regardless of what it says to the world after the event.

The Kremlin's answer only further complicates the situation. Contact was made "at the level of the special services," but not with Putin himself, the spokesman said, and added that the American press was reporting "scare stories. Russia's foreign intelligence chief, Sergei Naryshkin, said in an independent confirmation that he met Ratcliffe and that their meeting was a "routine encounter. In a way, both are a legitimate interpretation of Trump's version of events.

Neither offers an explanation for the fact that American reporting, based on officials' briefings on the substance, has recorded a specific warning related to a documented intelligence assessment: that Putin, thinking Washington is not interested in risking a second front against him while fighting a stalemated war in Ukraine, might believe that a limited, deniable attack against a NATO member country, such as sabotage, a cyberattack, a drone incursion, or a land grab camouflaged as an accident, would be less costly than continuing to grind through a deadlocked conflict in Ukraine. It's called the escalation logic and is a formula that analysts have for a long time.It's called the escalation logic, and is a formula that has been known for a long time.

All these things are not happening in isolation. In the last twelve months, Ukraine has been the site of a spate of drone and missile attacks, but the events took place not only within its borders — they have also spread well beyond, with incidents within NATO Poland and the Baltic states seen as a test of wills rather than mere accidents. You can tell from the alliance's actions the importance they give that pattern. All 32 members of the 2015 Hague summit agreed to increase defence spending to 5% of GDP by 2035 and for more than two decades military spending had been pegged at 2% of GDP, which was the previous bottom-line. The European allies and Canada combined invested about $485 billion in defense last year, an increase of almost 15 percent in 12 months. It isn't the spending pattern of governments that think the threat is gone, it's the spending pattern of governments that are playing cat and mouse games with exactly what Trump is publicly denying in his rhetoric.

Markets are interpreting the same message. Rheinmetall is now Europe's largest listed defence company with sales growth of 29% and operating profit growth of a third last year, and predicts 40-45% sales growth this year with order backlog hitting a new record of more than €63 billion and forecast to more than double by the end of the year. The surges in orders are similar from Saab, Leonardo and Hensoldt. The world's investors are not buying a peace of any duration they are buying this continent, which is going to keep arming for years, no matter what the Oval Office says on any given afternoon. The European official in Brussels, speaking on the condition of anonymity, was more placating, suggesting that for now there was no evidence of anyone preparing for an attack on NATO territory, but that doesn't rule out the alliance's own frantic rearmament calculations.

There is a pretty easy reason why Trump continues to minimize all this. He's been promoting himself as a deal-maker capable of handling Putin himself for months, and the idea of his own spy chief having to scramble up to Moscow to give him a warning undermines this image. When the warning didn't actually occur or when it's boiled down to old friends just chatting it up, it's a smokescreen to shield the narrative he wants to tell about his ties with the Kremlin even if it leaves his own intelligence community's judgment hanging limply in the air. It is still a real question whether or not Putin is considering probing into NATO territory. The fact that people who have a job to live do are taking that risk seriously, and the money that's flowing into Europe's arsenals says all that much more, is never in doubt.