Along the lines of the bizarre twists that may cause a country to fight its own ally… may I remind you of a former ally of the US to whom was provided weapons and munitions in a fight against the Iranian Evil? The ally: Iraq…
Politics and diplomacy is a game people… we often don’t know what’s going to happen in the future. Often times people don’t think (or pretend not to think) of the contingencies because of wishful thinking. If a war happened it would be a crisis, plain and simple.
Oh, absolutely. Completely inconceivable. I mean, in the two hundred and twenty-six plus years the U.S. has been in existence, there’s never been an armed conflict between states, or groups of states. Well, um, except that once …
It’s much less likely anymore, as it’s pretty well established in people’s minds that the individual states are not soveriegn nations in a strong alliance (which was one of the contentions of the Confederacy). But there’s no question that the NATO member nations are sovereign, so there’s no question that such a situation is still possible …
Actually, that kind of gives an idea of what would happen. Both countries would be trying to sell their side of the brewing conflict to their NATO allies well before hostilities commenced. (These things don’t pop up out of nowhere, after all.) In most cases, there would be a consensus as to which nation was in the right, and the situation would end up being solved by diplomacy. (A country which might be willing to roll out the military resolution against its neighbor would probably be much less willing to do so with the threat of war against the whole NATO alliance.) If no consensus could be achieved, and diplomacy ended up failing, you’d end up with a war between not just the original two countries, but whole factions of NATO signatories. Some might remain neutral, and outside countries might be drawn in, but it would be pretty ugly …
Why does this whole thread bring to mind Sir Humphrey Appleby’s observation that the whole point of the British “independent nuclear deterant” was not the Russians, but the French … ?
Well, yes, but other than the Toledo War, it’s definitely never happened 
Going by history, England thrashed the Armada and Wellington sent Napoleon to the showers, but in the last dustup against the US, they seem to have come out on the losing side by a score of 1 pig to none.
I think nobody got the underlying joke yet… please note that Russia is attacking Turkey from behind and maybe Greece (grease?) would help?