I remember precisely where I was and approximately what I was doing on November 24, 2015, when a Turkish F-16 shot down a Russian Su-24 on Turkey’s border with Syria.

I was sitting on a chocolate-colored loveseat, hunched over a MacBook in my Yonkers condo. That’s the “where.” And again, I’m absolutely sure of that part.

As to the “what,” I’m pretty sure of it too: I was “consulting” and drinking. Or, to get the order right, drinking and “consulting.” I can’t remember exactly what inebriant kept me company that day, though. Hence the “approximately.”

In a little under three weeks, I was moving to the island paradise I’d call home for eight solitary years. I’d long since stopped going into the city other than for a farewell dinner with the Eastern European pinging away at my Google chats that day.

I developed a fondness for Stew Leonard’s in my final months in New York. I can’t speak for the other locations, but the one in Yonkers is a veritable amusement park of comestible delights. Shopping there with the drunken munchies was — and I say this sincerely even as I chuckle at the absurdity of it — one of the most enjoyable experiences of my entire life.

I typically bought beer while I was at Stew Leonard’s, not because I wanted beer (I didn’t), but rather because if you’re the kind of drinker I was in those days, you don’t just walk by alcohol and not buy any. Beer always ended up in my Stew Leonard’s cart, and to the extent it was possible for someone well on his way to drinking two fifths of liquor every, single day to get drunk on beer, I was drunk on beer fairly often in those final New York weeks.

So, it’s entirely possible I was beer-drunk while advising an excitable Eastern European “journalist” (and I use that term very loosely) on how best to propagandize a NATO member shooting down a Russian fighter jet with an air-to-air missile.

If I was — beer-drunk instead of liquor-drunk — my advice would’ve been commensurately watered down and graceless, but either way, millions of netizens were subjected that day to my drunken analysis published second-hand by the son of an alleged apparatchik on a portal with a readership on par with that of Reuters.

I know what most of you are thinking. You’re thinking: Jesus Christ, that’s terrifying! Scores of clueless Westerners across the English-speaking web were subjected that day not just to the drunken ramblings of a rogue political scientist lost in a New York nightmare, but in fact to those ramblings run through a Combloc filter at a potentially existential moment for Russo-NATO relations. “Russian vodka, poisoned by Chernobyl!” as Frank Cross might put it.

What can I say? Sorry about that. If I had it to do over, I’d… you know what? Who am I kidding? That episode’s no different from any other episode in my life: If I had it to do over, I’d almost surely do it again. But I’d charge more for my services. A lot more. (That check would need to have seven figures and two commas, not six and one, my friend. And don’t act like you don’t have it.)

I bring this up for what I assume are obvious reasons: Vladimir Putin’s getting more and more brazen about testing NATO’s willingness to shoot down Russian aircraft encroaching on allied airspace.

Earlier this month, Polish and Dutch fighter jets downed a handful of Russian drones in a high-profile episode that prompted quite a bit of hand-wringing in geopolitical circles. Poland invoked Article 4.

I played that down because, as I wrote in “Reckless Mischief,” it’s not uncommon for Russian aircraft to kiss NATO airspace, nor is it rare for Russian drones to fly over Poland.

That said, a subsequent incursion which found a trio of Russian fighters (so, not drones) hanging out in Estonia’s airspace for more than 10 minutes was a little too flagrant for comfort, and it’s being treated as such. On Thursday, Bloomberg recounted a meeting in Moscow where diplomats from the UK, France and Germany told Russian officials that NATO’s had enough and may shoot down Russian planes which “accidentally” veer into alliance skies.

The report came two days after Donald Trump appeared to endorse a more aggressive approach to additional provocations, even as he stopped short of an unequivocal commitment to backstop NATO in a hypothetical scenario where alliance fighters recreate November 24, 2015.

Trump’s surprising endorsement (half-hearted or not) of NATO’s right to engage manned Russian aircraft was part of a broader about-face. On Tuesday, Trump openly suggested Ukraine might be able to reclaim all territory lost to Putin, a dizzying reversal for a man who’s repeatedly insisted Kyiv should cede the same territory in exchange for a ceasefire.

Trump met with Volodymyr Zelensky this week in New York where he (Trump) delivered a General Assembly speech that would’ve made Gaddafi proud were the “good” Colonel alive to witness it. In a September 23 TruthSocial post that alternated between reasoned analysis and cartoonish bluster, Trump called the Russian military a “paper tiger.” “Russia has been fighting aimlessly for three and a half years a war that should have taken a real military power less than a week to win,” he said.

I don’t say this often, but Trump’s exactly right. Of course, he’s known that — that Russia’s a paper tiger — all along. The reason he’s saying it publicly now isn’t because he only recently came to “fully understand the situation,” as he claimed in the same social media post, but rather because Putin embarrassed him by continuing to attack Ukraine following the summit in Alaska.

What exactly would happen in the event NATO does shoot down a Russian fighter jet at some point in the near future? I can only answer that question under the assumption that Trump hasn’t (and wouldn’t) communicate to Moscow that the US isn’t prepared to stand by its Article 5 commitment. If the US doesn’t intend to honor the mutual defense clause, then all bets are off.

With that caveat — i.e., assuming the US backstop still holds — the answer’s “not a damn thing.” Not a damn thing would happen in the event NATO fighters engaged and downed Russian warplanes encroaching on allied airspace, other than a lot of tough talk, lies and propagandizing. The war Russia would go to in such a scenario is an information war — the only sort of war they can win with NATO.

I can say that with confidence because in the hours and days after Turkey shot down a Russian fighter jet, I helped craft a lot of such tough talk, lies and propaganda, most of it aimed at smearing Ankara and Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

To be clear: I didn’t do so at the direct behest of the Russian government, or certainly not that I was aware of. Rather, as a trained political scientist with a deep understanding of Cold War-era propaganda tactics and an intuition for how those tactics could be amplified multiplicatively in the social media age, I knew just what to do if the goal was to cast doubt on the Turkish narrative.

How did I know that was the goal? Well, I didn’t to be honest. No one told me that. But it certainly felt, to me, like my consulting job at the time called for a damage control campaign which turned a fiasco into a propaganda coup in lieu of a military confrontation I knew was unwinnable for Moscow, and therefore wasn’t on the cards.

The reason Russian fighters were buzzing around Turkey’s borders at the time was of course Putin’s military intervention in Syria, where The Kremlin was in the process of helping Bashar al-Assad, the Quds and Hezbollah beat back the Sunni extremist rebellion which finally succeeded in toppling the regime almost a decade later.

As it turned out, there was a semi-plausible narrative linking Erdogan’s family to oil commandeered by ISIS when the group still controlled vast swathes of territory in Iraq and Syria. And, so, in addition to all manner of lies and half-truths about what actually happened in the moments before Turkish jets engaged the ill-fated Russian warplane, I helped cook up a side story which painted Ankara as a ready buyer of oil stolen by ISIS. It was a largely unverifiable claim, but one I knew could be defended, at least circumstantially, because Erdogan backed the Sunni opposition in Syria.

At no point during the ensuing two weeks was I compelled to consider the notion that Russia intended to follow-through on the countless veiled (and not-so-veiled) threats of a military response against Turkey. The Kremlin trafficked in all manner of such threats at the time, and exactly none of them were any semblance of credible or serious.

Instead, Moscow worked through its global propaganda network to paint Turkey with the ISIS brush and on December 2, 2015, the Russian Defense Ministry held a press conference formally accusing Erdogan of aiding and abetting ISIS oil smugglers. The same accusations I leveled against Ankara two weeks previous.

So, if it comes to pass that NATO shoots down a Russian jet or two, don’t fret: It won’t be the end of the world, nor will it be the beginning of World War III. All it’ll be is the beginning of a new propaganda war and in that theater, at least, The Kremlin’s no paper tiger. In the disinformation arena, Russia’s the most effective state actor on the planet — as God, liquor, beer and Stew Leonard’s seven-layer dip as my witness.