Russia recently placed Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas on a “wanted” list, accusing her of “crimes” that include the destruction of Soviet-era monuments in memory of Soviet soldiers in Estonia — a significant escalation in Putin’s pressure campaign in Eastern Europe. In the Estonian parliamentary system, Kallas is the head of the government, the person empowered to lead the country (the president is merely a ceremonial figurehead). Targeting her as a “criminal” represents a major step for several reasons, she not only has a senior governmental position, but she is also well-connected throughout the EU and NATO communities, well-spoken in English, French, and Russian, and widely identified as one of Europe’s most dedicated and articulate supporters of the Ukrainian cause. (READ MORE: Alexei Navalny’s Death Is Not the Most Outrageous Demise Today)
When Kallas speaks — and she has spoken with great frequency and passion regarding the threat from Putin’s Russia — her voice reaches well beyond what one might expect from the leader of a country roughly the size of Vermont or New Hampshire. One might mock the “crimes” she is accused of or dismiss them as simply yet another example of random bluster from Putin, but this would be a grievous error. Viewing what happens to Putin’s enemies — for example, the death of Alexei Navalny — one hopes that Prime Minister Kallas has a very good security detail.
Regardless of the personal threat to Kallas, this Russian threat, and similar ones aimed at officials in Latvia and Lithuania, signal that the ground is being prepared for a Russian attack on the Baltic states. As we’ve seen before in Ukraine and elsewhere, an attempt to criminalize a country’s leaders and institutions represents the preparatory stage for, first, escalating subversion and, eventually, an outright attack.
Moving In on the Baltic States
When might this attack take place? A recent and widely publicized report from Estonia’s foreign intelligence service suggests that the Russian military threat is already materializing. How soon and to what extent remains, in large part, a function of what Russia will be able to set aside while continuing its war with Ukraine, but the report posits the emergence of a significant threat within the next decade and, were Ukraine to collapse, the threat could come much sooner — perhaps in as little as three years, timed to take advantage of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, frequently mooted for 2027. It’s not for nothing that tiny Estonia, in addition to ramping up its own military expenditures and training posture, has also diverted scarce weaponry to Ukraine, which they believe is fighting NATO’s fight. Like the other “frontline” NATO members, its defense spending is above the much-discussed 2 percent of GDP target.
Unfortunately, an attack on Estonia might not begin with Russian tanks rolling across the Narva bridge. More likely there would be a first phase — a “gray zone” that combined cyber attacks and terrorist actions conducted by the proverbial “little green men.” After the debacle of its march on Moscow, the Wagner group was allowed to relocate to bases in Belarus, strategically placing it near Poland and the Baltic states. Moreover, each of the Baltic states has a substantial minority Russian population, the legacy of Stalin-era forcible relocations and outright colonization. Subversion and destabilization, after all, have become the coinage of Russia’s way of war.
A further component might be called “de-legitimization.” While Putin assured Tucker Carlson that he had no interest in attacking the Baltic states or Poland, Prime Minister Kallas was being threatened by the Russian state. Repeatedly, and in all three Baltic states, the Russian government has promoted a narrative in which the Russian minorities are suffering various forms of mistreatment. The template being used is precisely the same as the one used in Ukraine: Undermine the legitimacy of the government, attack the culture as “racist,” “Nazi,” or simply “corrupt,” and then invent provocations that might justify the invocation of Joe Biden’s infamous “minor incursion.” (READ MORE: Putin Loves Biden)
The salient difference between Estonia (and its equally vulnerable Baltic neighbors, Latvia, and Lithuania) and Ukraine is that, unlike Ukraine, it is a NATO member, and, under Article 5, an attack on it constitutes an attack on all NATO members, including the United States. Unfortunately, this means less than we might hope. Contrary to widespread belief, even among foreign policy mavens, Article 5 does not obligate other members to respond militarily in the event one member is attacked. Instead, the relevant language reads: “The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them … shall be considered an attack against them all and … each of them … will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking … such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force.”
Article 5 Doesn’t Protect the Baltic States
This qualifying language, so often ignored, was included in the original NATO treaty at the insistence of the U.S., contrary to the wishes of many of the original European signatories. At the height of the Cold War, what guaranteed a U.S. military response was not treaty language but the presence of the U.S. Seventh Army astride Germany’s Fulda Gap, squarely in the path of a likely Soviet attack. Dead American soldiers assured a U.S. military response, not the language of Article 5.
Significantly, the only time that Article 5 has called forth a response came following the 9/11 attacks. When the U.S. was attacked, virtually every NATO country came to our assistance by sending troops to Afghanistan, some at considerable sacrifice. Estonia, for example, placed no restrictions on the troops it deployed, which led to their operating in conjunction with the British in the hellhole that was Helmand province. Nine Estonian soldiers were killed. For most Americans, this sounds trivial. But when considering them as a percentage of a country’s population, viewed in terms of the numbers of friends and families directly affected, their casualties were equivalent to some 2200 Americans — not notably less than the number of American soldiers killed in Afghanistan. (READ MORE: Ukraine and Russia Battle for Avdiivka)
Did this earn them the “right” to our protection? Unfortunately, talk of “rights” rarely survives first contact with the dictates of realpolitik. One could argue, after all, that we assumed a measure of moral responsibility for Ukraine in 1994 when Bill Clinton pressured them to surrender what was then the third-largest nuclear arsenal in the world, offering in return only contemptibly nebulous security assurances.
Put very simply, there’s nothing in writing that obligates the U.S. to a military response in the event of a Russian attack on Estonia, its Baltic neighbors, or indeed any of the other NATO “frontline” states. Few American voters understand how these states came to our assistance after 9/11, or that, unlike some larger NATO states, these countries now devote much more than the oft-ballyhooed 2 percent in defense expenditure. Few American voters seem to care.
America First Doesn’t Equal Isolationism
They might care more if they understood that it’s in our interest to stand up for countries that have chosen to stand with us, not out of some emotional tie or obligation, but rather to assure a world aligned with our most practical political, social, and economic interests. A “realistic” foreign policy takes its cue from Lord Palmerston’s famous dictum, that nations have neither eternal allies, nor perpetual enemies, but rather “interests that are eternal and perpetual.” What are our eternal and perpetual interests?
Above all, our interests include our right to live unmolested here at home, within our borders, and our right to interact freely around the world, with other similarly independent and like-minded nations. It’s worth noting that just such a vision was articulated by President Donald Trump in his (now sadly ignored) major foreign policy speeches in Saudi Arabia and Poland in 2017 and his speeches before the United Nations in 2019 and 2020. But this is a vision going back to Thomas Jefferson’s campaign to clean up the Barbary pirates and James Monroe’s promulgation of the Monroe Doctrine.
Our world is much larger than that of Jefferson or Monroe, but the challenge remains the same. “America First” means putting our interests first, but it cannot mean recourse to the shopworn concept of “isolationism.” Instead, “America First” should mean a clear-headed insistence on pursuing the genuine interests of the American people in both our domestic and foreign policies. It rejects the magical thinking that allows China a free pass on environmental regulation while crippling our economy in pursuit of arbitrary and wrong-headed climate agendas. It rejects promoting an international LGBTQ agenda as a feature of our foreign policy, and, for similar reasons, it rejects presenting Vladimir Putin as an avatar of family values while giving him a free pass to pursue the literal destruction of families in Ukraine.
Why should we care about the rising threat to a little country like Estonia? Or, why should we care about the independence of Taiwan or other countries threatened by Russia, China, or Iran? The answers may vary in detail, but the fundamentals remain the same. These hostile countries are united by a desire to reshape the world in their favor by reducing the U.S. to a vulnerable and marginal player — they’ve been quite explicit in their desire to take us down, not just in their respective regions, but globally.
We should care because the world today is much too dangerous to go it alone. A century ago we could speak of the “Two-Ocean Navy” as a perfect guarantor of our security. But no longer. We once scaled our military to counter two adversaries, today we can scarcely afford to keep up with one. We often talk about how our actions affect the minds of our potential adversaries, and that is important. But it’s also worth reminding ourselves that our friends and potential friends are also watching.
Friends, true friends, are worth having. As our mothers once taught us, the only way to have a friend is to be a friend. There’s a schoolyard logic to all of this. We are — and I suspect we would like to be — the big kid that all the little kids look up to. But if we don’t stand up to bullies on their behalf the whole schoolyard will turn against us. We can bemoan the rise of the Chinese threat, or complain about the military deficiencies of the larger NATO countries, but China’s rise and the hollowing out of NATO came at a time when we were eagerly spending our so-called “peace dividend” back in the 1990s under Bill Clinton. If NATO countries decided at the time to draw down their military capabilities, they were in many cases simply following our lead.
No one wants a war with China, Russia, or Iran, not in defense of Taiwan, Israel, or even little Estonia. But, at this critical juncture in our history, ensuring peace means standing up, strongly, for ourselves and our friends. For too long, we’ve sent a message of weakness, of a willingness to allow ourselves to be pushed around, a message of “calibrated” half-measures as a response when our service members are killed. As I argued in a previous American Spectator article, we refuse to defend our border, even against an obvious terrorist threat. Reversing this message of weakness means more than acquiring hypersonic missiles or AI-guided drones. Put very crudely, our message to the world should be “mess with the U.S. and you will regret it.”
In 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain dismissed Hitler’s threat to Czechoslovakia as a “quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing.” He assured the world that, having tossed the Czechs under an armored steamroller, he’d guaranteed “peace for our time.” Winston Churchill was having none of it, saying of Chamberlain, “[y]ou were given a choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor and you will have war.” We now know who saw things more clearly.
Sometimes you have to stand strong for peace. Prime Minister Kaja Kallas knows this — even as she’s directly threatened by Putin. We need similar courage in our leaders. Would that we might find it.
James H. McGee retired in 2018 after nearly four decades as a national security and counter-terrorism professional, working primarily in the nuclear security field. Since retiring, he’s begun a second career as a thriller writer. His 2022 novel, Letter of Reprisal, tells the tale of a desperate mission to destroy a Chinese bioweapon facility hidden in the heart of the central African conflict region. You can find it on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback editions, and on Kindle Unlimited.