By EDWARD LUCAS
August 22, 2014
Obama needs to hark back to Kennedy's "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech.
During the Cold War, West Berlin was militarily indefensible and symbolically vital. Had the Soviet Union wanted to, it could have defeated the token American, British and French garrisons in the city in a couple of days. West Berlin’s best and only defense was the Soviet belief – probably correct – that the result of aggression would be World War III.
It was for that reason President John F. Kennedy proclaimed “Ich bin ein Berliner” in 1963 after the Berlin Wall cut the city in two, threatening to throttle the Western enclave. The Soviet Union had to believe that the West still really cared about the grungy, grumpy former German capital, just as we had done during the Berlin airlift of 1948.
A half century later, there are new and urgent reasons to invoke JFK’s famous speech. On Friday, the escalating confrontation between the West and Russia lurched into more perilous territory when more than 100 Russian “aid” trucks crossed the Ukrainian border, headed toward the separatist-held enclave of Luhansk in eastern Ukraine. Using notably strong language, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said the “so-called humanitarian convoy” constituted “a blatant breach of Russia’s international commitments,” and he accused Russia of firing artillery at Ukrainian forces while orchestrating a dramatic arms buildup.
But a statement from Brussels, while welcome, will not suffice. It is long past time for Washington to deliver its own stern message to Moscow. When President Barack Obama visits Estonia next month, he should channel Kennedy, and proclaim something on the lines of “Eestlane olen ja eestlaseks jään” (“I am and will remain an Estonian” – the chorus of a popular patriotic song). Estonia, along with its neighbors Latvia and Lithuania, is the new West Berlin of Europe. Russia resents their very existence, seeing the former Soviet satrapies as a dangerous bastion of NATO and European Union influence. Even before Vladimir Putin came to power, Russia was a discomfiting neighbor. In the early 1990s it dragged its feet on withdrawing the occupation forces the Kremlin installed in the Baltic states in 1940. It has mounted a succession of economic sanctions, domestic political subversion and propaganda offensives. In 2009 Russian military exercises rehearsed the invasion and occupation of the Baltic states. For good measure, the drill included a dummy nuclear attack on Warsaw.
With a combined population of 7 million, no air force or heavy armor, the thin, flat strip of land that constitutes the three nations’ territory on the east coast of the Baltic Sea is a military nightmare from a defensive point of view – and a dream for attackers. There is no strategic depth: The Balts have their backs to the sea and no hinterland to retreat to. With a surprise attack – something military planners take surprisingly seriously – Russians could be on the coast within three hours, presenting the West with a fait accompli.
Would we really go to war to throw the Russians out of, say, a corridor across Lithuania? (Russia’s exclave of Kaliningrad is supplied by train and road from Belarus, across Lithuanian territory). Or supposing Russia whips up resentment in the ethnic-minority population in Estonia and Latvia, and then intervenes as it did in eastern Ukraine? What then?
NATO has long exhibited a dangerously ambiguous attitude toward the Baltic states’ defense. In the years after 2004, when they joined the alliance, any plans directed against Russia were seen as too provocative. One of the first acts of the Obama presidency, at the alliance’s Strasbourg-Kehl summit in April 2009, was to instruct NATO to draw up some limited reinforcement plans. These involve Poland deploying the best part of its army to Latvia and Lithuania in order to forestall any Russian attack, pending the arrival of other NATO forces in Poland.
But what seemed a prudent compromise in 2009 strikes many as insufficient now, following Russia’s annexation of Crimea and quasi-invasion of eastern Ukraine. Poland, in the event of a crisis, would prefer to have its troops at home. It cannot be fully confident that other NATO countries will have the political will and military muscle to play their part.
Weak defense sends a dangerous signal to the Kremlin. But defending the Baltic states in isolation is all but impossible. NATO could build a Maginot Line on the border of the Baltic states and they would still be vulnerable: Russia is too big, too strong and too close. The only hope is deterrence: to project the impression that an attack on the Baltic states or Poland would result in NATO retaliation against every other part of Russian territory. In other words, defending the Baltics is like defending West Berlin during the Cold War: You have to be willing to threaten a global confrontation, or else you give up and go home.
So the Baltic states – more than any other countries in Europe – rely on their friends. But why should their friends care? Why should NATO risk a potentially catastrophic shooting war with Russia for three small countries that are so hard to defend? One answer is that the alliance needs to draw a clear line and inform Putin that his military adventurism stops on NATO’s borders.
The Baltic states represent, moreover, not just NATO’s front line, but something else. All three are post-Cold War success stories—Estonia most of all—and models for the future.
The post-communist panorama makes bleak viewing these days. Once-stalwart Atlanticist countries such as Hungary now openly decry the values of the Western alliance. Viktor Orbán, the country’s nationalist conservative prime minister, says the “era of liberal democracies is over.” Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico likens the presence of NATO troops in his country to the Soviet-led invasion of 1968. Russian energy diplomacy has made great headway in the Western Balkans, signing up countries such as Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia for its South Stream pipeline, which would entrench its grip on the central Europe’s natural gas supplies.
But Estonia, amid the former Soviet bloc’s economic stagnation, political decay and geopolitical uncertainty, stands out as a beacon of hope and achievement. In just over two decades, it has become one of the most admired and successful countries in the world, to the point that Obama is making an unprecedented bilateral visit there next month. So what is Estonia’s secret? And what lessons does it hold for others?
Edward Lucas is a fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, a think-tank in Washington, DC and a senior editor at the Economist. A new edition of his 2008 book “The New Cold War” has just been published by Palgrave Macmillan.
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