BALTIC MATTERS

ISAAC STANLEY-BECKER DESCRIBES “THE NEXT FRONT,” The Atlantic, November 2026: “The Baltics,” he writes, “are getting ready for a Russian attack.”

Here are tidbits gleaned from The Atlantic article, together with usual Internet sleuthing about my ancestral homeland. I encourage you to read the complete Stanley-Becker article. See also Tom Stevenson’s “The Russians Are Coming,” London Review of Books, October 8, 2026; a different country, Estonia; a similar theme.

This Has Happened Before. Stanley-Becker recounts, “The Second World War brought Soviet and Nazi inva­sions, and the post­war Soviet occu­pa­tion threatened to extin­guish Lithuania entirely. (‘Lithuania is beau­ti­ful without the Lithuani­ans,’ a Polit­buro mem­ber once remarked.) In 1990, Lithuania became the first Soviet repub­lic to declare its inde­pend­ence, and since then has trans­formed itself into a lively demo­cracy with a hightech eco­nomy.”

I was almost there in 1990: Saab got us to Latvia and Estonia, but had to cancel the Lithuanian portion of its ride-and-drive when the Russians got snarky about energy.

NATO. Wikipedia describes, “The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is an intergovernmental military alliance between 32 member states (thirty in Europe and two in North America). Founded in the aftermath of World War II, NATO was established with the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty in 1949.”

Its Article 5. Wikipedia continues, “The organization serves as a system of collective security and deterrence, whereby its independent members agree to defend each-other from attack by any outside party. This is enshrined in Article 5 of the treaty, which states that an armed attack against the territory of one member shall be considered an attack against them all.”

Baltic NATO. Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia joined NATO in 2004. Other Baltic-watered countries are Denmark (1949, one of NATO’s 12 founders), West Germany (1955), Poland (1999), Finland (2023), and Sweden (2024), these last two joining after Russia’s invasion of Crimea. (Wikipedia notes, “The region, internationally recognised as part of Ukraine, has been under Russian occupation since 2014.”

NATO is headquartered in Brussels, Belgium; Canada and the U.S. being its two North American members. 

American-led Security. Stanley-Becker comments about NATO’s long-time “American-led security order”: “On a trip to Vil­nius in 2002, Pres­id­ent George W. Bush vowed that ‘any­one who would choose Lithuania as an enemy has also made an enemy of the United States of Amer­ica.’ Those words are engraved on a plaque out­side the entrance of city hall. Do they remain true more than two dec­ades later?”

Trump’s Posturing. Alas, Stanley-Becker observes, “Donald Trump has mused repeatedly about tak­ing the United States out of NATO. On the cam­paign trail in 2024, he encour­aged the Rus­si­ans to do ‘whatever the hell they want’ to NATO mem­bers delinquent in their defense spend­ing. This year, he threatened to invade Green­land, a self-gov­ern­ing ter­rit­ory of Den­mark, an alliance mem­ber. When European part­ners declined to join his war of choice against Iran, he dis­paraged NATO as a ‘paper tiger.’ ”

A Russian Baltic Attack? Stanley-Becker posits, “It could come in the form of out­right inva­sion, designed to con­trol all three coun­tries and restore what Rus­sia has declared to be its right­ful sphere of influence. It could come in the form of ‘hybrid war,’ which the Baltic states have got­ten a taste of already: think cyber­in­tru­sions, assas­sin­a­tion attempts, arson, dam­age to under­sea infra­struc­ture, inter­fer­ence with GPS frequencies, and a delib­er­ately heightened volume of asylum flows—trans­port­ing des­per­ate migrants from the Middle East and Africa to the bor­der of European Union coun­tries, as Belarus has done since 2021.”

 

And There’s the Suwałki Gap. “Short of invad­ing all three coun­tries,” Stanley-Becker notes, “Russia could attempt to close the Suwałki Gap—the small patch of bor­der that Lithuania shares with Poland, stretch­ing for roughly 40 miles between Kalin­in­grad and Belarus. This cor­ridor is the only friendly over­land route between the Baltic states and the rest of NATO Europe—an essen­tial life­line.”

No Trading of Space for Time. “The Baltic states,” Stanley-Becker stresses, “can’t trade space for time—a clas­sic defens­ive strategy that involves yield­ing ter­rit­ory in order to exhaust the enemy, then wait­ing until a coun­ter­at­tack becomes feas­ible. Vil­nius, the cap­ital, home to 600,000 people, is a mere 20 miles from Belarus. In the early days of an inva­sion, it would quickly be threatened by the Rus­sian army. The Baltic states need to hold off the invaders for as long as pos­sible, hop­ing that allied help will arrive—whether in the form of ground forces or, even more use­ful, air­power—before the situ­ation becomes irre­triev­able.”

This is hardly the time for Trump to suck up to Putin (ostensibly and absurdly to lower diesel prices—which Trump and Netanyahu jagged upwards in the first place with their Middle East war.) Just who is acting traitorous in all this? ds

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2026