What The Hell America!

Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are such tiny countries that if Russia wished to take a bite out of them, as it took bites out of Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 and 2022, it would simply swallow them whole. To make themselves less toothsome, they have armed themselves and forged alliances with Europe and the United States. But the American side of that alliance suddenly looked less dependable in March, when President Donald Trump dressed down the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office and accused him of starting the war that began with his own country’s invasion. If that scene looked catastrophic in Washington or Kyiv, consider how it might have looked from the Baltics.

Soon after, I visited these states to find out how they planned to survive with the American support of their security in question. Russia parted with these states reluctantly in 1991, and Russian President Vladimir Putin has called their alliance with NATO “a serious provocation”—language and logic identical to his rationale for attacking Ukraine. In Washington, opponents of Trump and friends of Ukraine were enraged by his reversal, and freaked out by it. In the Baltics, the concern was more muted, and even top diplomats acknowledged upsides to Europe’s frantic race to rearm itself.

“Everyone understands now,” Estonian Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna told me, “that there is no situation anymore where someone else is coming to solve” Europe’s problems. He said Estonia understood this reality long ago, and welcomed the belated realization by others. “I personally like this change of attitude.”

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A certain amount of optimism must be a psychological necessity for leaders of the Baltic states. They share borders with Russia and its partner Belarus, and unlike Ukraine, they do not have hundreds of miles of steppe between Russia and their capitals. The Baltic states are tiny, each about the size of West Virginia. During the past century, the Baltic states were ruled from Moscow, and they would like to avoid that fate in the future.

In 1968, the historian Robert Conquest published The Great Terror, at the time the most unsparing account of the state-directed megadeath supervised by Joseph Stalin in the 1930s. After the book’s publication, some readers remained skeptical: Could the Soviet Union have been that bad? In fact, it was worse. But for years before his vindication, Conquest was accused of Russophobia. After glasnost, when he revised his old book, his publisher asked him to come up with a snappy new title. His friend Kingsley Amis suggested I Told You So You Fucking Fools. (The publisher eventually went with The Great Terror: A Reassessment.)

The urge to say I told you so, with or without accompanying expletives, is strong these days throughout the Baltics. The three former Soviet republics have, like Conquest, found themselves vindicated after years of accusing Moscow of planning and committing a wide range of sins. Could Putin really be planning, as Baltic leaders had suggested for years, to invade and retake the former Soviet states? In fact he was. All three republics—members of NATO since 2004—have supported Ukraine vigorously since its 2022 invasion. All three have taken only the coldest comfort in knowing that their warnings were true.

Already Baltic governments have encouraged their citizens to stock enough food in their home to weather an emergency, and to have plans for rendezvous outside the capitals. “It’s not an easy talk to have with your family,” Deividas Škelys, a defense analyst in Lithuania, told me. “People become scared, because suddenly it’s not a movie anymore. It’s reality.” It helps to have still-living memories of Soviet rule. In Tallinn, the signs of mental preparation for a Russian invasion are omnipresent. About a quarter of the Estonian population is ethnic Russian; they speak Russian at home, and in many cases they maintain close connections to Russians in Russia. But in public spaces, the Russian Federation and the Soviet Union are roundly despised. Estonia maintains a state museum dedicated to the evils of the Soviets and their suppression of Estonian nationhood and identity. It equates Communism with Nazism and spends much more time on documenting the crimes of the former. During an intermission at the Tallinn opera, an older Estonian man caught me staring up at the sprawling, Soviet-era socialist realist ceiling mural, which depicts Communism triumphant. He pointed out a smudgy area where a Leninist slogan (“Art belongs to the people”) had recently been effaced in an ongoing effort to de-Russify.

“We have been living here 7,000 years and have never witnessed any good things coming to Europe from the east,” Tsahkna told me. He was previously Estonia’s defense minister, from 2016 to 2017, and said the sight of Russians mustering at the border had long concentrated the Estonian collective mind. At that point, on the other side of the border, there were “120,000 troops ready to go within 48 hours.” But he said Estonia and its Baltic neighbors were constantly assured that the era of war in Europe had passed, and that their concerns no longer applied. Europe “didn’t believe a full-scale brutal war, like what we saw last time during the Second World War, was possible.”

Now, Tsahkna said, his European allies have realized their error. When I visited the Baltics, Germany’s Parliament had just voted to spend about $1 trillion on its military—a budgetary allocation that would have been inconceivable before the invasion. And on the streets of Baltic capitals, one sees NATO soldiers constantly. I met German soldiers, in uniform, at a café in Vilnius. In Tallinn, at the airport, British soldiers were eating hamburgers in the food court, and Prince William, colonel in chief of the Mercian Regiment, was in town to inspect his troops at a British camp just 100 miles from the Russian border. American soldiers are on the border with Belarus.

But is Europeans’ coming to their senses enough to compensate for Americans’ losing theirs? Tsahkna seemed remarkably blasé about the American president’s having begun to repeat Kremlin propaganda wholesale and assert, ludicrously, that Ukraine started the war with Russia. But Tsahkna told me Estonia had in many ways improved its position since the beginning of the Ukraine war—and he denied that Trump’s preposterous assertions and constant questioning of the value of NATO were significant. “I don’t see a change in America’s commitment to NATO,” he said. He noted that Trump called himself “very committed” to NATO in the meeting where he argued with Zelensky. (After Trump said he was “very committed to Poland,” he was asked directly by a reporter at the meeting, “What about the Baltics?” He stammered through a response and said he was “committed to NATO,” conspicuously not mentioning the Baltic states by name.)

Tsahkna pointed out that U.S. troops have been in all three Baltic countries since the annexation of Crimea, and that the first Trump administration had overseen the rise in their numbers. “I’m a practical person, so I look at the agreements we have made, and what I see in real life. What I see is U.S. troops in Estonia.” Before, he said, “we had no permanent presence of NATO troops—no U.S. troops here, no British, no French.” He said Estonia now feels more secure than ever. Equally noteworthy, Tsahkna said, was the decline in the number of Russian troops on the other side of the border. “They are not existing anymore there,” he said, delicately. Then he dropped the euphemism to make sure I saw his point about the 120,000 Russians formerly camped out there. “They were sent to Ukraine. They’re dead.”

Read: Trump sided with Putin. What should Europe do now?

“In the last two years,” a defense analyst in Latvia told me, “we have seen Russia go from being the second-strongest army in the world to being the second strongest in Ukraine.” (His joke is part of the standard humor repertoire in the region.) In all three countries, people repeatedly referred to Ukraine as a war that has bought time for other countries that might otherwise have been soft targets for Russia. Škelys, the Lithuanian defense analyst, said that his country had always had plans to mobilize its population and defend itself. But since the Ukraine invasion, that capacity became activated. “We were on sleep mode,” he told me. “Ukraine was supposed to lose in a couple of weeks. But then people rose up. We saw that, and now it’s a much different game in the Baltics.” That time, he said, has not been wasted. “We’re moving in a direction where every single adult citizen knows what to do in time of war: drivers, sausage makers, paramedics. Maybe you are a good IT guy and you’ll be trolling Russian trolls.”

And he agreed with Tsahkna, saying the geopolitical picture had changed in some positive ways since the Ukraine invasion. Poland and Finland have redoubled their support, and the latter joined NATO in 2023 after decades of neutral dithering. Suddenly the idea of taking back the Baltic states became a much more complicated affair. “If you want to attack the Baltics, you have to do something with Poland and Finland,” Škelys said, because keeping control of these small states is impossible with well-armed enemies right next door. “If you want to attack Lithuania, you have to attack Latvia and eastern Poland. It’s become a much bigger game.”

The building of alliances is the opposite of Trumpism. I told Tsahkna, as I was leaving the foreign ministry in Tallinn, that I found it odd that American liberals in Washington were so horrified by Trump’s equivocation over Ukraine, while those actually inside Russia’s artillery range were relatively calm. “Russia has even larger-scale plans for the future,” he assured me, and he said that after its campaign of overwhelming force had proved so underwhelming in Ukraine, it was resorting, as expected, to hybrid warfare: sabotage, espionage, information ops. But he left me with a soft dig at D.C. worrywarts. “We are very practical people,” he said. “We don’t have the luxury to be sad and afraid.”