Are We on the Verge of World War III? – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

Over the past weekend, the Wall Street Journal ran an alarming article entitled “The Russian Military Moves That Have Europe on Edge.” The article leads with Russian moves along the border with Finland, and the accompanying photograph highlights activity at a Russian naval base near its Arctic border with Norway. The article expands at some length on concerns that Russia is beginning to redirect military capabilities away from the war with Ukraine, in a manner directly threatening members of the NATO alliance.

These threatening actions have been accompanied, repeatedly, by threatening words from senior members of Putin’s leadership cadre. Typically, the headlines drip with menace. One from London’s Daily Express highlighted the worldwide coverage: “Putin’s spy chief names the 4 countries ‘first to suffer’ in new WW3 Warning.” Sergey Naryshkin, Director of the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service, calls out “aggression by NATO” against Russia as a growing threat, mentioning countries such as the U.K., France, and Germany, but focusing most of his ire on Poland and the three small Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Naryshkin finds these countries particularly blameworthy, condemning them for their “high aggressiveness” and “rattling their weapons.”

At first blush, one is tempted to dismiss this out of hand. It’s nonsensical, for example, to imply that Russia has anything to fear from Estonia, a tiny country with a population of scarcely 1.5 million — and a military boasting only some 8,000 active duty personnel, no tanks, a handful of armored personnel carriers and artillery pieces, and no — repeat, no — combat aircraft. Latvia and Lithuania have similarly limited capabilities. Of these countries, only Poland, to use Naryshkin’s phrase, has anything resembling offensive weapons to “rattle,” and even that represents a stretch. (RELATED: American Nuclear Weapons in Poland? No.)

With respect to “high aggressiveness,” the larger question would be simply “why?” Why would any of these four countries, or even the four acting in concert, choose to attack Russia? The political, economic, or cultural incentives are entirely lacking. None of these countries much like Russia — each has bitter memories of subjugation by Soviet Russia — but since regaining their independence with the fall of the Soviet Union, their entire foreign policy orientation toward Russia can be summarized in a single short phrase: “Leave us alone.”

Instead, and unsurprisingly, it is these countries that have reason to fear Russia. Russia has only grudgingly acknowledged the independence of the Baltic states, and in every case has trumpeted the cause of a purportedly disadvantaged Russian-speaking minority. The parallels with Ukraine are screamingly obvious, and are underscored by increasing evidence of Russian hybrid warfare activities aimed at these countries — not yet, perhaps, from the notorious Russian “little green men, but an almost daily drumbeat of low-level harassment, including electronic interference with civil aviation. And this past Saturday’s Wall Street Journal article is not the first to document how Russia has undertaken a high-profile expansion of its conventional combat capabilities in the region.

Simultaneously, the Russian intelligence services have launched attacks against the West, attacks accompanied by a disinformation strategy to divert blame to the Baltic states. The most notorious — and best documented — recent case involved using an address in Lithuania to originate shipment of bombs to various western nations, using the package express service DHL. This included — and may have been primarily aimed at — the United States. It’s a classic operation, right out of the old KGB playbook, an operation that not only wreaks havoc in the target country but also points a finger at a country that the Russians wish to embarrass or discredit.

Faced with this expanding threat, all four countries are now engaged in a concerted effort to protect themselves. They are now fortifying their borders against a conventional attack by Russian armored forces (in Poland’s case, a Russian attack via Belarus, similar to one flank of the initial Russian assault on Ukraine). In January 2024, the Latvian, Lithuanian, and Estonian defense ministers approved the Baltic Defence Line initiative, designed to implement a comprehensive border fortification plan. Poland had already undertaken something similar.

And scarcely a month ago, on March 18, the defense ministers of the four countries announced plans to withdraw from the Ottawa Convention, the international agreement prohibiting the use of land mines, with plans for production beginning with anti-tank mines. Even as they prepare for a possible Russian invasion, these countries are all ramping up their counterespionage and countersubversion capabilities.

Significantly, none of these measures can reasonably be interpreted as “offensive.” Building border fortifications or laying minefields designed to stop tanks — these are about as defensive as can possibly be. Even some of their other recent military initiatives, such as the acquisition of anti-armor and air defense missile systems or reconnaissance drones, can scarcely be accounted as “saber rattling.” But they are already making a difference in terms of crafting a deterrent to a Russian attack. And there is more to come, as reflected in ongoing dramatic increases in military expenditures.

For example, just this week, the Estonian government announced an increase in defense spending from 2.87 percent of GDP to an eye-popping 5.4 percent. Latvia is increasing its defense spending to 3.65 percent of GDP. Lithuania this year will spend 3.9 percent of GDP on defense, and recently announced plans to boost spending starting in 2026 to between 5 percent and 6 percent of GDP. Poland spends 3.83 percent of its GDP on defense, a figure that is also projected to significantly increase next year.

This is nearly twice that of countries such as France (2.06 percent), Germany (1.52 percent), or the U.K. (2.26 percent), and comparable to the 3.4 percent that the U.S. currently spends. It’s a level of effort that far exceeds the 2.0 percent threshold that Donald Trump has demanded of our NATO partners.

Therein, perhaps, lies the real reason why Sergey Naryshkin and other Russian luminaries seem so violently exercised by the “threat” posed by the Baltic states and Poland. In recent months, Putin has devoted considerable effort to separate President Trump from engagement along Russia’s periphery. The most prominent aspect of this, of course, has been Putin’s Ukraine “diplomacy,” but there is much more than just Ukraine’s future in play.

If, for example, the American public can be persuaded that the NATO countries along Russia’s borders are the “aggressors,” or that they somehow lack “legitimacy,” then U.S. support for these countries could be called into question. After all, the much-ballyhooed — and widely misunderstood — Article 5 of the NATO treaty doesn’t obligate the U.S. to send troops to defend a NATO country that comes under attack. Instead, the only obligations are those that are “deemed necessary” to assist the member under attack.

We’ve seen how this game works — discredit the victim and inhibit the provision of support. It’s not for nothing that Hamas has worked so hard to paint Israel as an “aggressor” and as a “colonialist, apartheid state,” and we saw the result, repeatedly, in the Biden administration’s unwillingness to provide Israel the levels of support it deserved. The Russians have played this game to great effect with Ukraine, the Chinese with Taiwan, and we are now seeing it in play with NATO’s eastern European frontline states.

We’ve entered a very delicate stage with respect to establishing a genuine deterrent to further Russian aggression. Assuring peace along NATO’s eastern boundary will require something more than just border fortifications and land mines, or air defense missiles, necessary though this may be. It will require a real deterrent capability, and this is something the Russians desperately want to deny their Baltic neighbors.

So the real object of Sergey Naryshkin’s fevered pontification about World War III, and about how Russia is threatened by tiny Estonia, may well be found in a largely overlooked recent development. On January 13, the Estonian armed forces took formal delivery of six HIMARS rocket systems at the Lockheed Martin plant in Arkansas. The systems are scheduled for delivery this spring, with full operational status achieved over the course of the summer. Delivery of Lithuania’s first HIMARS system is expected later this year, and that of Latvia early in 2027.

Preventing this, perhaps by persuading the Trump administration to cancel these sales or at least limit the number and range of the rockets provided for these systems, may very well be the real purpose of Naryshkin’s noisome vaporings. From Estonia, even the short-range variant of the HIMARS rocket systems could reach the outer southern suburbs of St. Petersburg or dominate Russia’s maritime approaches through the Gulf of Finland. The longer-range variants could dominate all of Saint Petersburg and its wider environs.

The underlying message should be clear. If Russia attacks, Estonia’s counter would not simply be a grinding battle of attrition in the fortifications along its border, a battle ultimately hopeless with a population of only 1.5 million and no space in which to retreat. Instead, the rejoinder would include holding Vladimir Putin’s beloved home city hostage. You won’t find this calculation articulated in any official Estonian statements, but it’s open to anyone with a map and a ruler.

In the final analysis, deterrence only comes through the potential ability to inflict unacceptable levels of punishment on the aggressor. Sergey Naryshkin to the contrary notwithstanding, Estonia (or Latvia, or Lithuania) has no intention of invading Russia. Ensuring peace in the Baltic region means deterring Russia — it’s as simple as that. We should draw the obvious conclusions and act accordingly.

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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 recent 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. A soon-to-be-published sequel finds the Reprisal team fighting against terrorists who’ve infiltrated our southern border in a conspiracy that ranges from West Virginia to the forests of Belarus. You can find Letter of Reprisal on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback editions, and on Kindle Unlimited.