Seablindness. Seth Cropsey
to patrol the Channel and parts of the North Sea. Two carriers built only a decade earlier had been mothballed.
Putin knew the time was right to crack NATO’s atrophied spine. He did not have to cast about for an achievement to crown his twenty-five-year reign as Russia’s supreme leader. NATO’s demise would allow gains in Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, the Balkans, and Transnistria to be extended. The excuse for invading Ukraine applied equally to the Baltic States: the million or so ethnic Russians who lived in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania must be protected. Returning the Baltic States to Russian control would shatter NATO and make smooth the highway to recreating an imperium in Europe. Except that this time, it might reach the Atlantic, an accomplishment that would dwarf Stalin’s seizure of Eastern Europe at the end of World War II.
In mid-2024, Russian foreign intelligence agents began to contact pro-Russian intellectuals and writers in the Baltic States, and small think tanks sprang up in Tallinn, Riga, and Vilnius. Staffs were hired. They turned out articles that explained the “facts” of growing discrimination against ethnic Russians. Friendly reporters repeated the untruths in their journals. Other sympathizers whose pro-Russian credentials had been validated years earlier began to press for solidarity among ethnic Russians in the Baltic States’ trade unions. Websites appeared with fabricated stories of mistreatment, arrests, and harassment directed against ethnic Russians. Moscow contacted ethnic Russians and offered them Russian passports, citizenship, and higher pensions than those that the Baltic States offered.
Russian agents initiated a low-level bombing campaign against ethnic Russian–owned small businesses that heated up the political warfare. The bombings “proved” the dangers that ethnic Russians faced. Other crimes, such as kidnappings and the occasional murder, received international attention. From Moscow to Vilnius, the pro-Russian social media called for “measures” to protect ethnic Russians in the Baltic States. Members of the Duma howled, and eventually Vladimir Putin felt obliged to weigh in.
Putin warned the Baltic leaders to stop what he termed provocations or face the consequences. At the same time, he put the Baltic Sea Fleet on a heightened alert status, mobilized three infantry brigades, and moved one Spetsnaz battalion with helicopter transports and an armored division into the Pskov oblast near the Estonian border.
The U.S. State Department and foreign ministries in London, Paris, and Warsaw issued démarches, and NATO’s general secretary called an emergency meeting. His public statement surprised the foreign policy establishments of most alliance members by reminding Putin that Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty required all members to assist one who had been attacked.
Putin corrected this—privately. He told his close advisers that Article 5 actually says that an attack against one member, and here he quoted from memory, “shall be considered an attack against them all.” “What does that mean?” he asked contemptuously. The Russian president noted that the United Kingdom had told the Polish government in March 1939 that it would “feel” itself “bound” to help Poland if the Nazis attacked. Five months later the Chamberlain government dropped tons of leaflets over Germany after Hitler invaded Poland. “Some feeling,” Putin snorted. “Some binding,” he added. “Treaties,” he declared, “are not handcuffs. They’re like shirts. You wear one when it suits you.
“The Americans,” he continued, “are stretched between their Arctic Fleet, the Mexican civil war, their peacekeeping operations in Kashmir, and stopping the Sunnis and Shiites from a second nuclear volley.” Putin was referring to the concentration of jockeying international naval vessels in the nearly ice-free Arctic, the anarchy of Mexico’s armed struggle between drug lords and the government, the aftermath of war between India and a jihadist Pakistan in which both sides had launched nuclear weapons, and a brief nuclear exchange between the Gulf States and Iran that had driven the international price of oil to just over $300 a barrel.
The Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) responsible for all NATO forces, U.S. Admiral Alec Krone, ordered a squadron of F-35s to move from Timisoara, where they were stationed in Romania, to the Amari air base in northwestern Estonia. U.S. President Algodón started calling the leaders of NATO member states. They were reluctant to admit that the hopes for peace that their defense budgets over the previous two decades reflected might have come a cropper. But for the most part, they agreed that a successful Russian military takeover in the Baltics risked the entire continent and would doom the alliance.
All of Europe’s NATO members maintained ground forces of one kind or another. They started to flow into the Baltic States. Not all the European states possessed major naval combatants. For its part, the United States had bet that the next half century would be pretty much like the previous fifty years: emergencies and the occasional crisis, but nothing more. Under increased budgetary pressure, the U.S. Navy had changed the thirty-year naval shipbuilding plan into a fifty-year plan. The number of ships that were to have been built in three decades would now be constructed in five decades. As a result, the U.S. fleet was short in every category of major combatant: amphibious, attack submarines, ballistic-missile submarines, aircraft carriers, the planes carried on their decks, frigates, destroyers, and the logistics ships that kept the fighters supplied. New technology that might have helped remedy deficiencies—for example, small drone submarines—had been developed but was not deployed in significant enough numbers to make a positive difference.
Russia had been busy building up its navy while the Western powers were dismantling theirs. Moscow had far surpassed the goal it set in 2010 of modernizing 70 percent of its fleet by 2020. The $600 billion it spent during that decade had proved a good investment, especially the supercarrier, Yekaterina Velikaya, with its hundred-plane capacity and electromagnetic launch catapults. Russia had replaced the United States as the dominant naval force in the Mediterranean eight years earlier, and Yekaterina was patrolling the Med during the second week of June 2025 when Putin began to flood the Baltic Sea with amphibious vessels, attack subs, and large surface ships bristling with anti-surface and anti-aircraft missiles.
A debate erupted within the U.S. intelligence community over whether Putin intended to go to war when Yekaterina Velikaya exited the Straits of Gibraltar and sailed north to join the gathering Russian armada in the Baltic Sea. Smaller vessels and ground-based naval aviation would assist her in hunting for NATO submarines.
At the president’s request, Admiral Krone flew back to Washington from Estonia’s Amari air base, where he had established an allied joint force command headquarters. After a lunch of canned sardines, yogurt, and a kombucha—the admiral was a SEAL officer and remained in excellent physical condition—Krone went over his briefing papers and current intelligence reports. Done, he napped for twenty minutes, awakened, and finished the third chapter of Finnegans Wake. It was his second read of the impossible novel. After touching down at Andrews in mid-afternoon on Sunday, June 29, the admiral was ferried by helicopter to land on the White House South Lawn. He began to brief the president and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Thomas Zrebiec less than thirty-five minutes after landing at Andrews.
The essentials were straightforward. NATO fielded more powerful conventional ground and air forces than Moscow. Putin had an important, perhaps decisive, advantage in combat ships—unless the United States were to swing naval forces from the Persian Gulf and West Pacific to the Baltic Sea. This would take at least six weeks. It would also risk additional fighting between the Gulf States and Iran and another even more devastating spike in international oil prices, while encouraging Chinese or North Korean adventures in East Asia.
Then there was the nuclear unknown. Putin had hinted for years that one mission of his nuclear forces was to backstop any conventional weakness. “The military balance between Russia and the West,” Admiral Krone told the president, “is exactly opposite the one we faced in the Cold War.” He meant that, while the Soviets had held the upper hand in conventional forces, the U.S. nuclear umbrella was understood during the Cold War to have protected Europe against being overrun should the Red Army start to push alliance forces west.
“Today,” Admiral Krone observed, “if it comes to war, we can stop them from taking the Baltic States with conventional forces. But Putin is a risk-taker. There is no telling whether he would use nuclear weapons if he feels he is losing.” The president did not have to be told