Under Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, an “armed attack” on one Nato member is to be regarded as an attack on all. Fine words, but the challenge for Nato is to ensure that they are never put to the test. For his part, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin knows that there is no better place than the Baltics—nearby, lightly defended, far from the Nato core and with a large Russian minority—to try his luck.
.. Moscow’s geopolitical aims are more modest, too: it believes that the US just has to accept that its current dominance must be replaced by a humbler role in a “multipolar” world in which Russia is treated with the respect it thinks it deserves. With respect would come the realisation of Moscow’s second objective: recognition that Russia has a legitimate extraterritorial sphere of interest, much of it encompassed within a loosely defined “Russian World” (Russkiy Mir) that includes most or all of the post-Soviet space, including, to a greater or lesser extent, the Baltics, the three renegade states that made it all the way from the USSR to Nato.
.. When, in 2005, Putin notoriously referred to the collapse of the Soviet Union as “a major geopolitical disaster of the century,” he was not mourning the Communist Party, but rather the fact that “tens of millions of our co-citizens and compatriots found themselves outside Russian territory,” a theme that, tellingly, he alluded to in a major speech shortly after the annexation of the Crimea. Trying to repair, at least partly, that breach through the creation of his “Russian world” is much more than a matter of poking Washington: it is a central element in his foreign policy and, critically, a key source of domestic support.
.. The Baltic’s Russian-speakers receive most of their news from Russia’s poisonous media (which reserves plenty of venom for supposedly fascist Russophobic Balts). Nevertheless, while they appear to be generally supportive of Moscow’s adventures abroad, they seem to have little appetite for being “rescued” by their compatriots: the devastation in Donetsk has only sharpened their awareness of what that could mean.
.. But according to the Czech General, Petr Pavel, speaking shortly before he became the head of Nato’s Military Committee in June, 48 hours is how long it would take the Russians to occupy the Baltic states, establishing a fait accompli that would present the west with some very difficult decisions. What the Balts are hoping for are troops who are already there, a tripwire akin to the US presence in South Korea.
The Nationalist Solution
Extremism is a spiritual phenomenon, a desire for loftiness of spirit gone perverse. You can’t counter a heroic impulse with a mundane and bourgeois response. You can counter it only with a more compelling heroic vision. There will always be alienated young men fueled by spiritual ardor. Terrorism will be defeated only when they find a different fulfillment, even more bold and self-transcending.