After watching European leaders deploy some of their harshest adjectives yet at this week's summit, I find myself frankly exhausted by the frontline states' endless demands for actual military hardware.
I was enjoying a truly sublime sea bass carpaccio at the NATO ministerial meeting in Sweden this week when I heard the news. Ursula von der Leyen, standing at a podium bathed in the soft, reassuring light of Western European stability, had done it. She had looked directly into the cameras and declared Russian threats against the Baltic states to be "unacceptable." It was a masterclass in rhetorical statecraft. And yet, before the applause could even die down in the press gallery, the whispering began. Whispers from Estonia. Grumbling from Latvia. A distinct lack of profound, weeping gratitude from Lithuania.
It seems that for some people, the most powerful diplomatic vocabulary on the continent is simply not enough. Despite the European Union formally classifying their potential annihilation as a danger to our entire union, Baltic leaders are still, rather greedily, asking for air defense systems and troop deployments. It is exactly this kind of provincial, tactical thinking that ruins the elegance of a perfectly good geopolitical summit.
Consider the sheer generosity of President von der Leyen’s phrasing. By stating that a threat against one member state is a threat against our entire union, she is voluntarily sharing your trauma. When a Russian cyberattack hits a Lithuanian hospital, a deputy trade minister in Paris feels a slight, sympathetic chill while drinking his espresso. We are all in this together, conceptually speaking. Is it not enough that we have agreed to conceptually share your doom? Must we also send artillery shells, which are terribly expensive and ruin the budget for next year's climate symposium?
We have given the Baltics the highest level of verbal assurance available under the current treaty framework. If they cannot repel a motorized rifle division using the word 'unacceptable,' that is a failure of their own imagination, not our rhetoric.
When Mark Rutte took the stage to announce that our security environment is more dangerous and more contested, he was painting a beautiful, abstract mosaic of global multipolarity. He was inviting us into a high-level intellectual dialogue. He was not asking for the citizens of Tallinn to start nervously checking their basement rations. It is incredibly rude to take a sweeping academic observation about NATO's newest allies and make it all about whether or not Russian tanks are currently idling on your specific border.
I spent three hours at a cocktail reception with defense ministers on Tuesday, and I can assure you that the solidarity in that room was palpable. We clinked glasses. We nodded gravely. We agreed that the situation was, quite frankly, deeply concerning. Do the Baltics have any idea how many calories are burned nodding gravely in a bespoke Italian suit? To hear them continue to whine about imminent physical danger while we are doing all this heavy lifting in Stockholm is, frankly, insulting to the diplomatic process.
It is time for the frontline states to realize that being part of a modern, sophisticated alliance means understanding the difference between hard power and smart power. Hard power is crude, noisy, and requires moving heavy metal objects across snowy terrain. Smart power is what we do in Brussels: we stand shoulder-to-shoulder, we look into the middle distance, and we issue a PDF declaring that whatever bad thing is about to happen to you is strictly against our values. If the Baltics cannot find comfort in that, one has to wonder if they belong in the civilized world at all.