Hugging or Hedging? Baltic Coping Strategies in ‘America First’ World

The Baltic states have traditionally built their national security strategies upon the cornerstone of dependable and durable US commitment to the region. But what happens when your most valued security partner starts to credibly doubt its long-standing alliance commitments? As a Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump openly questioned if he would come in aid to the Baltic countries in a hypothetical attack by Russia. After taking the reins of power at the White House, he further intimated that he may halt regional military exercises. Uncertain about the future trajectory of US foreign policy, partner nations have been forced to rethink their most fundamental strategic assumptions vis-à-vis the United States. Fears of US abandonment, of course, is a recurring theme and long predate the election of the 45th president of the United States. During the Obama years, for instance, Eastern Europeans exhibited a nagging anxiety about America’s pronounced pivot to Asia and whether that would lead to a diminution of Washington’s role in European security affairs. Arguably though, there is a discernible difference between a mere calibration of foreign policy direction under the previous US administrations and a constant entertainment by the current US president of the possibility of stepping away from NATO, an institutional affiliation that has defined the US-led international order for decades. The proposed paper focuses on NATO’s easternmost members: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and the ways in which they have navigated the ‘America First’ world. The organizing question here can be summarized as follows: To what extent have the Baltic states altered their strategic position vis-à-vis the United States given the mounting uncertainty about its role as a military protector and subsequent calls for European strategic autonomy? In order to answer this question, the article turns to theoretical insights that have emerged around alliance relations. Comprising just around six million people, the Baltic states represent a valuable case study that allow us to test rival claims about alliance politics as well as behavior or small states under the threat of abandonment.