Small States' Efforts or Circumstances? Explaining the Outcomes of the Baltic States’ Strategic Burden Sharing in NATO

The paper provides a comprehensive overview of the Baltic States’ attempts to influence political outcomes in NATO through strategic burden sharing behavior (contributing the most to joint allied objectives important to the US) over the last two decades. By applying process tracing methodology, the paper argues that the Baltic States’ efforts in sharing the burden helped to shape favorable allied attitudes towards them, making their voices better heard at the NATO table. Yet, the effects of Baltic States’ strategic burden sharing behaviour on NATO decisions were significantly modified by the manifestation of circumstances beyond their control: (i) alignment between the Baltic States’ interests and respective preferences of the US and other major NATO allies; and (ii) compatibility of Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian preferences with the underlying security environment. Specifically, NATO’s decisions mostly reflected Baltic States’ security interests when they coincided with the ones of the US and other major allies between 2014 and 2025. On the contrary, Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian efforts to share the burden in areas important to the US struggled to produce desired results when their interests were less compatible or even contradictory with respective interests of major NATO members during the first decade of their membership in the Alliance. At the same time, the more Baltic States’ interests were compatible with the collective perception of NATO’s security environment, the more successful they were in implementing them and vice versa. Such findings suggest that researchers examining small states’ attempts to advance their interests in international institutions would benefit from including the role of circumstances in their research designs, which still mostly focus on examining small states’ efforts.