NATO’s uneasy edge

RIGA, Latvia — On the day tens of thousands of Russian soldiers stormed into Ukraine last year, U.S. paratroopers from the 173rd Airborne Brigade, kitted out in full battle gear, landed at the airport in Latvia — a boots-on-theground symbol of Washington’s commitment to defend its most vulnerable NATO allies in Europe.

On paper, that commitment has been ironclad since the U.S.-led alliance extended its collective security umbrella guarantee to Latvia and its sister Baltic states, Lithuania and Estonia, almost 20 years ago. In practice, fulfilling that promise would be a nightmare, given the current lack of resources and the rising threat of Russian aggression, which has mounted exponentially. Neither Washington nor its European allies are ready.

NATO reckoned drowsily for years with Moscow’s rising threat, then got a wake-up call when Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his ruinous attack on Ukraine 17 months ago. In its annual summit last week, the alliance adopted 4,000 pages of secret plans to prepare hundreds of thousands of U.S. and other rapid-reaction troops from bases across Europe to defend front-line states, including the Baltics. The mission: “deterrence by denial,” meaning stopping Russian troops before they can seize an inch of NATO territory — and potentially subject the bloc’s front-line states to the risk of atrocities like those committed in Ukraine.

But those plans, and the dollars, euros and political will to fulfill them, remain in doubt. And nowhere are those doubts deeper than in the Baltic states, where Russia’s threat is existential.

“If you want to prove that the alliance is real and credible, this is the place,” said Kristine Berzina of the German Marshall Fund, which organized a research trip to Latvia for several transatlantic security experts this month.

The Baltic states — colonized by imperial Russia, then subjugated by the Soviet Union for much of the 20th century — have been warning for years that Putin would not be content to live within Russia’s existing borders. They were ignored in Washington, London, Paris and Berlin.

Today in central Riga’s handsome Art Nouveau center, a two-story banner of Putin gazes across the street at the Russian embassy, his face a grotesque skull against a blood-red background. The image captures the loathing Russia inspires for many Latvians, whose grandparents and great-grandparents were rounded up by Soviet forces and deported en masse to Siberian concentration camps during and after World War II.

Russian propagandists train their venom at the Balts — “Nazis” is a favorite epithet — and were enraged when Latvia, shortly after the invasion of Ukraine, ordered the destruction of a Soviet Red Army monument in downtown Riga.

The Balts are bulking up their Lilliputian defenses to prepare for a Russian invasion, which many consider plausible within three to five years. Determined not to be a free-rider in NATO, Latvia has raised defense spending from 1 percent of gross domestic product to 2.3 percent of GDP over the past decade; reinstated the draft; and is buying U.S.-made missiles and German air defense systems. Insiders say the defense minister is the only official who doesn’t break a sweat during the government’s annual budget negotiations.

But Latvia, the size of West Virginia and with a population under 2 million, shares 240 miles of border with Russia and its vassal state Belarus. Its own forces would be scarcely a speed bump if Russia does invade. The Latvian navy, whose offensive capacity consists of five small patrol boats, “is a coast guard, frankly,” according to its commander, Capt. Maris Polencs.

A 2016 study by Rand Corp. concluded that Russian ground forces could capture Riga and Tallinn, capital of neighboring Estonia, in two to three days. “Without U.S. support, we are done,” said Andis Kudors, a Latvian scholar.

The Pentagon has deployed more than 20,000 additional troops to European bases since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, bringing U.S. strength across the continent to at least 100,000. U.S. Gen. Christopher G. Cavoli, the supreme allied commander Europe, is leading an effort to muster some 300,000 rapid-reaction NATO troops, roughly eight times the strength of the current force. The goal is that they could deploy to defend front-line states in 10 to 30 days.

The problem is aligning the massive buildup needed to achieve that goal with the political will and available resources of most of the alliance’s member states. The prognosis is not encouraging.

Across most of Europe, years of anemic military spending produced rickety armed forces and meager weapons stockpiles. Arming Ukraine has emptied arsenals across the continent. Defense industry production in the United States and Europe is inadequate to the task of arming and equipping the additional brigades Cavoli wants. And new investment to juice weapons assembly lines will take years to bear fruit.

It’s also unclear who will provide the tens of thousands of additional NATO quick-reaction troops Cavoli wants, given that about two-thirds of NATO countries fail to meet the alliance’s minimum target of spending 2 percent of national output annually on defense.

At Adazi, a base near Riga, a Canadian-led NATO battalion is earmarked to grow by a couple thousand troops to reach brigade strength, about 4,000 soldiers. Even that modest upgrade will take at least three years. By then Moscow might already have reconstituted its own brigades depleted in Ukraine.

The outlook is no more heartening at Lielvarde Air Base in Latvia, where a small fleet of U.S. Blackhawk helicopters trains to ferry combat troops to the front to repel invaders. It depends on a supply line so flimsy that spare rotor blades take up to three weeks to arrive from U.S. factories. “In a crisis we’d be grounded in a week or two,” Lt. Col. Lukas B. Berg of the U.S. 3rd Infantry Division, the helicopter task force commander, told me.

NATO retains enormous power, as it demonstrated this spring with its largest-ever air exercise, which included 10,000 personnel and 250 aircraft, about 100 of them from the United States. The alliance gained more muscle in the Baltic region when Finland joined this spring and will be further bolstered by Sweden’s likely accession later this year.

Nonetheless, Cavoli and his successors have their work cut out, and the urgency is clear. Without renewed resolve from Washington and major European capitals, the Kremlin is likely to regard NATO’s front-line states as tempting targets, and soft ones.