Visiting the Baltics After “Voting for Estonia” in 2016

Just before the 2016 election, I wrote a post entitled “On Election Day, I’ll Be Voting for Estonia”.  The post continued – and explained: “and Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and many more.”¹  At the time, I was worried about then-candidate Donald Trump’s foreign policy: “He has threatened to abandon most of our NATO allies.  He has implied to Japan and South Korea that they are on their own.”  While I disagreed with some parts of Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy, and even more of her domestic policy, I voted for her because I felt she would maintain our NATO commitments and would continue to support our other allies and friends.  I felt such a foreign policy was the best way to protect the security and well-being of the United States. 

In saying I was “voting for Estonia”, I was really saying I was voting against what I feared would be President Trump’s foreign policy.  And I still think that was the right vote.  If President Trump’s foreign policy in his first term wasn’t as bad as I feared, that may have been because, for the first couple of years, he didn’t know how to do what he wanted (and, at times, didn’t even know what he wanted).  Inexperience slowed him down – and made his first term foreign policy not as bad as it might otherwise have been. 

Last month, I finally got around to visiting Estonia – and Lativa and Lithuania.  And I am glad I did.  Some people have told me they wouldn’t want to travel that close to Russia.  I did not feel that way.  In fact, it was good to travel “that close to Russia.”  I was able to see for myself how far those countries had come since becoming independent, again, in 1991 and joining NATO and the European Union in 2004.

The progress is amazing.  They went through tough times for the first few years after 1991, but they have made amazing progress since.  When we were in Tallinn, we took a cab out to see the Estonian Open Air Museum.  The cab driver told us that the one building we definitely needed to see was the apartment building of a Soviet-era collective farm.  The building had four apartments.  Each of the apartments showed what it was like in the particular era: 1967, 1979, 1993, and 2019.  The 1967 apartment was basic.  For example, there were no light fixtures, just bare bulbs, but at the time, it was a big step up for the people.  They finally had their own apartment, even if it was basic.  The apartment from 1979 was much better.  There were light fixtures and real furniture.  In fact, the furniture looked like furniture we saw in hotels we stayed at when we visited East Germany in 1979 and 1982. 

The apartment from 1993 showed the problems that came with the final years of Soviet rule and the beginning of independence.  Property that was taken by the government in Soviet times was returned to its prior owners.  But for people who didn’t get property back, who maybe had to move out of where they were living, or who lost their job when the government-run businesses for which they were working shut down, it was not a good time.  That is what the 1993 apartment showed.

The final apartment was from 2019.  Freedom and prosperity had come to Estonia.  By 2019, one of the tenants bought two of the apartments and combined them into a single unit.  This was the Estonia that we saw when we visited.  An impressive achievement.

There was, however, perhaps, a bit of a sense of fragility in that success.  Actually, maybe it was just something I felt when our tour guide, who grew up in Lithuania before 1991, talked about her life in Vilnius in Soviet times.²  You wondered what would happen if Russia succeeded to some extent in Ukraine and the firmness of the United States’s commitment to NATO was called into question.  Would Estonia – and Latvia and Lithuania – be able to maintain their success if Vladmir Putin – or some Putin successor – decided Russia needed the Baltics back, too?

Many in the United States, perhaps more in the populist wing of the Republican Party, though many in Democratic Party, too,³ are already saying: We have so many problems at home, why should we worry about, or spend our money on, places like Ukraine. Others might phrase it more along the lines of: “As long as we defend Poland (and other countries in NATO), we don’t need to help Ukraine.”  I think the underlying point of both of these views is pretty much the same: We shouldn’t worry about the world; we should just think about ourselves.

There are many things wrong with this view.  First, the amount of “extra money” we are spending on helping Ukraine (i.e., money that we are spending on Ukraine that we would not otherwise be spending to just defend ourselves) is insignificant.  According to the Congressional Budget Office, we will have a deficit of $1.7 trillion this year.  The amount of “extra” spending for Ukraine is probably no more than 3 or 4% of that deficit.  In other words, it almost disappears in the rounding.  Plus, even if we didn’t spend this money helping Ukraine, would we really spend it intelligently and effectively to actually solve problems here in the United States?  To ask the question is answer it.

Second, as for the idea of defending NATO countries, but not Ukraine, you don’t always get the option of fighting the war you want to fight.  You have to fight the one you are given.  You can’t just pick and choose; the enemy gets a say, too.  That is where we are with Ukraine.  Russia has said, in its view, the fight for Europe is going to start in Ukraine, not Poland or the Baltics or some other place we would prefer.  Maybe we can wait until Russia gets to Poland, but the fight would likely be harder then.  Russia would be stronger; our allies might be less interested in fighting and less confident in our commitment.  Stopping Russia in Ukraine is the cheapest, and most effective, way to defend NATO.

As for those who say that Putin wouldn’t be dumb enough to attack Poland or another NATO member, who would have thought he would attack Ukraine?

If a revanchist Russia succeeds in Ukraine, what will be next for Putin (or his successor) and, perhaps more importantly, his autocratic Chinese big brother?  Will he/they really stop with Kyiv?  Xi Jinping has made it clear what China wants: Taiwan plus a world that effectively kowtows to the Chinese Communist Party; a world that doesn’t allow Chinese citizens living outside China to criticize the CCP; and a world in which you nobody can say anything when China does to Xinjiang what it has already done to Tibet.

Finally, you can’t always stay out of wars just because you want to.  We tried to stay out of World War I.  It didn’t work.  We didn’t want to get into World War II, either.  Eventually, the enemy told us we didn’t get to choose.  As the Cold War started, our leaders realized we couldn’t just stay at home.  We had to get involved.  We didn’t do everything right, but we were right more often than we were wrong.  And the world was a safer place for it.  And we were better off for our involvement.

That is why I “voted for Estonia” in 2016 and why I think that we should be helping Ukraine today.  Actually, I think we should be helping Ukraine even more than we are.  Because it is the best way to defend the United States.
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¹ I singled out Estonia because, at the time, there was a lot of discussion about whether the United States would really go to war with Russia if Russia just attacked Estonia, a little country of perhaps little importance (but still a member of NATO).  Barack Obama publicly assured NATO, and in effect warned Vladimir Putin, that we would defend Estonia.
² It was interesting that the tour guide always talked about “Soviet” times, not “Communist” times.
³ Many fewer Democrats would be supporting our efforts to help Ukraine, if, instead of Joe Biden, we had a Bush-like Republican as president3 (either George H.W. or George W.).