Today, when we think where we were in 1991, when once again we were able to run our own countries, the Baltic States are virtually unrecognizable. From barely known backwaters of the USSR — "you speak a dialect of Russian, right?" — we have become three of the most dynamic countries in Europe today. We pull our weight too, paying more than our fair share of defense expenditures. In fact, Estonia and Latvia pay a higher percentage of GDP on defense than the U.S. We can do this because we are successful economically, with sound fundamentals: low indebtedness and deficit spending. We are far richer than at any time in our long, long history.

Moreover, we are thriving democracies, with rule of law, respect for human rights and fundamental rights and freedoms. Just yesterday, I am proud to say, Reporters Without Borders published their annual ranking of press freedom around the world. Estonia was ranked number two, after frontrunner Norway but ahead of our usual competitors — the Netherlands, Sweden, Finland and Denmark. The United States came in at number 57 in the world in the press freedom rankings. Russia: no. 171 out of 180.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

That's all on the positive side of our history ledger. Lord knows we've had far darker history, and for far, far longer. Which is why Russia sees our current success as a temporary blip in the thousand-year stretch it has craved or possessed us. Russia has reverted to form; its imperial war of aggression against Ukraine, the horrors of murder, rape, kidnapping and plunder that we see ongoing as we sit here, are well known to Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians.

But while Russia has become what it's always been, we also see dramatic changes in the West, leaving one to wonder if there still is a West as we have grown up knowing it all our lives.

Just as the transformation of the Baltic states has been an outstanding accomplishment, especially when we compare it to the fates of almost all the other countries to exit from communist/Russian colonial rule, today we must face the fact that as we changed, so too did the rest of the world. The fundamental assumptions that the West has held dear for the past 80 years since the end of World War Two have, in the past decade, changed beyond recognition. I will take up the changes in three areas: Russia, the U.S. and Europe. The third and perhaps most dramatic change has been in China, but that runs far afield for today.

All of which adds up to a world far more dangerous, fragile and threatening, especially to our small countries bordering Mordor. Russia has harbored revanchist desires ever since December 1991 when the USSR formally ended. As we know well, in the 1990s, only grudgingly did Russia accept our independence, probably more because of fear of the West than any fundamental change in its attitude toward its former colonies. Russia whined but did not object to our joining NATO and the European Union in 2004. But by February 2007, right after Vladimir Putin's speech at the Munich Security Conference, where he attacked NATO and the OSCE and staked out a far more assertive role for Russia, he proved the point by launching a massive debilitating cyberattack on Estonia.

A year later he invaded Georgia. In that invasion we could already see the seeds of today's weakness in the West. The EU was absent or blamed Georgia and reneged on canceling its Partnership and Cooperation Agreement with Russia. The U.S. was initially supportive, but after Barack Obama assumed office, the U.S. cut off all military assistance to Georgia, forbade sending weapons to the beleaguered Georgians and proclaimed the "Reset." An example of Europe's response was Finnish President Tarja Halonen's reply when asked why Finland didn't protest and condemn the invasion the way Estonia had. She said Estonians suffered from "post-Soviet traumatic stress." In other words, our entire nation was psychologically damaged for protesting Russian aggression.

This form of blatant post-Soviet neo-Finlandization would be the attitude of Western Europe for nearly fifteen years.

By 2013 Russia already tried to stop Ukraine from signing the lowest level of cooperation with the EU, an Association Agreement, something the Balts had agreed to 20 years earlier. Then in 2014, after the Ukrainian Revolution of Dignity forced Putin's puppet Viktor Yanukovych to flee, Russia annexed Crimea and the FSB and GRU created fake "people's republics" in Eastern Ukraine.

The West, however, continued its neo-Finlandization. In March of 2014 I said at the opening panel of the Brussels Forum that not responding to the first case of aggression threatened the whole post-World War Two order forbidding changes of borders through force.

Italian foreign minister, and soon to become the EU's high representative for common foreign and security [policy], Federica Mogherini, snidely replied on stage, "What do you want to do, bomb Russia?"

The Obama administration again prohibited sending weapons to Ukraine, resulting in massive losses of Ukrainian lives fighting the well-supplied Russian army in Eastern Ukraine. Western Europe was no better, signing — despite Russia's annexation of Crimea — the Nord Stream 2 pipeline agreement, with Dmitri Medvedev, Angela Merkel and today's Secretary General of NATO Mark Rutte all gleefully grinning ear to ear.

Central and East Europeans, Balts, Poles, Czechs, on the other hand, were at best dismissed and often demonized as Russophobes, as if genuine experience with Russian behavior — actually knowing something about the country — had to be discounted. Some kind of romanticized idea of Dostoyevsky, Tchaikovsky and the "great Russian soul" dominated Western European foreign policy.

All of this only changed with the full-scale invasion of all of Ukraine on Estonian Independence Day, February 24, 2022. Suddenly Germany had a "Zeitenwende," a turning point, which turned out to be a nothing burger. No real increase in defense expenditure, no assistance to Ukraine unless the U.S. did it first, as we saw when Chancellor Scholz said no German tanks unless the U.S. sent Abrams tanks first.

But given the horrors we have seen — the brutal and savage war crimes the Russians continue to commit: torture and murder of Ukrainian POWs, rape and killing of civilians, indiscriminate bombing of hospitals and playgrounds with cluster munitions — the response of Europe has frankly been far short of what it should be.

What was positive in these past years is that Finland and Sweden ended respectively 80 and 215 years of neutrality and joined NATO, which has made our entire region far more secure.

At the same time this new security paradigm in the Baltic region has led to dramatically increased Russian hybrid or gray-zone attacks on Northern Europe: explosives placed in Lithuanian cargo planes, telecommunications and electricity cables under the Baltic Sea cut by ships transporting Russian oil, arson fires in Lithuania, Russian spies feeding strategic information in Poland, cyberattacks in all countries in the region, thugs hired by the GRU smashing the windows of Estonia's minister of the interior, GPS jamming leading to diverted and cancelled airline flights — the list goes on and on.

All this, Ladies and Gentlemen — escalating Russian aggression, European passivity and reluctance to take a firm stand — takes place in the context of a U.S. withdrawal from and at times outright rejection of fundamental American policies of the past 80 years.

Let's be honest. We all are beneficiaries of Pax Americana, the so-called "post-war settlement," the political, economic and military order the U.S. created at the end of World War Two. And in the past ten years, but especially in the past several months, it is coming to an end.

The post-World War Two settlement describes the U.S.-led set of rules of international behavior, accepted by all but the most rogue of nations, which shakily perhaps, since 1945 nonetheless prevented outright aggression in the Northern Hemisphere. It is premised on a loose set of principles, the most important one forbidding changes in borders via force or threat of force, included in the Charter of the UN in 1945 as a direct response to Germany's and Japan's wars of conquest that started World War Two. Pax Americana ruled both in transatlantic space but also in the Pacific and Oceania, but more broadly formed the basis of a generally peaceful 80 years in large swathes of the world, much as the post-Napoleonic Congress of Vienna set the rules for European countries from 1815 to 1914.

This was not merely a political order. All of it was created by the U.S. to prevent another World War, based on the lessons learned from the aftermath of the first world war, the chaos, economic collapse and rise of fascism in the 1920s and 1930s.

Post-war settlement milestones included:

• 1941 Atlantic Charter — no territorial aggrandizement, self-determination, restoration of self-government, reduction of trade restrictions, global cooperation, freedom from fear and want, freedom of the seas, disarmament of aggressor nations.
• 1943 United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration — something many of our parents and grandparents in DP camps after the war benefited from.
• 1944 Bretton Woods (World Bank, IMF).
• 1945 UN Charter — forbidding the use or threat of use of force to change borders, the most important axiom of international relations since that time.
• 1947 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) — later the WTO.
• 1948 Marshall Plan.
• 1948 Berlin Airlift.
• 1949 NATO (in response to the communist coups in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary in 1948).
• 1950 Coal and Steel Community (EEC/EU).
• Enlargement of the EEC to Greece, Spain and Portugal, bringing in formerly authoritarian states.
• 1975 CSCE/OSCE.
• Paris Charter — every country has the right to choose its security arrangements.

All these fundamental agreements and institutions have shaped the world we live in for the past 75 to 80 years. They were set up, with the exception of the Coal and Steel Community, by the United States — and even that with considerable nudging by the U.S.

On Europe's side, since the end of World War Two that left the continent in anarchic rubble, its answer to Pax Americana — indeed its implicit part of the deal granting the U.S. the lead in guaranteeing the peace throughout the Cold War — was to forswear power. Go ahead, get rich, but the security of Europe was to be led by the United States.

This has been the founding post-war catechism of what was then Western Europe. Eastern Europe, meanwhile, occupied by the Soviets, didn't have much choice in the matter until the collapse of communism in 1989-91.

Then came the anni miraculorum, those years of miracles. Eastern Europe became free. Russia was supposed to become a democracy. President George Bush declared a "Peace Dividend," meaning everyone could reduce defense spending. It was Kumbaya and La-La Land. Love, peace and Woodstock. We were all friends. Never mind that Yeltsin shelled his parliament, refused to withdraw troops from the Baltic states and invaded Chechnya. Communism was dead, and that meant Russia was now a good country and wouldn't harm a fly — let alone its neighbors.

As we in the Baltic countries became more prosperous, joined the EU and NATO, the U.S. became increasingly disenchanted with its role leading the West. While our three countries did raise defense expenditures to the 2 percent minimum agreed at the Wales NATO Summit in 2014, no one else really bothered — until the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Even then, not everyone, least of all the larger NATO countries.

The U.S., meanwhile, step by step backed off from the very order it had created and for decades urged the world to adopt. Its last major step expanding Pax Americana came in 2002 with the U.S. decision to support Baltic membership in NATO in 2004. The U.S. tried but failed to overcome German opposition in 2008 even to offer a Membership Action Plan to Ukraine and Georgia — a failure I am convinced gave a green light to the Russian invasion of Georgia. Thank you, Angela Merkel.

By 2009 we had Barack Obama saying — and I quote — "Don't do stupid shit," and forbidding military assistance to Georgia. We saw the same after 2014 and the annexation of Crimea, along with a hands-off attitude toward the Russian-German-French Minsk debacle that basically acceded to Russian aggression.

For a while, the Trump 1 administration did send armaments to Ukraine, but under Joe Biden and his National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, we saw an utter failure to take decisive steps against Russia. The mantra was "Ukraine must not lose," never "Ukraine must win." "Escalation management," a theoretical construct of so-called International Relations Theory, meant Ukraine did not get ATACMS missiles and, when the U.S. finally relented, they were limited in range. The U.S. even told Ukraine not to fire at Russian refineries, lest it drive up oil prices before the U.S. election.

Meanwhile, under Trump 2, we have seen a historic distancing from the post-war settlement. Already in February 2024, then-candidate Donald Trump said he would not assist allies that did not spend enough on defense and would encourage Russia "to do whatever the hell they want" to countries that "did not pay their bills."

This is a profound break with the past 75 years since the founding of NATO.

I will not delve into all the various polemical, at times contradictory and often mercurial statements by administration officials — whether public or in Signal chats. I will leave that to others. Nor will I discuss tariffs, though it's worth mentioning the U.S. has placed tariffs on Ukraine but not on Russia.

We don't need to do literary criticism. Where the U.S. is going regarding the prohibition of aggression and international law is clear from official policy. From this, Europe can deduce for itself the future of its security, its relationship with the U.S. and the future of NATO.

On February 24 — the third anniversary of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine — the United Nations General Assembly voted on two resolutions concerning the war.

The first, drafted by the EU, condemned Russia's actions and supported Ukraine's territorial integrity. It called for a commitment to "the sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity of Ukraine within its internationally recognized borders" and for accountability for crimes committed under international law, through "fair and independent investigations and prosecutions at national and international level."

The United States voted against this resolution, alongside Belarus, Burkina Faso, Burundi, the Central African Republic, North Korea and Russia. China and Cuba abstained.

A second development soon followed. After Ukrainian President Zelenskyy declined to sign an agreement to repay the U.S. for aid already donated and to grant the U.S. mining rights to 50 percent of Ukraine's mineral resources, the U.S. stopped providing military intelligence to Ukraine. Military equipment deliveries were halted. The U.S. firm Maxar, which had provided satellite imagery of the battlefield, ceased offering intelligence to Ukraine.

This sent chills through European militaries. They began to wonder about their dependence on U.S. technology — and what might happen if the U.S. decided to "turn it off" in future conflicts. Until then, few NATO members had seriously considered that the high-tech military hardware they relied on might be withheld or disabled. Suddenly, it became a genuine possibility.

A few weeks later, while promoting the new sixth-generation stealth fighter — the F-47 — President Trump announced he would sell allies a "toned-down version," meaning one with fewer capabilities.

Then, most directly, on March 29 the Washington Post published the U.S. Defense Department's nine-page Interim National Defense Strategic Guidance, which outlined administration policy toward Europe.

I quote from the Washington Post's report:

"Hegseth's guidance acknowledges that the United States is unlikely to provide substantial, if any, support to Europe in the case of Russian military advances, noting that Washington intends to push NATO allies to take primary defense of the region. The United States will support Europe with nuclear deterrence of Russia, and should only count on forces not required for homeland defense or China deterrence missions."

For all intents and purposes, then, NATO — according to this Department of Defense document — will be phased out. European allies will be promised the U.S. nuclear umbrella, but otherwise, we are on our own.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

We have come a long way. The Baltic States have done exceedingly well. Yet the world we thought we had entered — the West of international rule of law that we believed we had rejoined with our accession to NATO and the EU — no longer exists. Aggression and changes of borders by force are now seemingly allowed, or at least acquiesced to.

This, I need not elaborate, has profound implications for the future of the Baltic states. We have not faced such a precarious security environment since the last Russian troops left our countries in 1994.

We face a tough future in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. We will continue to need your help and support and your effective lobbying in Washington.

Since we are all Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians in our historical memories — and hence in our souls — we all know, as Ronald Reagan said almost 60 years ago:

"Freedom is a fragile thing and it's never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. And those in world history who have known freedom and then lost it have never known it again."

Thank you.

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