The writer is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and an adviser to Disruptive Industries, a threat intelligence company
President Donald Trump and his lieutenants habitually command Europe to do more for its own security. But there’s already a place where European countries successfully look after themselves: the Baltic Sea. The mini ocean has plenty of threats (think ghost ships and cut cables). Yet so self-sufficient are its countries that the US military barely matters. This is the future America faces around the world.
In October 2023, the Chinese-owned container ship Newnew Polar Bear performed a mysterious trip during which several undersea installations in the Baltic Sea were damaged. First, the Balticconnector gas pipeline connecting Finland and Estonia lost pressure, then a cable sustained mysterious damage. Authorities discovered that another cable had been damaged hours earlier.
A few months after that, the Joint Expeditionary Force — a regional military grouping comprising the UK, the Nordic nations, the Baltic nations and the Netherlands — announced a new initiative to track precisely such threats to Baltic Sea infrastructure. Last month, after a further string of suspicious cut cables, the group announced it was activating the initiative, called Nordic Warden. Just a week later, Nato unveiled Baltic Sentry, an operation with naval vessels patrolling the waters above undersea cables and pipelines.
Although Baltic Sentry is a Nato operation, it was conceived by Baltic Sea leaders at a meeting in Helsinki. Like Nordic Warden, it is an entirely European undertaking.
These initiatives are manifestations of the Baltic Sea nations’ increasing maritime collaboration. “In 2006, we decided to pool resources to get a better picture of threats in the Baltic Sea,” retired Rear Admiral Anders Grenstad — at the time chief of the Swedish Navy — told me. “And the co-operation has grown ever since. Back in 2006, it was mostly about detecting smuggling, but now this collaboration has turned out to be even more useful.”
Indeed, after the Newnew Polar Bear managed to sail off to Russian waters, thus escaping the reach of local investigators, the Baltic Sea nations enhanced their incident-response collaboration. They strengthened protocols for crises short of war. Finland has also joined Nato and so has Sweden, which has the region’s second-largest navy (after Germany), further easing co-operation.
The Swedish Navy needs more ships — so do all the Baltic Sea countries. Poland, using some of the more than 4 per cent of GDP it spends on the military, is already increasing its fleet. Others are also making acquisitions.
But what matters is that they have cobbled together a Baltic Sea maritime presence that — while not yet large enough — doesn’t depend on America.
Yes, the US Navy regularly participates in drills such as the annual Baltic Operations exercise Baltops. But on a daily basis, the nations look after their waters. Making America redundant was never their intention; they just knew that constabulary services in their region were not a top US Navy priority. If Trump were to announce tomorrow that America is pulling out of the Baltic Sea, little would change. One might even ask whether anyone would notice.
This approach is likely to extend elsewhere as allies assemble enough resources (and some form of nuclear umbrella extended by Britain or France) to render the US good-to-have rather than need-to-have. Now that Trump and vice-president JD Vance have forcefully told Europe’s nations to look after themselves, they’re making haste.
But Trump may not like the outcome. America’s power derives from the fact that adversaries fear its military and allies need it — and therefore defer to Washington on crucial national security matters. If Washington needs diplomatic back-up and its allies shrug their shoulders, has the US succeeded?
