In July 1940, Vincas Krėvė-Mickievičius was summoned to a midnight meeting at the Soviet foreign ministry. Lithuania had already been forced to sign a “treaty of mutual assistance” with the USSR that had led to 20,000 Soviet troops being stationed on its territory. Now the country’s deputy prime minister was being presented with a new demand. A raging Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister, told him that he should “take a good look at reality and understand that in the future, small nations will have to disappear”. Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia were duly swiftly annexed by the Soviet Union while Finland fought a war for national survival.

The events of 1940 hang heavily over Baltic, a timely analysis by Oliver Moody. It is in the author’s own words “a book about the return of the ancient struggle with Russia for mastery of the Baltic, how the West can win it and how its outcome will be decisive for the future of Europe and the wider West”. In a series of well-researched essays that draw on his own reporting as a foreign correspondent and combine history, current politics and military strategy, Moody examines the various ways that the countries on the Baltic littoral have responded to the Russian menace.

If the Baltic states are nervous about the future, history suggests they have every reason to be. Although they are all now members of Nato and the EU, the west has not always proved a reliable ally in times of crises. As Moody says: “From the moment the three countries seized their independence at the end of the First World War to the point where they regained it at the start of the 1990s, politicians and diplomats across the west thought they were unviable at best and dangerously provocative at worst.”

By the time Krėvė-Mickievičius faced Molotov in 1940, the west had long washed its hands of the Baltic states. Britain warned the Estonians in the early 1920s that it would be unable to intervene on their behalf. London effectively handed the Baltic Sea over to Hitler with the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 1935. Nor did the west support the Baltic states’ push for independence from the USSR in the late 1980s. In thrall to Gorbymania, they feared it might undermine the position of Mikhail Gorbachev, the reformist Soviet president.

West Germany worried that the Baltic states’ aspirations would jeopardise its own reunification. Toomas Hendrik Ilves, a future president of Estonia, then running the Baltic desk at Radio Free Europe, the US-funded broadcaster then based in Munich, was confronted by a West German intelligence officer who demanded that he “tell those Balts and the Estonians to stop this nonsense about independence”. French president François Mitterrand complained: “We cannot endanger everything we have achieved just to help countries that have not had an existence of their own in 400 years.”

Would the west endanger everything to help the Baltic countries today? The question has acquired a new urgency since Donald Trump returned to the White House. The US president’s fondness for Russia and hostility towards the EU has sown doubts about America’s commitment to European security. Russia’s hybrid activities and President Vladimir Putin’s demand that Nato return to its pre-1997 borders has unnerved the region. Would western Europeans defend the Baltic states if Russian bombs rained on their cities?

The Baltic countries have acted decisively to boost their own resilience. Finland’s regular army of 8,500 soldiers plus 13,000 conscripts can be supplemented by 250,000 reservists in wartime, while a further 900,0000 have received military training. Its “red carpet” defence strategy hinges on raising the cost of an invasion for the aggressor on the basis that “even the biggest bear will not eat a porcupine”. Lithuania has turned itself a standard bearer for liberal democratic values. Latvia has grappled, controversially, with how to integrate its large ethnic Russian minority.

Yet other European countries are not nearly so well prepared for conflict with Russia. Three years after Olaf Scholz’s Zeitenwende, or epochal change, the state of the German armed forces remains pitiful. The army is an estimated 75,000 professional soldiers short of its obligation under Nato minimum capability requirements and lacks everything from basic kit to heavy equipment. And while Russia’s factories churn out up to five million shells a year for about $1,000 a piece, European countries manage about a third of that rate at quadruple the cost.

Could Nato even defend the Baltic states if called upon to do so? A final section of Moody’s book explores in some detail the alliance’s various military capabilities and strategies in the region. Two things become clear. The fact that the Baltic Sea has become, following the accession of Sweden and Finland, a “Nato lake” (albeit an increasingly toxic one, largely denuded of fish and covered in algae blooms) is unlikely to confer any decisive advantage in a war with Russia. And second, that the US is indispensable for deterrence and defence.

Even with the US onside, Nato would by some estimates have no more than 72 hours to defend the Suwalki Gap, the narrow corridor on the Polish-Lithuanian border that lies between the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad and Belarus, before Russia could close it off with a two-pronged offensive. A frontline state under attack might have to cling on for up to two weeks before reinforcements arrive in any useful numbers. Those reinforcements would be vulnerable to attack as they and their equipment made their way across Europe on trains and motorway convoys.

Inevitably, much of this military analysis is speculative and its interest value hinges on how likely you think a Russian assault on the Baltic states to be. Opinion is divided. The performance of the Russian military in Ukraine hardly suggests it is ready to open a new front. But Moody is clearly right when he says that “the best way to prevent a war is to be unmistakably capable of winning one”. European governments now seem to have grasped this, judging by recent moves to increase defence spending. Meanwhile his core argument that western Europe can learn from the way that Baltic countries have developed broad and deep resilience is persuasive.

Indeed, that is also the view of Joel Burke, author of Rebooting a Nation. He argues that all countries can learn from the “incredible rise” of Estonia which transformed itself in a generation into a tech hub and undisputed leader in e-government. Starting with the success of Skype, the video-calling platform that was sold to eBay for $2.6bn in 2005, Estonia today has built a thriving tech ecosystem. It has the most tech start-ups per capita in Europe with 10 unicorns — start-ups valued at more than $1bn — built in the country or by Estonian founders.

This success hardly seemed likely in the aftermath of The Singing Revolution, so-called because the push for independence was conducted via Estonian folk festivals. “The situation for the fledgling Estonian state post-independence was desperate. Setting up the infrastructure necessary to deliver services for a new country is hard. Doing so with gangland-style violence in the capital, an economy in chaos, an occupying force numbering in the thousands still stationed across the country and the remains of a corrupt and sclerotic Soviet government bureaucracy is something else entirely.” Estonia became known as “the wild east” and Tallinn was nicknamed Metallinn as looting turned the country into one of the world’s top exporters of copper, brass and tin.

What transformed the country’s fortunes was a combination of radical free market shock therapy plus the embrace of technology. For a country with few natural resources, a small population thinly spread over a large area and limited state capacity, technology was a logical way to deliver public services and accelerate economic development. Every citizen was given a digital ID at birth, as the key to accessing government services online, 99 per cent of which are now online. Meanwhile the Tiger Leap campaign promoted technological literacy in schools. As former president Lennart Meri put it: “The situation may be shit, but it’s our fertiliser for the future.”

Burke, an American who previously worked in Tallinn’s tech sector before becoming a policy adviser in Washington, argues that Estonia offers a glimpse of a potential future — “one that may help save the West from what seems now to be an imminent decline into irrelevance if something isn’t dramatically changed in how government operates”. Even if some of his later chapters indulge in slightly jarring tech-bro libertarianism, his account of Estonia’s transformation is very readable. And he is right on the need for western governments to embrace reform. Indeed, the current situation in most countries today provides plenty of fertiliser.

Baltic: The Future of Europe by Oliver Moody John Murray £16.99, 384 pages

Rebooting a Nation: The Incredible Rise of Estonia, E-Government and the Startup Revolution by Joel Burke Hurst £24.99, 304 pages

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