OMG you guys!
Now that Trump is president, does that mean that Vladimir Putin can invade the Baltic countries!?!?
No, no it does not.
A year and a half ago I laid out three reasons why Putin is never going to touch Estonia,
Latvia or Lithuania.
Reason number three was the fact that these countries are all members of the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Now, since I made that video, Donald Trump has been elected President of the United States and
he has famously expressed some skepticism about NATO.
Some people think that he might even abandon the organization.
I think this risk is oversold.
Trump has hired a bunch of generals, and they all know that NATO is valuable.
But even if the United States gave up on the alliance, I still think there’s no way Putin
will invade the Baltic countries.
Here are three reasons why…
1.Oil.
When Russia annexed part of Ukraine in March of 2014 a barrel of oil cost 104 dollars.
Today it costs just under 50 dollars.
For over a year now I’ve been pointing out that these oil prices are not going to recover
any time soon.
In fact they’re probably going to go lower.
The rest of the world is now waking up to this reality.
In 2017 Russia cut its military budget by 25%.
A lower oil price also means that the rest of Russia’s economy is dramatically weaker.
Russia is in no shape to undertake a wider war, and oh boy would an invasion of the Baltics
lead to a wider war.
2.
The Frozen Conflicts
Russia has a number of “Frozen conflicts” on its periphery.
Both Ukraine and Georgia would love the opportunity to escalate the conflicts in their countries.
They have been held back from doing so by the US and the EU.
If Russia invaded the Baltics, both these countries would get full support from the
West.
Most of Eastern Europe has a very grim history of Russian occupation.
If Putin stepped up those fears with a Baltic invasion, Poland in particular would be guaranteed
to get belligerent.
Who knows, maybe Romania would intervene to boot the Russians out of Transdniestria in
Moldova as well.
Russia doesn’t have a large presence in Nagorno-Karabakh, but that conflict would
almost certainly spin out of control if Russia was distracted.
This, combined with Georgia’s actions would be guaranteed to have spill over effects in
Chechnya and Dagestan.
A Russian invasion of the Baltics might lead to a disintegration of Russia itself, and
it would certainly lead to the fall of Putin’s regime.
3.
Germany
This is the big one.
For 70 years Germany has been a strongly pacifist country.
The German Eagle has been slumbering, largely out of Guilt.
A Russian invasion of the Baltics would wake that eagle up.
US policy makers find it easy to ignore history.
The Russians can’t.
They know that a militarized Germany is the largest potential threat they face.
Everybody knows that Hitler invaded Russia in 1941.
What few appreciate is the fact that an initially more successful invasion a century earlier
had a large German component as well.
We tend to look at Napoleon’s army as mostly French, but it wasn’t just that.
Almost a third was German, and if you add the Poles to that number, Napoleon’s army
was almost half Eastern European.
If the Russians invaded the Baltics, Germany would have to re-militarize.
Russia will do anything it can to avoid this result.
So to sum up: NATO is unlikely to fall apart, but even if it did, Russia can’t attack
the Baltics.
Thanks to the fall in the oil price, they don’t have the resources necessary to fight
a larger European war.
And that’s exactly what they’d get the second they invaded Estonia.
As much as Russia hates NATO and the EU, they’d hate a newly militaristic Germany infinitely
more.
The Baltic countries are perfectly safe.
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