‘You’d be paranoid too’
When the Trump administration unveiled its plan to end the war in Ukraine in November, European leaders pushed back. France’s President Emmanuel Macron warned Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that the United States might “betray” his country. “The pressure must be on the aggressor, not on the victim,” Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s foreign-policy chief, said. “Rewarding aggression will only invite more of it.”
Washington wasn’t impressed. The new U.S. National Security Strategy dismissed “European officials who hold unrealistic expectations for the war perched in unstable minority governments.” A senior analyst at the RAND Corporation, a defense think tank, put it more bluntly: “The hand wringing from some across the pond … is a bit hard to stomach. … You cannot hope to shape outcomes if you’re sitting on the sidelines.”
So what are the Europeans actually doing?
In the northern reaches of the Continent, eight countries have drawn closer together in a formation called the Nordic-Baltic Eight: Denmark, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Sweden, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Immediately after Washington announced its Ukraine plan, their governments convened to coordinate a response. They’ve ramped up military spending, sent weapons to Ukraine, and integrated their command structures. NATO recently folded all eight into a single theatre of operations under U.S. command—even as Washington signals its readiness to pull troops from the rest of Europe.
Paul Taylor is a senior visiting fellow at the European Policy Centre in Brussels and a columnist for The Guardian. Taylor says the Nordic-Baltic Eight have more clout than their size would suggest—not through raw military power but through coordination. They caucus before EU and NATO summits. They share a threat perception that Western Europeans often dismiss, as suspected Russian sabotage of undersea cables has intensified in the Baltic Sea (Finnish authorities seized a vessel on New Year’s Eve after it allegedly severed a cable to Estonia). And they’re watching the forces Russia pulled from their borders to fight in Ukraine—wondering what’ll happen next when that war ends …
Gustav Jönsson: What exactly is the Nordic-Baltic Eight?
