In the not-unforeseeable event that Russia might renew its claims to dominance in the Baltics, does NATO membership in hand really offer a meaningful security guarantee? Put starkly, will German and British and American soldiers die to defend Vilnius? Would the Western great powers risk nuclear confrontation over Latvian independence? Unlikely. Such a logical conclusion might proliferate through the alliance more broadly, undermining NATO’s entire raison d’etre. If an alliance predicated upon the claim that an attack on one is an attack on all cannot credibly maintain that guarantee in the face of the only likely scenarios that might invoke it, what is the point of that alliance’s continued existence? NATO might become a dead letter or, more likely, a marginal institution-of-convenience, used only as an occasional fig leaf for Bosnia-type interventions where only secondary national interests are implicated.
