afford the expense of a robust conventional force. It was not a superpower and could not bring armed might to bear except on its borders. It could not keep forces in the field in a prolonged conflict. But Russia had maintained and modernized a powerful nuclear arsenal of hundreds of weapons that could be launched from land-based aircraft, silos, and submarines.
The United States, still the dominant global power in 2025, was less so compared to ten or fifteen years earlier. As the federal debt reached $24 trillion, politicians had failed to staunch the borrowing or limit the growth of entitlement programs. Debt service and spending that the law required tightened their choke hold on the defense budget.
The portion of the budget that the Navy devoted to shipbuilding had been preserved, not increased. But the foreseeable expenses of replacing a fleet built during the Reagan era had shredded the admirals’ sober long-range shipbuilding plans and left them in tatters.
For example, the first of the Ohio-class nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarines (SSBNs) had been commissioned forty-five years earlier. American military planners held fast to the idea that powerful, quick response and/or undetectable nuclear weapons would help discourage an enemy from launching a first strike. So land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, land-based long-range bombers, and boomers remained the triad that, it was hoped, would deter an enemy from launching a nuclear attack against the United States.
The new SSBNs cost more than $7 billion each, more than half the cost of an aircraft carrier, but not by much. Arguing that ballistic missile–carrying subs performed a national mission rather than a seapower one, the Navy had tried to persuade the administration and Congress that additional money should be appropriated to build the new boats—without success. Other programs were slowed or cancelled during the decades it would take to replace the fourteen aged SSBNs with twelve new ones. Congress passed legislation that allowed the number of aircraft carriers to drop from eleven to eight. It accepted the Navy’s proposal to stop buying two new attack subs each year to replace the aging Los Angeles–class boats. By 2025, the U.S. attack sub force had shrunk in a single decade from fifty-three boats to fewer than forty.
Only one carrier was built during the decades it took to modernize the boomers. The refueling of others was delayed as they were tied up dockside. The United States, at least for the indefinite future, could keep only two aircraft carriers at sea on sporadic patrols. The same cost-cutting measures were applied to the attack submarine force, with parallel results. Only thirteen attack boats could be put to sea.
America’s combatant commanders were nervous. Four-star admirals or generals, they commanded the air, sea, and ground forces that were deployed around the world to keep conflict away from the borders of the United States, defend vital American interests, and protect allies. China’s navy had not only surpassed America’s in numbers of ships but had also become a global presence, with constant patrols in the western reaches of the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, and the entire length of the Western Hemisphere’s Pacific coast. The few ships that remained in the U.S. 6th Fleet in the Mediterranean had been recalled home when its handful of ballistic-missile defense ships were judged redundant, once defenses against Iran’s nuclear-tipped medium- and intercontinental-range missiles became operational in Romania. This made sense to budget cutters only. Ships at sea are harder to target than fixed land-based missile batteries.
The diminished U.S. Pacific Command was able to keep a single aircraft carrier battle group in the Western Pacific. While serviceable in peacetime, a lone U.S. carrier would have very limited usefulness if an incident between China and Taiwan or Japan turned nasty. Long-standing allies cast about for other ways to protect themselves. In Taiwan, one political party was actively engaged in reunification talks with the mainland. China had secretly offered to ensure South Korea’s security if Seoul would send the American military packing, and the Blue House was thinking it over. Japanese politicians were divided between those who wanted to improve relations with China and others who sought to nullify the constitution’s Article 9, which outlawed war as a means of resolving international disputes.
Vladimir Putin had just turned seventy-three; just a few years older than Nikita Khrushchev when he placed medium-range nuclear missiles in Cuba, and three years younger than Leonid Brezhnev when he was gathered to his fathers. Putin remained firmly in command and had taken to sky-diving, which impressed his countrymen. All of Ukraine had long since been absorbed into Russia. So had bordering Transnistria, the slender belt—a bit larger than Rhode Island—inhabited by Russophiles, which once separated Moldova from Ukraine. In each case, the West objected strenuously, as it had when Russia invaded Crimea. Sanctions were applied, but always ended up leaking, then bursting. European dependence on Russian oil and natural gas overcame other concerns.
NATO, however, had strengthened its military presence in the Baltic States and Central Europe. After the Obama administration’s 2009 tergiversation, Polish and Czech leaders would not risk political capital to argue publicly for acceptance of defenses against Russian ballistic missiles on their territory. But Romania would—and did. NATO conducted annual exercises from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea.
The other side of the ledger was darker. Despite promises, only one of the Western European alliance members lived up to their NATO defense spending obligations, the U.K. But Britain had long since abandoned its alliance gold standard, the ability to deploy an entire expeditionary division. The Royal Navy was down to a few attack subs and fewer ballistic-missile boats. The surface fleet had nine ships available to patrol the Channel and parts of the North Sea. Two carriers built only a decade earlier had been mothballed.
Putin knew the time was right to crack NATO’s atrophied spine. He did not have to cast about for an achievement to crown his twenty-five-year reign as Russia’s supreme leader. NATO’s demise would allow gains in Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, the Balkans, and Transnistria to be extended. The excuse for invading Ukraine applied equally to the Baltic States: the million or so ethnic Russians who lived in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania must be protected. Returning the Baltic States to Russian control would shatter NATO and make smooth the highway to recreating an imperium in Europe. Except that this time, it might reach the Atlantic, an accomplishment that would dwarf Stalin’s seizure of Eastern Europe at the end of World War II.
In mid-2024, Russian foreign intelligence agents began to contact pro-Russian intellectuals and writers in the Baltic States, and small think tanks sprang up in Tallinn, Riga, and Vilnius. Staffs were hired. They turned out articles that explained the “facts” of growing discrimination against ethnic Russians. Friendly reporters repeated the untruths in their journals. Other sympathizers whose pro-Russian credentials had been validated years earlier began to press for solidarity among ethnic Russians in the Baltic States’ trade unions. Websites appeared with fabricated stories of mistreatment, arrests, and harassment directed against ethnic Russians. Moscow contacted ethnic Russians and offered them Russian passports, citizenship, and higher pensions than those that the Baltic States offered.
Russian agents initiated a low-level bombing campaign against ethnic Russian–owned small businesses that heated up the political warfare. The bombings “proved” the dangers that ethnic Russians faced. Other crimes, such as kidnappings and the occasional murder, received international attention. From Moscow to Vilnius, the pro-Russian social media called for “measures” to protect ethnic Russians in the Baltic States. Members of the Duma howled, and eventually Vladimir Putin felt obliged to weigh in.
Putin warned the Baltic leaders to stop what he termed provocations or face the consequences. At the same time, he put the Baltic Sea Fleet on a heightened alert status, mobilized three infantry brigades, and moved one Spetsnaz battalion with helicopter transports and an armored division into the Pskov oblast near the Estonian border.
The U.S. State Department and foreign ministries in London, Paris, and Warsaw issued démarches, and NATO’s general secretary called an emergency meeting. His public statement surprised the foreign policy establishments of most alliance members by reminding Putin
