‘They Will Die in Tallinn’: Estonia Girds for War With Russia

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Pretty much no one in the Western alliance is looking forward to the next few days.

NATO heads of state are due to meet Wednesday in Brussels beneath the disinterested gaze of President Donald Trump before he jets off to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. In between, British Prime Minister Theresa May—who faces a pending collision with the brick wall of Brexit—meets first with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and then with Trump. It’s a rapid-fire series of what would usually be staid diplomatic photo-ops that could, in this iteration, seriously disrupt the international order that has made the United States a global superpower since the end of World War II.

While the president and other Republican envoys make reassuring entreaties to the Kremlin, Trump continues to view himself as the disruptor of NATO. In the weeks leading up to the NATO summit, the president again berated America’s allies for their defense spending. To push back, supporters of the trans-Atlantic framework that is the architecture of American power in the world are on an information blitz, heralding increased defense spending across the alliance.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/07/10/they-will-die-in-tallinn-estonia-girds-for-war-with-russia-218965

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“Modern warfare is asymmetric in nature,” Uhtegi told me. “It is difficult to find the enemy forces on the ground. It is difficult to identify them, fix their position and destroy them. But this is what we must prepare for here. Like Afghanistan, Iraq—but here.”