Why a Trump win would alarm distant Baltic city

Our universities are dominated by self-designated Donald Trumps who have taken it upon themselves to protect the "family silver" from the "barbarians at the gate", says the writer.

Our universities are dominated by self-designated Donald Trumps who have taken it upon themselves to protect the "family silver" from the "barbarians at the gate", says the writer.

Published Jul 31, 2016

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The "bromance" between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin has reached new heights and is reason for concern, writes Peter Fabricius.

Surely no one is more nervous about the prospects of Donald Trump winning the US presidential elections in November than the burghers of Narva.

Narva is a small city in the far north-eastern corner of the Baltic state of Estonia, just across the border from Russia. If the three Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, are on the front line of what seems to be an emerging new cold war between the West and Russia, then Estonia is on the front line of the Baltic states and Narva is on the front line of Estonia.

The three Baltic states are former Soviet satellites, with significant ethnic Russian populations, for historical reasons, not least that Stalin sent many of their own populations to die in Siberia and replaced them with Russians. In Latvia, ethnic Russians constitute 26 percent of the total population, in Estonia 24percent and in Lithuania, 4.9percent.

Because of the peculiar history of Narva, 82 percent of its population are ethnic Russians.

These ethnic Russian populations are volatile elements in all the Baltic states. Some are agitating to be reunited with Mother Russia, drawing inspiration from Moscow’s recognition of the ethnic Russian enclaves of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia as independent states in 2008. And, of course, they have the example of Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and its military support for ethnic Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.

That recent history makes the Baltic states nervous. They joined Nato in 2004 to gain the security of its guaranteed military support from the larger members of the alliance if Russia did attack.

But this also made them lightning rods for Russia’s hostility towards Nato for what Moscow regards as the alliance’s aggression in pushing its membership right up to Russia’s borders.

Earlier this month, Nato moved to reassure the increasingly nervous Baltic states and Poland - also a “front-line state” - by deciding at its Warsaw summit to deploy a battalion of troops in each of those four states.

Yet Anders Linderberg, foreign affairs writer at Stockholm’s Aftonbladet newspaper, is not so sure about Nato’s commitment. He believes if Russia were to attack again, it would probably be against Narva, because of its vulnerable geography and its history.

He asks: “If Russia took Narva, would Nato intervene to take it back?”

Perhaps it would think it not worthwhile to go to war with Russia over one small city.

How much more pertinent would Linderberg’s question be if Trump were to become the next US president?

Trump told the Republican Party convention that if he were president, he'd recognise Russia’s annexation of Crimea and would not necessarily go to the defence of another Nato state, as the US is obliged to do under the Article 5 mutual defence pact.

This would depend on whether that Nato state had fulfilled its Nato obligation to spend at least 2 percent of its GDP on defence. Estonia, in fact, has reached that target, but Latvia and Lithuania haven’t.

Trump has also expressed his admiration for Putin, whom he regards as a strong man, like himself. Putin evidently reciprocates the sentiment.

This week the “bromance” between the two strong men seemed to rise to new heights. US intelligence agencies reportedly said they were pretty sure Russia had hacked into hundreds of e-mails from the Democratic national committee and given them to Wikileaks to publish.

This embarrassed the party by revealing the committee had for months been actively backing Hillary Clinton as the party’s presidential nominee, although it was supposed to be impartial.

The Democrats said Moscow was trying to sabotage Clinton’ s campaign to help Trump get elected.

And then, at a press conference, Trump issued an extraordinary public appeal to Russia to continue its cyber warfare by finding and leaking to the US media the controversial 30 000 missing e-mails that Clinton deleted from her server when she was secretary of state.

It was quite astounding that a presidential candidate could invite a foreign power - and an increasingly hostile one at that - to conduct a cyber attack on the US. This smacked of treason, some commentators said, although Trump later insisted he was joking.

Casting doubt on America’s willingness to come to the defence of its European allies is of course consistent with Trump’s general isolationism.

By his own admission he's an intuitive decision-maker who gets most of his knowledge of foreign affairs from the media.

One wonders if he has thought through the threat, even to America’s interests, in allowing the 70-year-old transatlantic alliance to unravel?

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