One of the great canards of our time is that the Baltic states are indefensible. Although the reasons for making this argument are rarely spelled out, they revolve around the presumption that Russia not only enjoys local conventional superiority, but also that NATO cannot and often implicitly should not defend them and thereby make a Russian-launched war a protracted one.
Few proponents of this argument bother to perform a true military analysis of the situation. While it is true that Moscow has enjoyed real superiority in the theater, NATO’s overwhelmingly superior capability if mobilized highlights the real problem with this argument. It either assumes or implicitly recommends a loss of will for NATO and a refusal to honor its commitment in the belief that Russia can quickly achieve a fait accompli that would render NATO counteraction ineffective or pointless, and would risk nuclear war. And of course, the latter alternative is simply unthinkable. Therefore we should simply give up the game.
