NATO BASES MAKE ESTONIA A TARGETIn conversation with Rein Müllerson, independent Estonia’s first Depty Foreign Minister and former Adviser to Mikhail Gorbachev
NATO makes Estonia a target. That is the judgment of Rein Müllerson, Estonia’s first deputy foreign minister in 1991–92 after independence and, before that, an international-law adviser to Mikhail Gorbachev. The Peacemonger is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Müllerson rejects the flattering line from Anatol Lieven that he is “the only sane Estonian”. Plenty of people at home, he says, regret how bad relations with Russia have become. The problem is that the political elite is strongly anti-Russian — some by long habit, many because Russophobia is now the opportunistic position — and open dissent carries risks. Sanctions have bitten Estonia hard; energy and food prices have risen at least as sharply as in Russia. A small state on the alliance’s edge is paying for a sanctions policy it cannot control, ironically, driven forward by a former Estonian Prime Minister in Brussels. The sharper point is military, and he borrows it from Robert Cooper’s account of the Cuban missile crisis. Soviet missiles in Cuba would have increased Soviet security and decreased Cuba’s, because the launchers would have been the first American target. Transfer that logic to the Baltic states. Significant NATO forces do not make Estonia safer in a war with Russia. They designate it a primary target. Estonia, he thinks, is luckier than it looks precisely because it does not yet host the kind of base that would put it in the firing line. Latvia is in a similar position. Lithuania is different, because of Kaliningrad and the Polish border. None of this, in his view, means Moscow has a strategic interest in invading Estonia. If fact, he sees no intent in Moscow to do so. On the Ukraine war itself he is equally unfashionable. The Russian operation, he argues, began as a limited attempt to force Ukraine back to the Minsk agreements of 2015, not as a plan to conquer the country. Kyiv had already killed the political half of Minsk in public, telling Polish radio there would be no devolution. Merkel and Hollande later described the years after 2014 as time bought for Ukraine to arm. The Istanbul drafts of April 2022 partly tracked Minsk. Russia, he says, now treats a bare ceasefire as a trap it has already fallen into once. Am end to hostilities only becomes possible within a wider settlement that covers neutrality and non-NATO status. Russia will not accept anything short of that and will not do so unless the west inflicts a strategic defeat on Russia, which appears unlikely. The Ukraine conflict is personal to Rein as he has friends in both countries. In 2014 he published “Ukraine: A Victim of Geopolitics,” arguing that a country divided by Habsburg, Polish-Lithuanian and Russian history would split if it were dragged too far west or too far east. He treats NATO for Ukraine and Georgia as a Russian red line, cites Bill Burns’s warnings from the embassy in Moscow, and describes the 2014 change of power as visibly backed by American officials. He expected Moscow to strike at American interests in Europe rather than launch the operation it chose, and he says he was wrong. Two older stories are instructive. Under Gorbachev he was told, on the Kuril Islands, not to produce the usual brief in which our case is strong and theirs is weak. Gorbachev wanted the Japanese points set out properly. At a Shevardnadze meeting packed with KGB generals, Müllerson argued for letting Soviet citizens petition the UN Human Rights Committee, watched the room conclude his career was over, and was summoned the next day to take the Soviet seat on the Committee. History shows that the winds of change inside of the Soviet Union at that time turned in his favour. He thinks Europe is preparing for a war with Russia precisely because its leaders are unable or unwilling to see that the wind direction has changed, and not in their favour. The only way to avert the devastation of war is if there is a seismic political shift in the distribution of power in Europe’s major powers which for now appears unlikely. Not because voter intentions are changing, but because globalist political elites will do everything in their power to remain in charge, whatever the cost. You can watch the full interview here: Wherever you are in the world, whatever your nationality and religion, I wish you much peace. Invite your friends and earn rewardsIf you enjoy The Peacemonger, share it with your friends and earn rewards when they subscribe. |