TALLINN, Estonia — In the summer of 1982, President Ronald Reagan declared that the United States would observe “Baltic Freedom Day.” The proclamation turned a grim anniversary — the Soviet Union’s mass deportation of Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian nationals away from their historic homelands began on June 14, 1941 — into an occasion to affirm “our hope that the blessings of liberty will one day be part of the national life” of three European peoples oppressed by Kremlin despots. That gesture, among many other policies, helped to secure for Reagan the admiration and affection of Central and Eastern European nations in the decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Forty-three years later, the Estonian general responsible for NATO’s frontier with Russia feels that something has changed. “I’m one of the few who is publicly still saying that Americans are our friends,” Gen. Andrus Merilo, who leads the Estonian Defense Forces, said during an interview in his office. “Which is strange, because they are. They still are.”
Granted, U.S. leaders have long encountered a strain of anti-American sentiment among Western Europeans. During a diplomatic tour of Western Europe before the 1982 NATO summit, French protesters accused Reagan of “fascism,” and West German authorities feared that “a suicide commando” might try to assassinate the American leader in Bonn. Yet the relative loneliness of Merilo’s confidence suggests that some combination of anxiety and frustration with Washington has taken hold even among the European allies most inclined to align with U.S. foreign policy initiatives. Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin has bragged that he will “finish … off” the Ukrainians, while the Kremlin oversees a military reform designed to “develop military capabilities sufficient to launch a limited military action against one or several NATO countries,” as Lithuanian security services suggested in their latest annual report.
“It’s extremely dangerous that we have problems between Europe and [the] U.S.,” Merilo said. “Russia is the near-term threat. They’re building up military abilities, at the same time [that] we are basically, you know, killing, [by] ourselves, the good alliance between the United States and Europe.”
Those tensions do not exist “on the military level,” the general emphasized: “Militarily, there is no difference. We see the threats the same way. We see the solutions in the same way.”
What Merilo called “political frictions” arise from a series of distinct yet overlapping questions haunting the trans-Atlantic alliance in the months leading up to the NATO Summit in The Hague, centered on President Donald Trump’s desire to broker a ceasefire in Ukraine and perhaps normalize U.S. relations with Russia. In the first few months of Trump’s presidency, European officials and Russia hawks on Capitol Hill feared that Trump, faced with a choice of coercing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into a deal on Moscow’s terms or trying to overcome Putin’s recalcitrance, might decide that the path of least resistance runs over Kyiv. That fear has eased somewhat in recent weeks, but Western policymakers still wonder if he will continue to authorize the supply of weaponry to Ukraine, much less apply economic pressure to Russia, in the event that he despairs of brokering a deal. In parallel, Trump put the European Union in the crosshairs of his on-again, off-again trade war, while his possessive rhetoric regarding Canada and Greenland has stoked outrage and alarm across the alliance.
“Basically, Europe and [the] U.S. work very hard to break the trust that was built throughout the decades of combined efforts against different challenges,” Merilo warned in a blunt rebuke to politicians on both sides of the Atlantic. “We have built up the relationship for 80 years, but now, it’s only [been a] few months, and we are close [to being] split [in] two different directions. … So we have to now think back — what went wrong? What actually must be done that we will restore the coherence between Europe and [the] U.S.?”
Failing that, Western politicians might yield to Putin a strategic victory far beyond his power in the absence of such self-destructive behavior within NATO. Two months before the full-scale invasion, Russian officials published a so-called draft treaty that functioned as an ultimatum to Western allies, including a demand that “NATO facilities … be rolled back,” as a senior Russian diplomat put it, to its 1997 borders — the period prior to NATO’s admission of Central and Eastern European countries such as Poland, Hungary, Czechia, and the Baltic states. Estonian officials believe that Putin expected to conquer Ukraine quickly and then, from a position of daunting strength, press those demands upon Western leaders unprepared for conventional war and perhaps intimidated by Russia’s nuclear saber-rattling. “Without Ukrainian success, I think we would be already in the war,” Merilo said.
Instead, the war turned into a quagmire of immense cost to Russia, in human, economic, and geopolitical terms: Russian forces have taken “approximately 950,000 casualties (killed and wounded),” according to recent British defense intelligence estimates, while Sweden and Finland sprinted into NATO, joining the trans-Atlantic alliance after two centuries of neutrality. Yet Putin continues to demand “post-conflict Ukrainian neutrality, authority over the size of Ukraine’s armed forces, and a further partitioning of the Ukrainian state,” according to the 2025 Worldwide Threat Assessment released by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency in May. If Trump’s effort to end the conflict in Ukraine produces anything like such an outcome, Merilo believes, Putin will renew his larger ultimatum to NATO.
“One very likely scenario is that if somebody says, ‘OK, the areas [that] Russia has now forcefully occupied will be [Russia’s],’ which means that some kind of restrictions will be placed on Ukraine that they cannot launch any counteroffensive to restore their territorial integrity, that’s enough for the Russians to say, ‘OK, let’s pull out 50% of our current force because we don’t need [them in Ukraine]. Let’s use these 300,000 to 350,000 troops somewhere else,’” Merilo said. “Those are not just soldiers. They’re trained, equipped, ready, and experienced units. After that, you can load them on trains to go to the next location. [Russia] can build up a new dilemma, somewhere else. Is it in the Baltic Sea region? Is it in Finland? Or somewhere else? It doesn’t matter.”
Perhaps that sounds alarmist, given Russia’s struggles on Ukrainian battlefields. Yet Putin has organized Russia’s economy around the war effort and imposed draconian restrictions on civil society since 2022 — measures that will be difficult to change without risking internal instability, Western officials and observers suggest. And if the admission of Sweden and Finland into NATO, as well as the belated increases in European defense spending, portend a fortified northern European wing of the alliance, those positive developments raise the prospect that Putin will perceive a “window of opportunity” to try to intimidate the allies over “the two coming years,” as Swedish Defense Research Agency Deputy Research Director Carolina Vendil Pallin said during a session of the Lennart Meri Conference in Estonia last month.
“So for Russia, if they want to push us into a new European security order, their window of opportunity is perhaps now, rather than three or five years down the line,” Pallin told me on the sidelines of the conference. “We often start with a question: ‘Will they attack the Baltic states?’ Just the fact that you have a considerable military power could influence our policy decision-making. … The Russian analysis could be that they don’t even need to [attack] … they could push us into deals that we weren’t ready to accept earlier.”
The prevalence of those misgivings sets the stage for an uncomfortable, paradoxical summit in The Hague. NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte predicts that the allies will commit to “a higher defense spending target of in total 5%” of GDP. Rutte’s team wants this target to reserve 3.5% of GDP for “hard military spending … and 1.5% on related spending … to be reached by 2032.” On the other hand, NATO allies will not make meaningful progress on talks to develop a strategy to contain Russia. Instead, NATO officials find themselves waiting to see how much of the U.S. military presence Trump will withdraw from Europe. “They haven’t discussed it with us,” an Estonian official told reporters in May. “Hopefully, the American drawdown is going to be gradual and coordinated with European countries.”
Trump’s team has sent mixed signals during his first months in office. Ambassador Matthew Whitaker, the new U.S. envoy to NATO, said during an appearance at the Lennart Meri Conference that the U.S. military drawdown would be done in a way that does “not allow any security gaps in this alliance.” For some American officials, the very fact of European vulnerability reflects the diminishing value of the trans-Atlantic alliance. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth expressed his “loathing of European free-loading” in leaked Signal texts, and some Defense Department officials have floated the idea (since scuppered) of ceding the position of supreme allied commander Europe.
“In practice, I suspect, when they get into it, they’ll realize that it maybe doesn’t make that much sense to do major force posture movements because you’ve got large Army ground formations in Europe, which are well suited for a land theater,” Atlantic Council Vice President Matthew Kroenig said on the sidelines of the conference. “Where the heck are you going to put them in the Indo-Pacific, which is a maritime and air domain?”
In any case, European complaints about Trump’s provocative rhetoric are undercut by their refusal to fulfill their obligations as allies in the absence of his alarming rhetoric. “I’m not a fan of President Trump … but the unfortunate fact is that it actually took Donald Trump being president again before defense [budgets] started actually rising in Europe,” a senior Baltic official said.
So far, at least, Trump’s disruptive approach to the war in Ukraine and trans-Atlantic relations permits a wide range of possible futures. It is theoretically possible “to use Russia’s depleted state to its advantage, seeking a detente with Moscow that disadvantages Beijing,” as Wess Mitchell, who led the State Department’s European and Eurasian affairs bureau for two years during Trump’s first presidency, argued in a recent Foreign Affairs essay. That strategy would aim to block Russia’s ambitions in Europe but encourage the Kremlin to look east — that is, “resist” Putin’s demands for “American concessions in eastern NATO states, which would confirm Russia’s westward vector,” while perhaps “lift[ing] restrictions preventing Asian allies from offering investment alternatives to China in Russia’s eastern territories if Moscow meets U.S. demands on Ukraine.” Russia and China believe they have a strong shared interest in weakening the U.S., but this flexible combination of measures, Mitchell suggested, might incentivize Putin to pursue priorities that irritate Chinese President Xi Jinping.
To reorient Russian foreign policy in such a way, Putin might have to stop invoking Czar Peter’s 1704 victory in the second Battle of Narva (in present-day Estonia) as a historical precedent for his ambitions. To that end, Estonian officials argued, Western officials need to persuade Putin that “a reset with relations with the West is unrealistic.” Not only do they want the U.S. and Europe to reject Russia’s demands about the future of NATO, but Baltic leaders argued that the allies should seize the approximately $300 billion of Russian central bank reserves currently frozen in Western banks. In parallel, Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) have co-authored a major new sanctions bill that would impose “not less than … 500%” tariffs on countries that import Russian products, especially oil and gas. That legislation has 82 co-sponsors.
“[The Graham-Blumenthal bill is] the sort of thing that we believe we should be doing to get Putin to understand time is no longer on his side; a bilateral deal with the Americans always provides them with the hope that they might be able to negotiate [a] new Yalta with someone,” an Estonian official, referring to the 1945 agreement in which the U.S. and the United Kingdom acquiesced to Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, told journalists in a closed-door briefing last month. “This war will end when one side or the other realizes that the strategy they’re pursuing is no longer viable.”
From that perspective, special envoy for Ukraine and Russia Keith Kellogg’s statement in March that Trump wants to “reset relations with Russia” provides Putin with all too much encouragement. So, too, does his remark, in a recent ABC News interview, that Putin has “a fair concern” about NATO admitting new members in Eastern Europe.
“They want to control all of Ukraine. They don’t want to see security guarantees for Ukraine. They want a crack, now, in the sanctions mechanism, and they want a new security order where they can push back NATO in Europe,” Pallin said in an interview. “The Russians are extremely skillful negotiators, not to be underestimated.”
If the negotiations result in a detente on terms that enable Putin to rebuild a Russian empire in Europe, with China’s support, then Trump risks enacting a policy analogous not to Henry Kissinger’s famous attempt to drive a wedge between China and the Soviet Union but rather to Western policies toward China in the 1990s, when the U.S. and its allies enabled a hostile regime to grow into a major geopolitical adversary. And, in the meantime, China seeks to exploit the apparent rift between the U.S. and European governments, according to Baltic observers.
“We see a more active China in Europe,” Gabrielius Landsbergis, the Lithuanian foreign minister from 2020 to 2024, told the Lennart Meri Conference. “And what is even worse … we see European countries actually more receptive to the seduction of China entrepreneurs, the Chinese government, whatever they have to offer. … You just take a look at the European South, where politicians are saying … ‘Our phone calls are just not being received [in Washington], while you just make a call to Beijing and you’re being received.’”
For now, Trump’s “frustration” with Putin’s “unreasonableness,” as Kellogg put it, tends to encourage observers who hope that the U.S. will apply economic pressure to Putin and sell weapons to Ukraine. And yet, “there are camps,” as Kroenig noted, in Trump’s administration competing for different policy trajectories. And, in this administration, those debates can lead to dramatic announcements and rapid changes, as evidenced by the rapid evolution of his trade war policies in April. Throughout the weekend after “Liberation Day,” senior administration officials offered competing accounts of the purpose of the policy. Some characterized the tariffs as an attempt to amass leverage in eventual negotiations aimed at “improved burden-sharing” between the U.S. and its allies, and others insisted that “this is not a negotiation” but rather an epoch-making move to ensure that goods sold to Americans are built by Americans. (“There are conflicting narratives because everybody’s got an opinion,” Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Stephen Miran said, five days after Liberation Day, when asked why Trump advisers were giving contradictory accounts of the policy’s purpose.) Two days later, in response to hair-raising tremors in the bond markets, Trump paused the tariffs on most countries.
For Merilo, that sequence of economic events suggests that Trump’s team is making “emotion-based” decisions without “think[ing] through” its plans in advance. “It indicates that the U.S. does not have any long-term strategy,” the Estonian general said. “They basically tried to test what works and what did not work. But this will be dangerous because I believe that the Russians have some kind of strategy, comparing to, maybe, currently, comparing [to] the U.S.”
Still, Merilo’s confidence in American friendship at least received cause for encouragement at the Vatican, on the sidelines of the funeral for Pope Francis. Not only did Trump meet with Zelensky for a one-on-one conversation, but he also found himself seated next to Estonian President Alar Karis for much of the funeral. “We talked about different things,” Karis said during a session of the Lennart Meri Conference. “He said, ‘Don’t worry; you are safe.’”
Karis allowed that “it might take some time” to establish whether European allies can “trust Trump,” but the impromptu pledge dovetails with Trump’s campaign-trail statement that his threat to abandon some NATO allies is just “a point of negotiation” with countries that refuse to pull their weight, as he told Time magazine in 2024. In any case, Estonia is rather a model citizen within the trans-Atlantic alliance. The tiny Baltic state spends 3.4% of its GDP on defense, a figure set to rise to 5.4% by 2026.
If some allied officials acknowledge that Trump’s brass-knuckle negotiating tactics have been necessitated by Europe’s unresponsiveness to other presidents, that doesn’t mean they don’t bring their own risks. “The key part of all this is, ‘What does Putin think?’” Kroenig said. “So we’re seeing now that even our allies, who probably should have a better read [on] us than Putin, are convinced that we’re not reliable, and we’re leaving — what is Putin’s assessment? Does Putin have the same assessment? And, if so, maybe attacking NATO suddenly becomes more thinkable for him than it was.”
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Merilo concurred. “It’s not good that we have even discussion about the U.S. leaving Europe,” he said. “That’s not good. That actually feeds the Russian self-confidence and builds up opportunity for them.”
The Estonian general emphasized that “the U.S. is not leaving Europe,” notwithstanding the rumors to the contrary. Yet he felt it necessary to send a message to Americans: “Do not mistake: Russia is not your friend. Russia is not your friend. Europe is.”
Joel Gehrke, a former foreign affairs reporter for the Washington Examiner, is an American writer based in the United Kingdom.