Ryan said, “Which will come when Russian Spetsnaz officers high-five each other over beers in the dining room of the Presidential Palace in Vilnius.”
Adler said, “Again, I hope I’m wrong, and I hope there is consensus.”
Ryan asked, “Anything I can do to up my chances?”
“Just give it your best shot, don’t make it personal between you and them, and be ready to roll with the punches.”
Ryan knew Adler was worried about his President losing his sense of decorum and becoming argumentative. Ryan found himself sharing his secretary of state’s concerns. He said, “And you be ready to deal with the diplomatic fallout if I screw up.”
Adler chuckled. “Trust me, Mr. President, I’m ready. Frankly, sir, if you didn’t have a mouth, I wouldn’t have a job.”
The meeting kicked off more or less on time, although the arrival of twenty-eight world leaders to a single place resulted in what Ryan considered to be a maddening amount of protocol, mostly unofficial, in the form of who had to shake whose hand first or which prime minister stepped up to greet which president in which order. There were cameras present as the principals entered the conference room and posed for a group photo, and Ryan knew media in each nation here would talk themselves silly if their leader was shown less deference by the behavior of other leaders.
The photographers in attendance were given fifteen minutes to chronicle the absurdity of it all, and then the cameras were shuffled out of the room and the twenty-eight men and women and their senior advisers got down to work.
The secretary general of NATO was the former prime minister of Norway, and well liked by everyone in the room. Ryan wasn’t a fan of the man’s policies, but got along well enough with the guy. After his short speech to kick off the emergency meeting, he recognized Lithuania’s president, and she read a prepared statement to the room.
Eglė Banytė was an eloquent speaker, her words were impassioned, and the English interpreter kept the running translation up in Ryan’s ear with incredible skill.
After ten minutes she ceded to Ryan, and the secretary general turned the floor over to the American President. He stood at the lectern and cleared his throat while the eyes of twenty-seven national leaders turned in his direction.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I appreciate the opportunity to speak before you today. My staff has placed a briefing booklet in front of you that covers what I am going to say here in more detail. I’d just like to ask for a few minutes of your time so I can make my case directly to you.
“When Russia’s president Valeri Volodin was the beneficiary of a strong energy sector, he was a dangerous man. He increased military spending by twenty percent, he adopted or restarted provocative and threatening initiatives involving his intelligence, military, and even his nuclear weapons programs. He brought his Navy to full combat readiness; he began overflying NATO nations from the border of his country all the way to the United States with strategic bombers. He threatened maritime commerce with his Navy, commercial airline routes with his air force. He harassed dissenters, he assassinated enemies, and he imprisoned those with whom he had business disagreements. He used his police, his spies, and his soldiers as blunt instruments to increase his power, both domestically and internationally.
“Again, he did all this at the height of his success. During the good times.
“Now Valeri Volodin is failing on all fronts, and for this reason, I submit to you, he has only become more dangerous.
“Back when things were good for him it appeared nothing could touch him. Certainly he felt he was invincible, and one of the consequences of this was the Ukrainian invasion.
“Ukraine looked toward the West to increase its economic and cultural ties, and Volodin panicked. Other former nations of the Soviet Union who have chosen freedom have found prosperity, and the Kremlin sees these nations as an existential threat to its backward and autocratic ways. The Kremlin cannot allow its subjects to witness the success of its neighbors, because then they would demand change for themselves.
“Volodin calculated that we would do nothing when he attacked Ukraine, so he attacked Ukraine. We did not do nothing, so he doesn’t own all of Ukraine. But we did not do enough, so today a large swath of that country is nothing more than a Russian puppet state.
“We’ve lost eastern Ukraine, but its loss illustrates something important. In the eyes of Valeri Volodin, Russia’s security depends on the insecurity of its neighbors.
“Now he sees a new threat: a Baltic region allied with NATO, increasing their ability to meet their energy needs without dependence on Russia. He sees Lithuania specifically as a successful and independent nation that serves both as demonstration of the failures of his policy and a potential corridor to his province on the Baltic Sea. He needs a victory. It will help Russia’s economy, bolster the Kremlin’s power, and take the pressure off him after his string of losses.
“Russia’s hybrid warfare against Lithuania is purposefully ambiguous. As long as Russia’s aggression stays below a certain threshold, there will be enough pundits and pacifists in the West assuring everyone that the real threats are not in Russia, but in the West. They will continue saying this until the facts on the ground are so utterly different from what they assert that the world will have no choice but to come to the conclusion that the pacifists were wrong, but by then it will be too late to do anything about it.
“People speak of hybrid warfare like it is a new phenomenon. But there is nothing new about it. Valeri Volodin’s Kremlin is executing the time-tested battle plan of using the full spectrum of power. In the United States, we refer to this under the acronym DIME. Diplomacy, information, military, and economics.
“DIME starts with diplomacy. Volodin’s Russia is pulling away from all international norms, violating treaties, making pacts with our enemies to increase Russia’s power at the expense of democracies, world bodies, agreed-upon standards of behavior. They’ve left the European Court of Human Rights, and they have breached every agreement and security assurance they have given in the past twenty years.
“He is diplomatically isolated because of the hostility of his regime, but his diplomats continue to aggressively pursue Russia’s policy in whatever venues remain open to them.
“On the intelligence front, he is swinging for the fences. For one, I believe FSB has a worldwide operation to bolster energy prices. If he can get oil and gas prices to rise, this will augment his power, both at home and abroad. The assassination of the prosecutor in Venezuela going after corrupt oil officials, the killing of the Saudi deputy minister of petroleum and mineral resources, the oil rig attack in Nigeria. Plus the attack on the LNG facility in Lithuania. It is no coincidence that all these events have happened in the past few weeks, and it is also no coincidence that they all have the effect of benefiting Volodin. We’ve seen gas prices shoot up fourteen percent in the past month, and crude prices a shade over nine percent.
“On the military front… well, we all saw what happened yesterday with the crash of SA44. Volodin is blatantly positioning an invasion force near his neighbors, threatening ships in the Baltic and filling the skies with military aircraft, with catastrophic results. He’s doing all this because he is gambling that the West isn’t committed to the fight against him, that we will allow him to absorb the Baltic back into his sphere of influence.
“It is on the last letter of DIME — economics — where we have seen his greatest failure. He began with this, and it was all he needed for a time. When oil and gas prices were high, Volodin used his energy companies, Gazprom and Gazprom Neft, as a weapon. But oil and gas prices have plummeted from last year’s highs, and Europe is an unfriendly market because Volodin has used Gazprom against you for so long that you found other sources of energy.