Baltic Takes

We’ll just let Mikhail Gorbachev fact check Tucker here.

‘Don’t be evil’ was Google’s motto. Meanwhile in Finland, Google has just behaved like a clichéd villain from some kids movie. To build new data centers at Muhos and Otanmäki, they quickly chopped down nearly 400,000 trees before getting permission, and even stripped away top soil.

Google says it acted in good faith, but has “fallen short of our own high standards in this instance" and will follow the agency's guidance as it continues to invest in Finland.

Let's also hope more European companies invest in the kind of smart, energy-efficient infrastructure needed for European tech sovereignty, including in AI, without driving up bills or pissing off local communities like this.

One local resident says wolves have been entering the village since losing part of their forest. The government says the law was not followed and the supervisory agency has now ordered a halt to the work while assessments are completed.

Europe does need tech infrastructure, especially for AI, and foreign investment is very welcome. But by riding roughshod over laws and local communities, this behaviour risks reinforcing many people’s worst perceptions of AI, jeopardising wider development.

The irony that right when Europe is finally starting to invest properly in its own defence, the US is ensuring that its suppliers can’t be relied upon.

On the latest Continental Rift, President @ilvestoomas.bsky.social & Andy Valvur discuss this, Putin’s proposed summit, and more, including the overlap between “people who were happy about Wikileaks but not so happy about [the AfD’s] Nazileaks,” and why Russia can’t respect a border even in space.

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There’s a lot of talk about WW3, but what if we’ve been looking at this the wrong way around. 🧵 …

The Baltic countries have already been pushing for this World Peace III together, including with fundamental reforms of the Security Council and more inclusion of civic societies and smaller nations in global decision making. That’s better for everyone, everywhere, in countries big and small.

baltictakes.comWorld War III? The Baltics have a better ideaThe international order needs ambitious reform, regardless of whether future generations describe our era as World War III (or the prelude to it). We must already start building World Peace III with s...

Here’s a bit of a deeper dive: www.baltictakes.com/world-peace-...

There’s a lot of talk about WW3, but what if we’ve been looking at this the wrong way around. 🧵 …

There is no other way all this ends regardless. If Russia’s aggression succeeds against Ukraine, this era of aggression only gets worse and lasts longer. There will be no era of peace until a better rules-based world is achieved, whether that takes weeks, years, or centuries.

So instead of obsessing too much over a hypothetical World War Three, or worse, rewarding aggression in the hope of averting it and turning it into a self-fulfilling prophecy, we should already be building World Peace Three.

There’s a lot of talk about WW3, but what if we’ve been looking at this the wrong way around. 🧵 …

If Twitter existed back then, pro-Nazi and pro-Soviet commentators would be ridiculing those ideals and instead arguing that the only path to peace would be British surrender next. But the allies weren’t deterred back then and neither should you now.

And we don’t need another world war to recognise that the international system already needs another fundamental upgrade.

There’s a lot of talk about WW3, but what if we’ve been looking at this the wrong way around. 🧵 …

Both needed an ambitious restart and then continuous improvement. Both helped deliver unprecedented levels of peace and prosperity. And both of them began being built DURING world wars. They did not spring spontaneously from the ruins afterwards.

Detailed planning for the League of Nations started within weeks of the First World War’s outbreak. The plan for a United Nations began in the very darkest hours of the Second World War.

There’s a lot of talk about WW3, but what if we’ve been looking at this the wrong way around. 🧵 …

Colonial history and world war history are usually separate chapters in our history books, or separate books entirely. But world wars are imperial wars too. Understanding that is crucial to building the global consensus to properly defend a rules-based order that serves all sovereign nations.

History wasn’t just interrupted by two World Wars. It was also interrupted by two attempts at World Peace, the ambitious efforts to build a rules-based world of sovereign nations as an alternative to centuries of imperial conquest.

There’s a lot of talk about WW3, but what if we’ve been looking at this the wrong way around. 🧵 …

We divide history into two world wars as if peaceful coexistence is the natural state of affairs in our world the rest of the time. In reality, humanity has had to endure centuries of warring empires.

The First World War was arguably the culmination of the age of empires. The Second World War was an attempt to drag us back to that age of empires, after Hitler and Stalin agreed their pact to divide Europe into spheres of influence.

*Spoiler alert for anyone who hasn’t yet read a history book.* Rewarding aggression does not avert a world war. In fact, it makes everything so much worse.

“It had no effect on them at all.” The entitlement. If you think waging war in an attempt to erase Eastern Europeans will only affect Eastern Europeans, go read a fucking history book.

The Canary, a UK publication that amplified Russian propaganda (and had awful reporting about the Baltics), raised £2m in new funding, then shut itself down in the most undignified way, blaming its employees who say ‘banking issues’ are an attempt to distract from its own financial mismanagement.

The Canary’s legacy includes the most cringe self-description of all time from one of their writers who just repeated Kremlin narratives.

More of that great Wolf Warrior Diplomacy™. This started with a cross-party group of Estonian MPs celebrating Taiwan's National Day. In response, China tried to explain their job as MPs is to never appear to contradict state policy …which, er, of course is not at all how our democracies function.

"I personally, along with many of my colleagues, intend to continue engaging with Taiwan just as actively as we have in the past and Chinese criticism or diplomatic notes certainly won't change that," Vaga added.

Wolf Warrior Diplomacy™ might appeal internally, enabling diplomats to tick boxes that they are being tough, but the reality is that it’s so consistently counterproductive.

He explained that cooperation is growing with Taiwan as one of the world’s fastest growing economies, while Estonian Foreign Intelligence has recommended reducing dependency on China, particularly in technology.

As an interesting example of that, Estonia’s newest billion dollar valued unicorn startup, Skeleton Technologies, is an AI infrastructure firm that was backed by Taiwan.

But by publicly berating them, the MPs got a bigger opportunity to publicly explain the strength of friendship between the Estonian and Taiwanese people, and the extent to which Taiwan is a staunch supporter of Ukraine and the rules-based international order.

"When communist China writes that I or other Riigikogu [parliament] members are doing something wrong, I take it as a compliment because it must mean I'm doing something right," said Kristo Enn Vaga, chairman of the Estonia-Taiwan Parliamentary Friendship Group.

Branko Milanovic is an order of magnitude wrong. Literally in this case. The non-citizen population of the Baltic countries is 3.6%, not one third. And that’s still probably the closest thing to accurate in his post here. He doesn’t even seem to know that the Baltic countries are in Europe.

Surrendering to nuclear blackmail, the Kremlin’s favourite talking point, is not going to help. It’s clear that Russia, like other aggressors, escalates when we reward its threats. But it’s not just about “bad memories”, as important as it is to remember and learn from the past.

It’s good memories of independence and freedom that drives us to want more of the world to benefit. We won’t let assholes drag this world back to an age of empires, and they certainly won’t succeed with the help of a sub-par economist pushing ahistorical, badly researched nonsense.

A rules-based international order of sovereign states with territorial integrity as a foundation of international law has proven beyond doubt to better for everyone, everywhere.

The alternative, last attempted by Hitler and Stalin, was shit and the world agreed after that not to reward aggression because we know exactly where that leads with spiralling death and destruction in big countries too.

It’s also impressive that he’s managed to combine ‘the Baltics are irrelevant’ and ‘the Baltics are evil powerful’ into one post.

It’s true that the average resident of a Baltic country has a far more powerful voice than those in a Chinese Tier II city. Freedom and democracy and self-determination are wonderful things. But it’s also good for the world when smaller countries can exist. Bigger countries benefit too.

There was close to a third non-citizens only in Estonia and Latvia and only in the early 90s. That has significantly declined, partly because “Russians” (actually a mix of nationalities who arrived during occupation) can all naturalise as citizens of the Baltic countries if they want it.

They like living here and integrating here for good reasons and, by the way, they are usually the first to tell people like Branko to fuck off when they push Kremlin talking points through faux concern for them.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Read more: www.baltictakes.com/dont-put-in-...

Oof. That ad placement.

Mearsheimer is a prophet in the same vein as Nostradamus. Both are completely useless for reliably predicting the future, but have devoted followers who selectively reinterpret past statements to fit events only after they’ve happened, while ignoring the many, many predictions that fail.

He said Russia wouldn’t launch its full scale invasion. He has said every month for the past four years sinde then that Ukraine is about to surrender. And he now insists there is no evidence of Russia’s imperial ambitions.

The people who love Mearsheimer are the pro-Russian commentators who tried to ridicule people for being concerned about Russia’s full scale invasion and are now pretending to be experts on the war that they insisted would never happen.

His defenders point out that he warned back in 1993 that Russia would try to recapture Ukraine, as if that was somehow against the established view at the time. Many people, especially here in the Baltics, have spent decades warning that Russia is an unreformed imperial power.