Atlantic Council

General James Craddock, NATO's top military commander, has requested that the alliance create contingency plans for Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, RFE/RL reported.  Contingency plans are full defense strategies crafted for each NATO member country and remain classified.

Although no Eastern European member states currently have full contingency plans, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia remain the only three alliance members to have none at all.  Despite Baltic pressure on the alliance for stronger defense against Russia, contingency plans were not drawn up for the three countries after their accession to NATO in 2004 because of a focus on Afghanistan and terrorism.  However, Russia's recent invasion of Georgia has brought the issue to the fore.  With the three Baltic countries considered the most exposed in the alliance, Craddock recommended Estonia be assessed first because of its large ethnic Russian minority and strained relations with Moscow.

Official contingency plans require unanimous support of all NATO members, so politics will almost surely come into play.  France and Germany believe proceeding with the plans might worsen already tense ties with Russia.  The U.S. and the UK strongly support moving forward with the plans and insist that NATO business needs to carry on in the wake of the Georgia conflict.  The Baltic states have expressed concern that a failure to provide them with contingency plans could erode the alliance's commitment to mutual defense.

Russia's war against Georgia has forced Europeans to ask where their true interests lie and which country they'd be willing to defend if and when a Russian push ever comes to shove.

Kurt Volker, the new US ambassador to NATO, yesterday called on the Alliance to increase preparations to defend the Baltic states from military attack, noting that, unlike Georgia, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are signatories to Article 5, "so if there is any attack on those countries we will all respond," James Blitz reports for the Financial Times. Volker added, "We need to do what NATO ought to do, not in a provocative way and not in a rushed or hasty way. But NATO being credible is what’s important."

CEOs who think cybercrime is just the business of CIOs are like Enron’s shrugging off the companies books as something for the accounting department. Those provocative words from Dr. Paul Twomey, president and CEO of ICANN, highlighted an all-star panel discussion on the launch of Cyber Attack: A Risk Management Primer for CEOs and Directors released on December 12 by the British-North American Committee (BNAC) and the Atlantic Council of the United States, the U.S. sponsor of the Committee.

In Fall 2005, the Council used a combination of virtual and interpersonal experiences to deepen ties among young people on both sides of the Atlantic.  From September 27 to October 2, thirty five delegates, including eleven students from around the United States, represented the Council at the 51st General Assembly of the Atlantic Treaty Association (ATA) in Tallinn, Estonia.  From October 12 to 25, more than four hundred forty students from seventy countries participated in an international on-line conference, “Building a Safer World: The United Nations in the 21st century.”