Tomas Jermalavičius, Tony Lawrence, and ICDS intern Anna-Liisa Merilind contributed a chapter to a book recently published by the General Jonas Žemaitis Military Academy of Lithuania entitled ‘Lithuania in the Global Context: National Security and Defence Policy Dilemmas’. The books aims to describe major changes that may adversely impact Lithuania’s security and defence and identify policies that can mitigate such impacts.
Our chapter deals with defence cooperation among the Baltic states and analyses why Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania—at face value natural cooperation partners—have struggled to work together on trilateral defence projects in the past two decades. We compare features of the three states with various criteria that have been put forward by the research community to explain success in defence cooperation projects, consider whether the prospects for Baltic defence cooperation have been enhanced or weakened by contemporary circumstances such as the degraded security environment and increasing Baltic defence budgets, and evaluate the prospects for success in the promising field of future Baltic naval cooperation.