Jill Dougherty
Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University
June 1, 2026
The Age of Insecurity
One day in March, my mobile suddenly buzzed with a new and ominous sound. It was an air alert from Estonia’s national alarm system, warning people to take cover if they spotted a drone. It was not an exercise; the drone hit a smokestack at a power plant. It was later identified as Ukrainian, flying off course during attacks on Russian military and energy infrastructure targets near the Baltic Sea.
I signed up for the alerts since I travel frequently to the region and wanted a more direct understanding of what Estonians are experiencing in their daily life. I quickly checked another app: the Ukrainian Air Alert. I scrolled through and found a long list of regions marked with small red circles—signifying that at that very moment they were being attacked by Russian drones and missiles. I stopped for a minute to contemplate this violent, disorienting world.
The World Then and Now
I was born in the black-and-white era of the Cold War. As bad as it was, things seemed clearer then: two nuclear-armed superpowers with two diametrically opposed systems. There were, of course, grey areas, with the US and the USSR waging proxy wars in Asia and Latin America. At several critical moments, the world stood at the precipice of nuclear war. But it never came.
Today, the largest land war in Europe since World War II rages in Ukraine, and the Middle East is convulsed by America and Israel’s war against Iran. An American president insults his European Allies, threatens to grab the territory of one of them, and rages that “NATO wasn’t there” to help him with Iran. Meanwhile, Asian countries nervously eye China’s military expansion in the South China Sea.
There is no neat bumper sticker name for our confusing time.
Previous generations have defined the times they lived in by the wars they fought: World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. But there is no neat bumper sticker name for our confusing time. We live in the Age of Insecurity, a time of kinetic wars and hybrid operations; of sabotage and cyberattacks; of deepfakes and shallow alliances; a world that seems increasingly on the cusp of catastrophe.
To understand the drivers of this insecurity, I have travelled extensively throughout what some still refer to as the ‘post-Soviet space’—a phrase undeniably antiquated thirty-five years after the Soviet Union collapsed. Some countries face the direct threat of invasion from Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Others are targets of grey-zone warfare, psychological operations, and electoral interference.
They are also confronting a new threat, shockingly, from the very country that, a little over a year ago, was a bulwark against Russia: the United States. President Donald Trump says he might reconsider America’s membership in NATO. “I was never swayed by NATO,” he told The Telegraph. “I always knew they were a paper tiger, and Putin knows that too, by the way.”
A City on a Hill
The starkest threat—other than a nuclear war—would be another Ukraine-style war, launched with another invasion. One possible location is Narva, Estonia, a key fault line between Europe and Russia. It sits on a hill, staring across the Narva River at the Russian city of Ivangorod. Spanning the river is the Friendship Bridge, built in 1960. Today, with Putin openly stating that Russia is engaged in an “existential struggle” with the west, the name reeks of irony. Estonia has been fortifying it with massive concrete anti-tank dragon’s teeth and other barricades. Vehicle traffic has been suspended, and only pedestrians are allowed to cross.
Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 gave birth to the expression, “Could Narva be next?” But the Estonian Foreign Intelligence Service’s 2026 public assessment states that “Russia has no intention of militarily attacking Estonia or any other NATO member state in the coming year.” Estonia and Europe, it said, have taken steps “that compel the Kremlin to calculate very carefully what, if anything, it can risk attempting.”
Russia, nevertheless, continues to test Estonia’s borders. Its fighter aircraft violate NATO airspace, triggering a response from the Baltic Air Policing unit at Ämari air base. Moscow is also carrying out disinformation attacks. Earlier this year, a small Telegram channel began promoting the creation of a so-called “Narva People’s Republic.” The effort seemed to be trolling, but it was eerily similar to Russia’s actual 2022 separatist operation, establishing “people’s republics” in Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions, a pretext to launch a full-scale invasion.
Fences Make Good Neighbours
Deep in the Białowieża forest, at the border between Poland and Russia’s ally Belarus, I witnessed Moscow’s use of hybrid warfare: weaponisation of migration. Poland erected a massive 6-metre-high reinforced steel fence, patrolled by armed border guards. The crossing where hikers used to walk peacefully was barricaded with X-shaped anti-tank obstacles made of rusted red steel, called ‘Czech hedgehogs’. Security cameras surveilled the area.
Of Poland’s 13 border crossings with Belarus, only two were open. Almost all the migrants are young men from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia, and Eritrea seeking employment and a better life in Europe. They learn about these illegal journeys online through apps like Telegram. The traffickers are international crime groups who demand a steep price: up to $16 000 per person. It’s a well-organised and coordinated process. Many, funnelled from their home countries via Russia to Belarus, are unaware they are being exploited to undermine the EU.
At the border, the smugglers—often disguised as migrants—use sophisticated tools, including petrol saws, to cut through the steel. They sometimes incite the migrants to violence, urging them to throw rocks and other projectiles, even an occasional Molotov cocktail, at the border guards. To interdict them, Poland uses a full kit of technical equipment: aircraft, helicopters, drones, observation towers, handheld thermal-imaging cameras, night-vision goggles, and off-road vehicles. That costs millions of dollars, and that expense is part of Moscow and Minsk’s strategy: force Poland, a member of NATO and the EU, to pay the price for their enemies’ hybrid attacks.
Other eastern European countries are following in Poland’s footsteps. In south-east Latvia, a bumpy dirt road deep in a wooded area opens into a clearing where a tall metal fence has been erected, its top crowned with coils of concertina wire. Another band of wire snaked across the middle of the steel mesh. It wasn’t enough; smugglers had already cut their way through in a few spots. The borderland here is dotted with lakes and swamps, so guards patrol it by boats, by skimobiles, by car, and off-road buggies. They also use drones and ground-based detection systems. Latvia gets assistance from its neighbours: Lithuania, Estonia, and Finland, all part of the Baltic Defence Line. The purpose: to stop, or at least slow, any invasion or incursion from Russia or Belarus.
A new Steel Curtain is dividing east from west: a thick metal fence, built by Europe to prevent any incursion by Russia or its allies.
In Lithuania, the village of Kybartai sits on the border with the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, the most militarised place in Europe. Cars, just a few of them, moved through checkpoints where Lithuanian border guards inspected them, opening trunks, peering in windows. In another area, large transport trucks lined up, loaded with supplies for Kaliningrad. Nearby, freight trains carrying furniture and other goods wrapped in plastic waited for inspection. A lone passenger train sat, locked, waiting to cross the border.
During the Cold War, the Iron Curtain divided east from west. Moscow’s communist rulers built it to keep their citizens in. Now, a new Steel Curtain is dividing east from west: a thick metal fence, built by Europe to prevent any incursion by Russia or its allies.
Writing on the Walls
Russia uses not only war itself but the fear of war to undermine the west. Moscow’s agents and complicit governments weaponise the Ukraine war, warning their citizens that opposition candidates, or the EU, will drag their countries into the conflict, forcing their sons to fight and die in battle.
Ahead of the last parliamentary election, Hungary already was in Moscow’s crosshairs. Polls showed its ally, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, trailing opposition candidate Péter Magyar. Russia could not afford to lose Orbán’s influence in the EU. Moscow’s weapon, which ultimately failed, was a broad disinformation campaign engineered by a Kremlin-backed group Storm-1516. According to researchers at Clemson University, the operation blended “established narrative laundering techniques with new amplification strategies,” including “fabricated media outlets, paid influencers, and a network of commercial marketing accounts with links to Africa.”
Russia uses not only war itself but the fear of war to undermine the west.
Orbán and his friendly media also employed propaganda. Everywhere in Budapest, the streets were forested with political posters. One was a dark, unflattering photo of Péter Magyar, flanked by equally menacing pictures of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Another was a poster of Zelensky by himself, his harshly lit black-and-white face creased with a huge smile, but with the warning: “Let’s not let Zelensky have the last laugh.”
In Georgia, the government, controlled by the Russia-friendly Georgia Dream party, used a similar campaign in 2024. Posters and billboards depicted a church in eastern Ukraine destroyed by bombing, alongside a picture of the serenely intact Holy Trinity Cathedral of Tbilisi. The message was clear: if Georgia attempted to join the EU, all it holds sacred would be destroyed. In a country that has suffered three major wars in its post-Soviet history, the campaign resonated. The Georgia Dream retained power in a highly disputed electoral outcome. Protest marches, in which participants often wave EU flags, have been violently suppressed, but continue to this day.
During Moldova’s parliamentary elections in 2025, Moscow set in motion a massive hybrid campaign (fueled by and estimated at $400 mn) to stop the country from trying to join the EU. Hackers attacked the site of the Central Election Commission; the Kremlin engaged in vote-buying and AI-driven disinformation. And the campaign employed the same go-to narratives it has used elsewhere: Moldova will be pulled into the Ukraine war. But, once again, the Kremlin lost its bet; Moldova, under Prime Minister Maia Sandu, has stayed on course to the EU.
America Unfriends Europe
In a recent interview, Donald Trump claimed that “it should be automatic” that NATO Allies join him in the war against Iran. “We’ve been there automatically, including Ukraine,” he said. “Ukraine wasn’t our problem. It was a test, and we were there for them, and we would always have been there for them. They weren’t there for us.”
NATO, of course, was there for the US on 9/11, invoking its collective defence Article 5. Canada and 19 European countries joined the US, sending troops, sharing intelligence, providing logistical, air and naval support.
What Trump meant by that is not clear. Was it a test for the Alliance? Or did he mean the US was testing its Allies, that an attack by Russia on a European country wasn’t a problem for America?
The implications of this newest threat are grave. The leader of the country that was the driving force behind the creation of NATO is now telling the leader of its primary threat that the Alliance is a “paper tiger,” that it is toothless. In effect, he is giving Russia a green light to do, as he put it in 2024, “whatever the hell they want with NATO.”
Europe has been listening to Trump’s threats for more than a decade. If, in the beginning, they might have taken it as bluster, or Trump’s attempt to strengthen the alliance, they are now taking it seriously.
Our Age of Insecurity is just beginning.
This article was written for the Lennart Meri Conference special issue of ICDS Diplomaatia magazine. Views expressed in ICDS publications are those of the author(s).
