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That's certainly the theory. But there are some cracks in that theory.
First: Nato isn't a country, and has no unified military. It would take time, at least a few days, for the various European nations to coordinate a response and for the US to send troops over there. Diplomacy in Brussels is famously slow.
Meanwhile, the Baltics are small. The Suwalki gap from Belarus to Kaliningrad is just 100km long, and most of the baltics are not much wider than that. Russia would barely have to advance at all to be within artillery range of their capitals. A strong, quick offensive could cross the gap and occupy their capital in a matter of days, and then present NATO with a fait accompli. Do they really want to go to the mat to liberate these small, useless countries that have already been occupied?
Suppose they do. NATO commanders and politicians agree that, dammit, they've made a commitment, so they fully mobilize their militaries for an all-out war with Russia. At that point, Russia activates its nuclear ICBMs and points them at Europe in a menacing way. Attack us, it says, and we will nuke you, because this is an existential war of survival for us, and we have a lot more nukes than you do.
Europe asks its big bro the USA to help. The USA, after all, has just as many nukes as Russia, and much more advanced ones. At that point Russia points its nukes at the US and says: "do you really want to get involved in this? Are you really going to sacrifice millions of your people to save some tiny little insignificant country in Europe that most Americans couldn't point out on a map? Isn't that insane?" And then the US backs down, and then Europe backs down, and Russia gets a win.
Of course this isn't a new concern, it's been at the heart of NATO strategy ever since it was founded. The solution to this sort of salami-slicing has been the absolute inviolability of article 5, plus a bit of strategic ambiguity and the US's refusal to sign a no-first-use treaty against nukes. Essentially, to make Russia fear us more than we fear them. But I don't know how much that will hold in this modern world where the Republican party (traditionally the more hawkish) has become isolationist, our main rival is now China, and NATO has been unable to manufacture enough basic artillery for Ukraine. I'm not saying that Russia can definitely take the Baltics, and certainly not Poland. But... it's not a complete fantasy, either, it's a real fear.
Nato doesn't have a unified military, but member states frequently train together. I'd be surprised if the Scandinavian and Baltic nations haven't jointly planned for this sort of scenario. While a complete military response would almost certainly be co-ordinated at the European level*, individual nations could spring into action much more quickly. The UK would very likely also respond quickly to a situation like this.
*This is assuming that Trump pulls the US out of NATO (over the objections of almost the entire US political/military establishment).
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That's precisely why the Baltics have insisted on having tripwire troops there. If the Russians overran NATO troops from the major member countries while doing this blitzkrieg, it would be considerably more difficult for those countries to go "whatever, we don't care".
True, that adds to the political calculus and would certainly provoke a big public outrage. But still... when you're comparing against a potential nuclear war, I don't know if the loss of a few thousand troops would be enough.
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The CIA had good advance intelligence of the Ukraine War. In the event similar intelligence emerged indicating an invasion of the Baltics, NATO would station 50-100,000 troops there and be capable of repelling the invasion. It’s not a realistic scenario.
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