🔹 Today, the Bucharest 9 Summit opens in Romania, bringing together the NATO allies whose Washington playbook I’ve spent the past months examining.

My new policy paper, just published by the Romanian Diplomatic Institute – Institutul Diplomatic Român, asks a question Bucharest cannot avoid: how have Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Poland, and Finland navigated the second Trump administration’s transactional turn toward Europe, without either mimicking MAGA at home or decoupling from Washington in the name of European strategic autonomy?

The answer is a third path: persistent, multi-channel engagement. A few findings that stood out:
→ Latvia’s Foreign Minister made 6 working visits to Washington in just over a year. Lithuania’s MFA spoke with Secretary Rubio within a week of inauguration. Poland’s Sikorski was the first European foreign minister outside the Quint to meet Rubio face-to-face.
→ Advocacy for Ukraine was never traded off against bilateral security agendas, but portrayed as complimentary to them.
→ Finland’s $6.1B icebreaker deal, Latvia’s pitch on 5G/6G and quantum, Poland’s nuclear and LNG deliverables -> Each ally arrived in Washington as a strategic investment destination, not a defense dependent.
→ Technology diplomacy went structural, not just rhetorical. Estonia opened a business hub at its Washington embassy in October 2024 and expanded its honorary consulate network to Portland and San Francisco to plug into the U.S. West Coast tech ecosystem. Lithuania sent its laser and photonics companies into the DoD Innovation Unit and NASA Ames. The infrastructure followed the pitch.
→ Engaging MAGA-aligned think tanks did not require importing MAGA policies internally. Hungary tried that. The northeastern allies did not.
→ The Baltic Security Initiative secured $200M in the FY2026 U.S. defense budget. The U.S. House Baltic Caucus hit 100 members. That is what persistent Hill diplomacy buys.

For Romania, facing troop withdrawals, a delayed Visa Waiver, and a recalibrated bilateral relationship, the lesson is not to choose between Washington and Brussels. It is to build the infrastructure of influence that peers under the same Russian shadow have already proven works.
As the B9 leaders gather in Bucharest, the toolkit is sitting on the table.

You can read the full policy paper here: https://lnkd.in/eWcJjePd
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