The West Takes NATO for Granted. One Country Still Wants In.

TBILISI—Transnational security cooperation, as an idea, has seen better days.

Real and rhetorical commitments to NATO are flagging: President Donald Trump has called the alliance “obsolete”; Germany sees itself soon spending barely half of NATO’s mandated but unenforced target for defense spending; and Britain’s defense budget fell by nearly one-fifth from 2010 to 2015.

The trend is largely understandable. Seventy years after NATO’s founding, and nearly three decades after the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact, maintaining the alliance is a lesser priority, if not a burden. Even with a resurgent Russia, the threat of tank divisions rolling across Europe seems mostly ludicrous.

Yet farther to the east, this scenario is not a fantasy—it is recent history. Indeed, for this small country, not even a member