Interview: The view from the Baltics

摘要

Jaak Aaviksoo speaks about defense issues with the precision of the former laser physicist he is. He steers a listener to conclude that the 2007 cyber attacks against Estonia must have come from the Russian government, but he never actually levels the charge. Aaviksoo needs all the skill he can muster. His tiny country of 1.3 million people is involved in important defense issues, from cybersecurity to NATO policy to the war in Afghanistan's Helmand province, where Estonia maintains a force of 160 soldiers, down from a high of 300 during the Afghanistan elections. As a younger man, Aaviksoo never envisioned his defense role. He began his professional career as a physicist living in Estonia under the Soviet empire in the 1970s and 1980s. He says he never believed the official caricature of the U.S. and NATO as the "archenemies of the peaceful Soviet Union." The Soviets trusted Aaviksoo enough to send him to New Orleans in 1981 to attend a meeting of laser physicists agreed to by U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. He later took advantage of Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika policy of social revival to conduct research in Stuttgart in then-West Germany, which is where he was when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.