I was thrilled when Sweden and Finland joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. My first thought was about the vast coastline the two Nordic states provided, essentially turning the Baltic Sea into a “NATO lake.”

Russia has a sliver of land on the eastern corner of the sea where St. Petersburg sits, and another slice with its Kaliningrad territory, located between Lithuania and Poland. But nearly all the Baltic coast is firmly in the hands of the alliance.

This is significant for several reasons. First, it is the only interior sea fully within NATO territory: All the other maritime venues for allied forces — the Mediterranean Sea, the Atlantic and Arctic oceans — are borderlands. Control of the Baltic gives NATO the ability to bottle up the Russian Baltic fleet; vital sea and commu

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