Northern Poland • Scruffy, yellowish-brown buildings are bunched around a long courtyard; portable toilets and generators have been set up on the dusty ground beside. Inside, military-grade laptops, the kind that don’t break if you drop them, are arrayed along a series of tables, their cables spooling off onto the floor. Men from different countries, some dressed in camouflage, talk in low voices. A large map of Europe’s Baltic coast has been projected onto one of the walls, with different colored markers scattered across it.
This, dear readers, is the transatlantic alliance. But this is not the transatlantic alliance in theory, the one people are discussing right now, with so much concern, from Washington to Tallinn to Montreal.