On May 13, 2026, leaders of NATO’s Northern and Eastern flanks gathered in Romania for the Bucharest Nine (B9) summit. In their joint statement, the leaders emphasized unity during a period of perceived chaos within the alliance. Finnish President Alexander Stubb remarked, “We must be able to see through the noise and strengthen NATO’s unity,” while the collective leadership declared that NATO cannot exist without the United States.

Furthermore, the statement outlined an ongoing process of enhancing burden-sharing and increasing defense funding across the alliance. As expected, Russia was identified as the primary threat to continental security and condemned for its confrontational actions, particularly the wide array of hybrid warfare attacks occurring below the threshold of open conflict. The leaders prioritized scaling up the transatlantic defense industry, including increasing production capacity and building more resilient supply chains. They also committed to leveraging lessons from the ongoing conflict in Ukraine to foster closer cooperation between Kyiv and NATO. While the official communique from Bucharest was optimistic, the underlying narrative was even more profound: the Northern and Eastern flanks are no longer peripheral. As Polish President Karol Nawrocki stated, the strategic “center of gravity” of NATO has moved to the East and North.

Both Romania and Poland now define themselves as “Eastern Bastions“, as these two regional........

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