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The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters news. The problem especially in the Baltics and in Poland is you have countries that have a very nasty historical habit of poofing in and out of existence. There are a lot of people around who don't remember the Soviet Union, but at one point it was incredibly frightening and the NATO alliance was created to fight it off.

Once the Soviet Union fell, many of Russia's former satellite countries rushed to join.

Soon, Russia was completely surrounded by NATO countries on its western flank.

This week on War College, we decided to take a look at what kind of shape NATO was in.

You may be a little surprised about what we found. We're listening to War College, a weekly discussion of a world in conflict focusing on the stories behind the front lines.

Here's your host, Jason Fields.

Hello and welcome to War College. I'm Reuters opinion editor Jason Fields.

And I'm Matthew Galt, contributing editor with War is Boring.

Today we're talking about NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and what kind of shape it's currently in with Joe Trevithic.

Joe is with war is boring and has been covering security issues for quite a while.

Joe, thanks for joining us.

Happy to be here.

So I want to start off with a new report just came out from Rand,

the Rand organization looking at sort of playing the scenario Russia versus NATO.

So what did they find?

Well the Rand report was pretty shocking.

It basically postulated that if Russia were to invade the Baltic

States of Estonia and Latvia specifically, but the Baltic states in general, which

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