Welcome to the three martini lunch.

Grab a stool next to Greg Carumbus of Radio America and Jim Garrity of National Review.

Three martini's coming up.

I finally don't have to correct the intro.

Jim Garrity is back.

He's back from his trip overseas.

We're going to get to hear all about it today visiting Finland and Latvia and Poland. And Jim, first of all, welcome back. It's good to have you. It is very good to be back. I'm also very pleased that I still kind of sort of remember how to log in to do all this stuff. You know, like, you know, wait, I have something to do it. Oh, that's right. Greg.

You know, so, yeah. If today's episode seems a little rough, we're still, still stretching those muscles, getting back into the habit. But I'm eager to talk about the trip, Greg. Yes. And thanks again to Charlie Cook and Scott Bertram and S. Detman and Craig Collins for filling in while Jim was away. but Jim, first of all, before we get into the three martinis, how did this trip happen? Sure. For those who think, does Jim go out of his way to mess with Greg's life and not be available to do episodes because of work trips? I don't intend to do this, but sometimes opportunities come along in the embassies of NATO's. They were calling themselves NATO's eastern flank. Now, I've had some readers say, well, technically they're the

northeastern flank, but basically Finland, the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, and

Poland put together and said, like, would you like to come? We're going to put together a reporting

trip on all the things that we're doing. And they never explicitly said this. But the subtext was, don't blame us for whatever dumb things Spain is doing today or whatever the German chancellor has said that's pissed off Trump or something like that. NATO is valuable. We're doing what the Americans expect us to do and more. And we'd really like to showcase that. And it was just too good an opportunity. So I went out with that. It was a remarkable trip. Two weeks, you know, like really good. A little bit exhausting, but very worthwhile. But yeah, so they were the ones who set it up. And because of that, you could get access to military bases and intelligence agencies and really remarkable access. You just can't usually, you know, knock on the door of these places and say, hey, can I see the stuff? Fantastic. All right. Well, let's start in Finland. And I don't know if you're a history buff. I know Jim, you are, but other folks might know that Finland and Russia are neighbors,

and they don't have a great history of getting along very well over the many decades and centuries, really. And so you not only had a chance to talk to their foreign minister, you had a chance to go on patrols in the Baltic Sea. Sounds like a pretty cool phase of the trip. That was absolutely awesome. And this is an extra shout out to John, aka ex-John, very proud of his Finnish heritage. And this is going to be

the most Finnish heavy episode of the three martini lunch of all time. Yeah, so like they only

joined NATO in 2023 up until, so during the Cold War, so they had fought Russia during World War II. They are very quick to emphasize. They were not on the side of the Nazis that they had this previous conflict due to Russia deciding, hey, we like that territory. We're going to take it. If you've ever heard of the white death, the infamous Finnish sniper who killed by the 500 people in one month.

They, you know, the Finns, I'm not going to say they all resolutely 100% hate the Russians,

but they remember their history.

And they remember during the end of that war, Russia basically annexed about 10% of what was

then Finland's territory.

During the Cold War, there was a process called Finlandization, which Finland was

technically independent, but they kind of had to say mother may I to Moscow during much of it.

When you share a border with the Soviet Union, you really can't make a lot of steps,

make a lot of decisions that irk them.

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