Denmark Reports Russian Flares Fired Near Helicopter in Baltic Sea

The takes

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  Adam Smith

  1723–1790, Scotland (the Scottish Enlightenment: Kirkcaldy, Glasgow, Edinburgh)

  Flares over the Baltic, Shadows over the Market

  When warships play at pyrotechnics around patrol helicopters, the sparks fall not on admirals’ uniforms but on the quiet prosperity of ordinary people.

  A warship in international waters, a small helicopter engaged, we are told, in a routine photographic survey, and suddenly two flares cut the air, one passing within a few metres of the aircraft. The language that follows is as hot as the magnesium: one side denounces “deeply unprofessional seamanship” and a creeping shift in the boundaries of acceptable conduct; the other side speaks of “provocative actions” and dangerous manoeuvres. We are thus presented with a familiar modern entertainment: two powers, both offended, both aggrieved, both manifestly convinced that the impartial spectator would award them the palm of prudence and the crown of justice.

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• 

  John Locke

  1632–1704, England (writing amid the Exclusion Crisis and the Glorious Revolution)

  A Flare in the Baltic and the Boundaries of Legitimate Power

  When a warship fires at a lawful aircraft in international waters, the question is not seamanship but sovereignty: who gave this ship the right to endanger another’s life and call it defence?

  I begin where the sea does, with the simple fact that a Danish military helicopter flew in international waters off Gedser, on what is described as a routine photographic operation of a Russian frigate. No one claims the air or water there as private property. No one pretends the Danish crew boarded the ship, damaged its instruments, or obstructed its course. They looked and took images, as men may lawfully do in that wide common God has given to all. In the state of nature, before treaties and flags, such observation would injure no one’s life, liberty, or estate; any government that now forbids it must show how the trust of its people extends so far.

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• 

  Niccolò Machiavelli

  1469–1527, Florence (republican secretary and diplomat, then exile, amid the Italian Wars)

  Russia’s Flares and Denmark’s Nerves: A Textbook Lesson in Managed Fear

  A Russian frigate brushing a Danish helicopter with flares in international waters is not chaos but choreography: a cold demonstration of how to trade in fear without yet buying a war.

  A warship does not fire flares “within a matter of metres” of a foreign helicopter by accident. When Denmark’s defence minister calls it “deeply unprofessional seamanship,” he speaks as one must for his public and his allies, but the act itself is professional in a different register: the register of intimidation. The Danish side says the helicopter was on a routine photographic mission over a Russian frigate in international waters off Gedser. The Russian side answers that Danish helicopters have carried out “dangerous maneuvers” and “provocative actions” near their ships before. Strip away the adjectives and you are left with the effectual truth: two militaries dancing at the edge of acceptable risk to defend incompatible stories about who commands this piece of sea and sky.

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