Israel has been in many conventional wars with it's neighbors since the day it was founded. In recent times their nukes protect them, but historically it was more about every man and women being either active military or reserve, along with an economy that is able to pay for being the best military in the region.

Somehow you missed out nearly US$4B a year of military aid from the US as a part of that equation (also nearly US$8B of loan guarantees).

Didn't air power play a big part too back in the day?

And don't forget that in the Baltics there is a fairly large contingent of Ethnic Russians who are the perfect pretext for a liberation exercise.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russians_in_the_Baltic_states

I disagree in Estonia and Lithuania. I think that 1) many ethnic Russians have seen the quality of life get much better living in these countries and while they may still hold many similar cultural values, would not want to live in Russia and 2) that the governments of the countries are well aware of the risk and have plans to counter it. Not so sure about Latvia.

The degree with which the Russian propaganda regarding vaccine safety has permeated the Russian populations in Estonia and Lithuania (and Latvia as well) has opened my eyes considerably into how strongly connected those communities are still to Russia. They are Russian first, and Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian second.

Now, Lithuania has only a relatively small number of ethnic Russians compared to the rest of the population, and in Estonia the it's somewhere in the middle (15% or so). Latvia is roughly 50/50.

And yes, the governments of those countries are well aware of the risk, but that is not the same as not having that risk in the first place.

Yeah sure, but the risk of taking a vaccine and deciding not to take it or holding up a sign outside of a hospital (I mean, plenty of hesitancy in the US too with no or very little Russian propaganda) is super different than taking up arms to support little green men coming across the border and I don't think really comparable. If we were back in '07 with the situation in Estonia, maybe, but now I'm super skeptical.

Yes but Israel operates under the US defense umbrella at least implicitly even despite their extraterritorial attacks against Iran. If Lithuania or Estonia started hitting Russian military targets, I'm pretty sure they'd be booted from NATO asap. Also, if they used nukes against Russia or even postured like they would it'd be a disaster. St. Petersburg is super close to Estonia, Belarus borders the baltics, so if you did even a first strike you'd probably end up with a nuclear cloud hanging over your own country a few hours later.