Everything is Resilience: Prince William in Estonia
Prince William's trip to Tallinn concluded on Friday. The UK press has primarily described the 48-hour visit as a new model for speedy, impactful state visits that pack together geopolitics with the Prince’s personal causes: mental health and climate change. On paper, the trip looks like a split between the three: visiting British troops deployed in Estonia (with attention to welfare), seeing clean energy tech innovations, and visiting a school for Ukrainian children.
In the Estonian press, the visit has been described in slightly different shades, paying little attention to princely passion projects. There, the visit was primarily discussed as crystallising a bilateral relationship organised almost entirely around security and defence, and the protection of critical infrastructure. "The United Kingdom is an important ally of ours—the presence of their soldiers in Estonia and their leading role in NATO is the basis for security in the region," President Karis noted in a statement during the visit. Despite recent criticisms of the UK’s reduction of its military commitment in Estonia, he described the presence of British troops as strengthening the eastern border of NATO (the Estonia-Russia frontier), which, he said, has “given our people a greater sense of security."
Karis’ focus only echoes the concerns of Estonian citizens and businesses. In the World Economic Forum’s recent Executive Opinion Survey, conducted in 126 countries, business leaders in only 12 countries ranked armed conflict as the main global risk their country faces. Estonia was one of them, alongside Poland and Latvia. Besides the larger existential threat that Russia is seen by many to pose, the now poor-performing economy is partly attributed to a loss of low-cost inputs from Russia. Two of the other top five risks that Estonian executives listed, cyber and disinformation, are also linchpins of Russian warfare. Surveyed in 2024, 39% of Estonian residents believed a large-scale military attack against Estonia to be “probable” or “very probable” were Russia's war in Ukraine to continue.
The extent to which the Russia threat looms large in Estonia is difficult to grasp as an outsider, perhaps even more so for anyone with little lived or historical experience of direct conflict. The Russo-Estonian relationship is marked by war and occupation. Estonia was part of the Russian Empire from 1710 to 1918, then occupied by the Soviet Union from 1940 to 1991. After regaining independence, tensions persisted due to issues including Estonia's accession to NATO and the EU. As the British journalist Oliver Moody explores in the new, brilliant, Baltic, this experience saturates and guides Estonia's approach to security and foreign policy today, and seeps into every aspect of its broader public policy. “Almost every big decision Estonia has taken since the end of the 1980s,” Moody writes, “has been judged by whether it serves to drag the country further out of Russia’s clutches.” Today is little different.
Resilience Tech
This history means that, in Estonia, resilience is more than the fuzzy global governance buzzword that it has become elsewhere. It is a daily reality and national characteristic, an “underlying mindset”, as Moody describes, premised on the belief that “a society’s defences must be much broader than bunkers and bombs.” Estonian resilience—the ability to adapt and even thrive when faced with shocks and threats—manifests in myriad material and cognitive forms: stocking up physical weapons and producing homegrown munitions in readiness for an attempted invasion; training schoolchildren to spot signs of disinformation campaigns; developing cyber-resilient digital public services; and shoring up supply chains through targeted trade strategies and alliance-building.
The Estonia narrative typically describes its world-class e-government system and feted tech ecosystem as products of “being able to start from zero” in the 1990s, but an ability to get things done, at speed, was born of both need and opportunity. The development of digital public services meant that a slim bureaucracy could serve a small population spread out across rural and urban areas. The tech sector, celebrated for producing the dotcom-era success Skype and more recent “unicorns” including Bolt and Wise, is marked by a focus on resilience-boosting sectors—communications, energy, mobility. There is little frivolity about it; even the gaming sector’s solutions have military applications.
Defence Spending and Innovation
Look hard enough, and Prince William’s visit made this point clear: in Estonia, everything is resilience. On the most obvious level, as he visited British troops deployed to the Russia-Estonia border, Estonia has vocally re-doubled its defence efforts as a critical national priority. In May 2023, Estonia signed a contract with Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) to acquire long-range loitering munitions, reportedly one of the most expensive defence acquisitions Estonia has ever made. The country is expected to raise its defence budget to at least 5% in 2026, from a projected 3.3% this year.
From creating a defence industry park to bolster local ammunition production to €100 million of new public funding for Estonian defence tech companies, Estonia is actively seeking to complement its defence technology imports with local production and innovation. Strengths within the relatively nascent but fast-growing Estonian defence tech industry already include cyber defence solutions, autonomous systems, sensors, communication and surveillance technologies, and vehicle maintenance and repair—but the current offer is insufficient alone. Tallinn also hosts a branch of NATO's Diana programme, a new initiative aimed at fostering dual-use and defence technologies to enhance capabilities across the alliance.
Low-Carbon Energy As Energy Security
As of February 9, 2025, Estonia, along with Latvia and Lithuania, synchronised its electricity grid with the Continental Europe Synchronous Area (CESA), fully disentangling from Russian- and Belarus-controlled electricity systems. Estonia is already highly energy independent, with a self-sufficiency rate of 99.6% as of 2022, but its energy mix heavily relies on domestic oil shale production. A recent report by CleanTech for Baltics, an industry association, describes Cleantech as “Europe’s first line of defence and strategic advantage.” Estonian low-carbon energy innovators that Prince William met directly articulated a security aspiration behind their work. Sunly, an Estonian renewable energy developer and operator, showcased a hybrid, PV, wind and battery project to improve the efficiency of grid use, and emphasised a need to move away from "big, concentrated power systems," which may be vulnerable to attack.
It is no surprise that countries fearing existential threat have been quickest to identify energy diversification and decentralisation as critical to national security, not just a low-carbon future. Israel announced in February a major solar incentive programme, designed to equip an additional 100,000 roofs with solar panels by 2030. The approach is intended to enhance resilience against potential disruptions to the national grid, ensuring that local areas and critical facilities can continue operating during emergencies, and enhancing energy independence.
Globally, investors became jittery when decarbonisation fell down the US agenda but are beginning to wake up to energy diversification as critical to energy security. Jeff Currie and James Gutman write in a new Carlyle report that “The energy transformation is on the cusp of reaccelerating…driven by the quest for security, with nations creating a diversified energy mix of joules across multiple sources to insulate themselves (and investment portfolios) from geopolitical, macro, and financial risks.” Countries such as Estonia that face near-term threats of physical and cyber conflict have long lacked the luxury of thinking of low-carbon energy only in terms of 2050 climate goals.
Strategic Cooperation: Tech bilaterals and minilaterals
“In the Estonian version of Maslow’s pyramid,” Moody writes “the struggle to preserve the nation is at the apex.” National integrity can rarely be achieved in isolation. In an interview at the Clean Energy Association, Prince William noted the need for international partnerships to support "tackling things much faster." He was preaching to the converted: Estonian policymakers and the private-sector are laser-focused on shoring up supply chains, boosting declining national competitiveness in export markets, building up trust among small groups of countries with complementarities, and developing targeted trade strategies to bolster security and prosperity. That a thirty-something-year-old independent state of 1.3 million people has produced Europe’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, speaks to the driving force that the quest for national resilience has played in impelling the country to make itself heard in global, pro-democracy fora.
At least a part of Estonia's strength to date has been the cohesiveness with which resilience has been understood as existential, and innovation—from education to timber to energy to diplomacy—a foundation for its development. Like another small state, Singapore, innovation has served as one vehicle to compensate for population size and security disadvantages through global economic ties and technological leadership. If the post-Soviet transformation was animated by a mission never to turn back, the state visit put on display the steadfastness of that impulse, and the role—with few holes—that every sector sees itself as playing in ensuring this future.