Standing up to bullies: Lithuania’s playbook for surviving economic warfare, and what Canada can learn

There was a point in time, not so very long ago, when Lithuania was considered the testing ground for a new kind of modern warfare — economic warfare.

Today we call it economic coercion, a concept Canadians have become all too familiar with, whether we’re talking about trade and tariff threats from the Trump administration, or targeted trade restrictions from China.

U.S. President Donald Trump threatened last year to use economic coercion to force Canada to become the 51st state.

That kind of pressure is nothing new to the government in Vilnius, Lithuania's capital.

Starting more than a decade ago, Lithuania faced intense economic coercion from both Russia and China, prompting the U.S.-based Hudson Institute in 2021 to describe the country as the canary in the coal mine of the world order.