As I said before, I applaud President Obama for going to Estonia this past week before the NATO summit in Wales. And I applaud what he said in Tallinn:
“So I’ve come here, first and foremost, to reaffirm the commitment of the United States to the security of Estonia. As NATO Allies, we have Article 5 duties to our collective defense. That is a commitment that is unbreakable. It is unwavering. It is eternal. And Estonia will never stand alone.”
I also support what he said after the NATO summit:
“Here in Wales, we’ve left absolutely no doubt – we will defend every ally.”
The question is, unfortunately, whether he will follow through on what he said. He didn’t follow through on what he said about red lines in Syria or about Afghanistan being the necessary war we had to win. He did follow through on what he said about leaving Iraq, though at this point it is more than a little unclear whether doing so, in the way he did it, was all that good of an idea. I am also sure that President Obama will follow through on his plan to leave Afghanistan by the end of 2016, regardless of the situation on the ground at that time. All in all, President Obama does a better job of following through when he says he is going to leave than when he says he is going to do something or defend something.
At the summit, NATO leaders agreed to establish a new force of several thousand troops that will be able to move into trouble spots on very short notice. According to The Wall Street Journal:
“The force of several thousand troops is aimed at increasing NATO's ability to move quickly into Central and Eastern Europe to deter Russia from intervening in former Soviet-bloc countries that are now members of the 28-nation alliance. …
Soldiers from countries volunteering troops would rotate into the rapid-reaction force, which would use equipment including ammunition pre-positioned in Eastern Europe. …
Five countries have offered to host bases for pre-positioning of equipment: Poland, Romania and the three Baltic states. At least one command-and-control center is likely to be based in the region, possibly at Szczecin* in northern Poland. …
By using rotation of troops into the region, the force allows NATO to say that it has a continuous presence in Eastern Europe but not a permanent one. It thereby avoids an open breach of a 1997 agreement with Russia to which it says it wants to adhere despite what it says is Russia's own flouting of the pact by undermining Ukraine's territorial integrity.”
This is all very good, but it seems to me it would be better to have NATO troops permanently stationed in eastern Europe. I understand that some countries in NATO do not want to contravene the 1997 agreement with Russia. But that was a different Russia, and Russia’s forcible annexation of Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine surely makes that agreement irrelevant.
The trouble with a rotating force is that it might not be in place when it is needed. In fact, it probably wouldn’t be in place when it is needed because that would be the very time an aggressor would try to do something. Therefore, NATO would have to make an affirmative decision to send a force to the Baltics, for example, in an emergency. However, as we have seen with respect to Ukraine, there will be countries that want to hold back for fear of antagonizing Russia. Instead of sending a force in, they would say, let’s try for a cease-fire first.
On the other hand, if forces are already there, because they are permanently located there, then there is nothing to do; there is nothing to decide. It won’t be a matter of Russia doing something when they know no forces will be there – because forces will always be there. This kind of presence has helped deter North Korea and helped maintain the armistice in Korea for over 60 years. A similar presence in West Germany worked for 40+ years. We should now try it in eastern Europe and the Baltics.
Another reason to have troops permanently stationed there is that is that any aggression Russia conducts against a NATO member will be vague and unclear. Russia will deny it is doing anything, as it initially did in Crimea and as it is still doing in eastern Ukraine. And the aggression, at least at first, won’t be with tanks and artillery. It will be unclear whether we need to send troops. But if we have troops permanently located there, we won’t have to worry about whether to send troops – because they will already be there.
In fact, I wonder if Russia’s undercover aggression is already happening in the Baltics. Next to the article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal about the Wales summit, there was an article about the abduction and detaining of an Estonian security official by the Russians. Is this the start of something in Estonia? Do we need to send forces to the Baltics now?
Nobody knows, but that is precisely the point. If we have forces permanently located in these countries, we wouldn’t have to decide whether a situation is sufficiently serious to send armed forces. In a crisis, sending forces could subject NATO to accusations of being the instigator. Also, as I said before, there could be countries who would hesitate; there almost always are. But if forces are always there, there is be no need to make such a decision; there would be no unfortunate hesitation.
Some might argue that such forces would necessarily be so small that they would just be a tripwire. They would be small, but they wouldn’t be a tripwire. They would be a warning and a shield – letting foreign countries see our commitment on the ground, not just in words. And making it much less likely anybody would be tempted to test that commitment.
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* Szczecin is the new Polish name for the previously German town of Stettin, made famous by Winston Churchill in his speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.” It is because of NATO’s firm policies in the past that Szczecin, and the rest of eastern Europe, is now free and democratic. Let us work to keep it that way.
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