Plan B Forum

Hell no we won't go! Oh yea this should scare the hell out of the Russians:
“the message we need to send is unity and capability.”Additional reporting by Richard Milne

My advise is to teach your children to speak Russian and the glory of the steppes. If we started now it would take a generation to produce Americans with enough grit to be able to fight the Russians by then it will be too late, of course assuming the liberal reluctance to use tactical nukes.

https://www.ft.com/content/e8dfe286-2f7 ... 144feabdc0

Nato allies at odds over response to Russian aggression


August 31, 2014
by: Sam Jones in London


In late March, Donald Tusk, the Polish prime minister, made a plea to Nato: put 10,000 troops in Poland, permanently, he asked.

But to the consternation of many in Poland and the Baltics, Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, last week slapped down any notion of Nato boots in a long-term positioning on eastern European soil during a visit to Latvia. In the wake of Russia’s land-grab in Ukraine, the debate over how Nato should respond has been an impassioned one that threatens to divide the alliance. “What Ukraine has done is put in perspective Russia’s policy, which is threatening to overturn the basic principles of European security,” says Michael Clarke, director-general of the Royal United Services Institute in London. “There’s almost a view for some that we are walking into a new Cold War or a new 1930s.” At its biennial summit this week, Nato will hope to bridge the member states’ divisions with the unveiling of its new “readiness action plan”, the result of weeks of detailed negotiation among alliance ambassadors in Brussels. The plan is not yet set in stone and, hawkish critics warn, is at risk of degenerating into a feat of linguistic acrobatics with little substance. The key sticking point has been whether Nato should discard – or bend – rules laid out in treaties such as the Nato-Russia founding act and the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty and subsequent documents, which proscribe “new” permanent deployments of troops, effectively ruling out bases in eastern Europe and the Baltics. Though Russia itself declared a moratorium on the CFE Treaty in 2007, Nato members such as Germany believe the alliance should still abide by the spirit of the document.In crafting its new policy, Nato has therefore walked a careful line on troop deployments. “We are not going to use any reference, not even in colloquial communication, on permanent basing,” says one senior Nato official. “We will talk about ‘appropriate presence’.” Nato warns on Ukraine crisisPlay videoWhat such “appropriate presence” may amount to has been left deliberately open-ended, the official added. The crucial shift in language, for the alliance, is on how the readiness plan will focus on Nato’s “frontier” – a reference to the Baltics and eastern Europe. The plan calls for it to be strengthened with improved swift deployment capabilities and increased military exercises and deployments in frontier states.“The deal with the Russians that there wouldn’t be any forward Nato positions in these ‘no mans’ states’ cannot be sustained,” says Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the chair of Britain’s parliamentary intelligence and security committee. “Nato assets must be positioned in all Nato countries that require them,” he says.Sven Mikser, Estonia’s defence minister, told the Financial Times that he wants to see “an Allied presence on our soil as a way of reassurance and deterrence”.But, Mr Mikser added: “We don’t mean the Cold War-style of a very heavy, static presence. We are not talking of divisions.”The alliance’s plan will feature a new high-readiness brigade, capable of being deployed in hours and significant propositioning of material in Poland, as well as a permanent command centre at Szczecin on the Baltic coast. Some of this will dovetail with ongoing Nato work. The US has just begun to put in place its new “European Activity Set”, a battalion-sized arsenal first used in military exercises in June. Currently based in Grafenwoehr in Germany, it will be relatively easy to relocate the EAS to Poland, replicate it there, or augment it. A more significant part of the plan will be the increased military exercises and deployments. Nato allies have already ramped up their efforts in the wake of the Ukraine crisis. The US, for example, has deployed 600 paratroopers from its 173rd Airborne Brigade equally divided between bases at Swidwin in Poland, Paldiski in Estonia, Adazi in Latvia and Rukla in Lithuania. Denmark, France and Britain have, meanwhile, sent fighter jets to Amari in Estonia and Malbork in Poland. But even Nato’s biggest military exercises do not come close to matching the scale of those undertaken on its borders by Russia. Spring Storm, the largest ever Baltic war game in late May, involved 6,000 troops. By comparison, Russia’s emergency war games on the Ukrainian and Baltic state borders in February involved 150,000 troops. “I don’t think we will go back to a full Cold War-type posture where we had millions of troops involved in exercises on both sides of the Fulda Gap,” says Admiral James Stavridis, who until last year was Nato’s supreme allied commander and is now dean of the Fletcher School at Tuft’s university. But Mr Stavridis predicted a sizeable increase from the slimmed-down exercises of the past decade.“In two words,” he says, “the message we need to send is unity and capability.”Additional reporting by Richard Milne

"Village idiot once again misreads his own source and draws completely wrong conclusions from it. Film at 11."

I have no intention of trying to read that Paragraph From Hell...

Don't worry, Trump the appeaser will hand back all of the former Iron Curtain countries to Russia on his first day in office.

I wonder how Sarah Palin will feel when Trump "sells" Alaska back to Russia in payment of his debts to Russian mobsters.

It would give her the ability to see Russia from her house.

Lord Jim wrote:I have no intention of trying to read that Paragraph From Hell...

This all you need Jim:

Nato allies at odds over response to Russian aggression

I is not just the United States that is screwed up it is almost all of the western world. We are all weak and not nearly united enough. However, on the positive side Putin is very smart and not likely to make a move until he is certain of victory. But one Russian victory in Europe would mean the collapse of NATO, western Europe would be over run with pro-Russian Europeans just wanting to give peace a chance. Remember the Persian II missile crisis in the 1980s?

All we are saying is give peace a chance. All we are saying is give peace a chance. All we are saying is give peace a chance. All we are saying is give peace a chance.

I would suggest that the draft be reinstated, but what would come of it, fragings and riots.

And what is it that NATO allies are at odds about? Can you articulate it? Did you understand a single sentence of what you read before you posted it?

Remember the Persian II missile crisis in the 1980s?

What the fuck are "Persian II missiles" and what was the "crisis" surrounding them?

Remember the Persian II missile crisis in the 1980s?

Uh, lib, I'm pretty sure you're referring to the Pershing II missile, (named after an American general, not a Middle Eastern rug)

And I remember well how that unfolded in the 80's, I've posted about it before. Ronald Reagan's steadfast leadership in pushing the deployment prevailed over a major efforts by the Soviets and the naive US and European Left to prevent it. It marked an important turning point in the Cold War:

In the 1970s, the Soviets started deploying SS-20 theater ballistic missiles in Eastern Europe. The missiles threatened European cities and threatened NATO's critical British air bases with short-notice attack. NATO responded to Kremlin escalation with a "dual track" policy pushed by the Carter Administration. NATO would negotiate to remove the SS-20s but, should the Soviets refuse to withdraw them, the allies would deploy equivalent systems.

West Germany's Socialist chancellor Helmut Schmidt argued that Jimmy Carter's approach exposed NATO to Soviet political attacks designed to sap the collective will to resist. Schmidt favored a common sense response that said: "You deploy, we deploy. You negotiate, we negotiate." But Carter insisted on "dual track."

Carter's strategic naivete delighted Kremlin chess masters. They knew their end game: Negotiations would fail. As Schmidt feared, neutralist sentiment, evident in Holland and Belgium, was infecting West Germany. Leveraging classic anti-American tropes (Adolf Hitler dismissed Americans as "cowboys"), Moscow's propagandists would portray NATO's response to the SS-20s as the aggressive act.

Among frightened Europeans, America's promise to protect Europe within its nuclear umbrella would morph into an American nuclear threat to Europe. The chess masters argued this political judo could shatter NATO.

In mid-1983, having collectively concluded negotiations had failed, NATO confirmed it would deploy U.S. cruise missiles to Britain and Italy and Pershing 2 ballistic missiles to West Germany to counter the Soviet SS-20s.

And then the Crisis, designed to stop NATO's counter-deployment, began in full media fury. Western "peace" organizations, Western pacifists and Communist sympathizers demonstrated throughout Western Europe and the U.S., their protests motley yet synchronized. In October the demonstrations intensified, along with media hysterics. Why? The West German parliament had scheduled a vote on missile deployment.

On November 22, West Germany's parliament approved the missile deployment. The next day, U.S. missiles arrived in Europe. NATO counter-deployed -- and nuclear war didn't erupt. The chess masters ... were checked.

What this episode illustrates, is the critical importance of having a US President who will be seen as strong and committed to our allies in the face of Russian aggression and intimidation. In another words, the exact opposite of Donald Trump, who has gone out of his way to undermine allied confidence in the US commitment to European security, and is at best a naive appeaser and stooge to Vladimir Putin, and at worst an agent of influence controlled from Moscow by a pile of blackmail material that Putin holds over his head.