What Is the US Military Doing in the Baltics? Get out – before we start World War III

Get ready for the new cold war, which will no doubt if Hillary Clinton gets into the White House: NATO has just announced it is “” the addition of 4,000 more troops to be stationed in Poland and the Baltic states, i.e. right on Russia’s western border. The Washington Post helpfully informs us that this is being done “to deter future Russian aggression” – as if there’s any real possibility that Putin will order the Russian army to take Warsaw or march on Estonia.

What this is is another NATO provocation aimed at showing Putin who’s really in charge in the former Soviet Union’s sphere of influence. They’re hoping the Russian leader will respond in kind. But he’s too smart for that: instead, Putin will retaliate in a different theater, perhaps in Syria or Armenia, where the fight with Azerbaijan in Nagorno-Karabakh is .

This latest move will bring the number of NATO troops staring at the Russkies across their western border to nearly 10,000 if we take into account the “Very High Readiness Joint Task Force” previously mobilized and the US troops .

Imagine the outcry if 10,000 Russian soldiers suddenly arrived on the Rio Grande! Or in Cuba – we’d be witnessing a replay of the Bay of Pigs invasion.

The US and Russia are coming dangerously close to an outright conflict: there have been . One where a Russian plane buzzed an American warship patrolling Baltic waters, and the other where a Russian jet intercepted a US reconnaissance plane headed at high speed for Russian airspace.

The buzzing of the warship was a foolish move on the part of the Russians, but even more foolish was the warning from John Kerry, who intoned: “Under the rules of engagement, that could have been a shoot-down, so people need to understand that this is serious business.” That’s nonsense: is any US commander going to issue orders to shoot down a Russian plane that is clearly not attacking? Of course not – unless that commander happens to be , who has thankfully retired.

NATO is launching “,” which pours US arms into Europe: aircraft, tanks, and artillery are flowing into the region. Can the Russians be expected to stand idly by while the NATO alliance prepares for war?

Asked how the US should respond to Russian fly-bys, GOP presidential frontrunner , in his usual contradictory and semi-coherent way, underscored both the stupidity of US policy and his own incoherence:

“Normally, an Obama, let’s say a president because you want to make at least a call or two, but normally Obama would call up Putin and say, ‘Listen, do us a favor, don’t do that, get that maniac, just stop it.’ But we don’t have that kind of a president. He’s gonna be out playing golf or something.

“But I don’t know, at a certain point, you can’t take it. I mean, at a certain point, you have to do something that, you just can’t take that. That is not right. It’s against all, you know, when you talk about Geneva convention, there’s gotta be things that are against it. You can’t do that. That’s called taunting. But it should certainly start with diplomacy and it should start quickly with a phone call to Putin, wouldn’t you think?

“And if that doesn’t work out, I don’t know, you know, at a certain point, when that sucker comes by you, you gotta shoot. You gotta shoot. I mean, you gotta shoot. And it’s a shame. It’s a shame. It’s a total lack of respect for our country and it’s a total lack of respect for Obama. Which as you know, they don’t respect.”

So – which is it? Diplomacy, or “you gotta shoot”? With Trump, there’s no real way to know.

And that’s the whole problem with this nationalist impulse – it’s an impulse, insofar as Trump is concerned, and not a coherent ideology – it could go either way. Because on the other hand, Trump has repeatedly said he would make a real effort to “” with Putin: he has consistently stated his opposition to starting a new cold war with Russia. In Syria, Trump wants to let the Russians , which he sees as preferable to having us send in our own ground forces. And if we take his goal of détente with the Russians seriously, then under a Trump administration why would US warships and planes be in the Baltics anyway? In order to support NATO, which Trump says is “”?

US relations with Russia are at an all-time post-cold war low. And there really is no reason why that should be so. We have vital strategic interests that are complementary to Russia’s – Washington and Moscow are fighting a worldwide Islamist insurgency that has visited terrorism on both countries. It is only our Bush era neoconservative foreign policy that has made Moscow out to be an enemy, and Trumpism is supposed to be breaking with all that.

And yet it will be hard, even if Trump does make it to the White House, to completely ditch the old GOP foreign policy orthodoxy, which will continually reassert itself in spite of everything: there’s too much money and prestige at stake, not to mention sheer force of habit.

America’s face-off with Russia is the most dangerous emerging conflict of them all: it augurs not only a new cold war, but a potentially very hot one in which nuclear weapons are the ultimate card. The US is now engaged in a with the Kremlin, in which the Obama administration is undertaking to “modernize” our nuclear weapons stockpile. It is dangerous because, a) nukes are inherently dangerous, and b) because “modernization” means miniaturization, a development that makes actually using nukes “thinkable” for the first time since Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

We don’t want to go down that road.

The very existence of the NATO alliance means that we have set up any number of tripwires that could end in a nuclear exchange. Not only on Russia’s eastern frontier, but on it’s southern flank, where our NATO ally Turkey has already one Russian plane and is likely for more. is an irrational despot who is seeking to stifle trouble at home – and no doubt looks forward to a conflict with Russia as a way to provoke a nationalist upsurge that would shore up his regime.

Do we really want to risk war with Russia for Erdogan’s sake?

And then there’s Ukraine, where US “soft power” gave a hard kick and deposed the elected President: they’ve been a basket case ever since. Not only that, but they’ve been an obstreperous basket case, stubbornly refusing to rein in either their corrupt economic arrangements or their inclination to simply stamp out internal opposition. The West is in a lather because the authorities the most popular television journalist in the country, but we didn’t hear a peep out of these guys when the Kiev regime first began cracking down on journalists like , who is for making a video opposing Ukraine’s conscription law.

a year ago, Ukraine’s government has fallen into the hands of extreme nationalists who are out to turn the country into a dictatorship. The presence of neo-Nazis in the Kiev government signaled the rise of the Ukrainian ultra-right as a force to be reckoned with, and my prediction is coming all too true: the ascension of , founder of the “Social Nationalist” Party of Ukraine – renamed Svoboda (“Freedom”) – to the post of Speaker of Parliament, and the of the “moderate” Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, shows what direction the country is headed.

That US troops are currently in Ukraine training and advising the army of a proto-fascist government – including the explicitly and others like it – is a moral obscenity. Yet this is where the launching of a new cold war against Russia has led us.