Posted on 03/31/2014 12:58:28 PM PDT by Olog-hai
Germany has said its air force is ready to increase security on NATO’s border with Russia, despite Moscow’s promise not to escalate the crisis in Ukraine.
A German defense ministry spokeswoman told the Reuters news agency on Sunday (30 March) “the army could take part in flights to patrol airspace with AWACS machines [surveillance planes] over Romania and Poland as well as training flights in the framework of a NATO air policing mission over Baltic states”.
The statement comes after Denmark and the US in the past few weeks agreed to send more than a dozen extra F-16 fighter jets to the region.
It also comes after the Pentagon, on Friday, told NATO’s military chief, US general Philip Breedlove, to return from Washington to the NATO HQ in Brussels.
Its spokesman said the move “does not foreshadow imminent military action in Ukraine”. But he added that “lack of transparency” and “growing uncertainty” over Russia’s mobilization of tens of thousands of troops on Ukrainian borders merits caution. …
(Excerpt) Read more at euobserver.com ...
Methinks Merkel and Putin are playing their own game, and shuffling 0bama out of the deal.
Yep, and that works fine with me.
A possible mirror of Molotov-Ribbentrop works fine with you?
NATO is getting a lot of pressure to show it’s got value. That’s my opinion. Putin is making NATO become real.
I’m sick of spending money we don’t have on Europe.
In the meantime, Kerry will play Rumpelstiltskin.
Yes, and foreign countries are sick of borrowing to us to pay for the security that, if they were to handle it themselves, they would get very imperialistic about because their own politicians are absolutely not trustworthy with such power because they are more like Putin than they care to admit. (That borrowed money was not supposed to be spent on the USA’s domestic welfare programs, but on keeping the actual peace as the USA is wont to do.)
So now, with the USA withdrawing from the world scene (just as Obama has planned, in fact), history is starting to repeat itself. And the USA won’t be unscathed, any more than it was unscathed during the last two world wars (to put it mildly).
Putin is attempting to install buffer states between Russia and everybody else. He is, in effect, reestablishing the Soviet Union. The best thing NATO can do is try to act non-threatening. (That’s because the US is NATO’s only stick. The organization by itself is barely a Russian speed bump. With Obama in charge the US can’t be relied on for ANYTHING.)
Putin is making NATO become “European” if anything. Another “international organization” backed by the USA that has gotten away from US control. Biggest mistake was doing the will of “Europe” w.r.t. the former Yugoslavia.
Damn straight! Whether we economically collapse from social welfare here or military welfare abroad, it`s still a collapse to us taxpayer peons who get to foot the bills.
Putin has been rebuilding the USSR in his own image ever since he attained the top spot in Russia well over a decade ago. Even calls it the “Eurasian Union” as a sort of jab towards the European Union. But notice that Putin’s strongest rhetoric is reserved against the USA.
Just because the USA shrinks off the world scene will not mean that these other empires will. They have a habit of showing up on your doorstep.
Until then I just wish they would pull their own weight.
The Bundeswehr has been second only behind the US military in terms of international deployments, for a while.
And this mess with Russia actually goes back to when Helmut Kohl recognized the independence of Croatia and Slovenia from Yugoslavia, so they kinda provoked it. They even had the nerve to provoke a rift with their allies—all the way back in 1991. In light of that, you would like them to continue to “pull their own weight”?
I’m sick of spending money we don’t have on dead beats in the US.
"A possible mirror of Molotov-Ribbentrop works fine with you?"
We've just been pissing in the wind by helping the Europeans ever since WWI. There would have never been a Molotov-Ribbentrop pact if in 1917 let the Allies didn't know we'd join in. The European "victors" would have had to deal with reality rather than pretend they'd defeated Germany in a war only Germany was responsible for.
It seems to me it's the infatuation with Europe among American elites that has greased the skids for this country to go down the tubes both morally and economically.
Germany spends 1.4% of GDP on defense.
We can look at that again when it's 3% or better.
Wilson ran on the re-election slogan “He Kept Us Out Of War”. So leaving the Lusitania unavenged was a price worth paying? like leaving Chris Stevens and other US ambassadors unavenged these days?—and we all see “the world’s” reaction to the latter.
Having the Kaiser run Europe from 1918 onwards would have meant more war—”unrestricted submarine warfare” was exactly what it said on the label. (It’s also wise to lay off the revisionist history.)
Do you think they’ll use it to defend the USA if Obama pulls us off the world scene?
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