OPINION:
It doesn’t matter that Ukraine is not a member of NATO. The alliance was created and exists today to deter and defeat Russian aggression. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is an assault on NATO because a failure by the United States to fully support Ukraine will cause the former Warsaw Pact nations to question our security commitment to them.
It’s encouraging that a growing number of western nations are severing their economic and financial ties to Russia, but the economic front in this war, though vital, will neither break nor contain President Vladimir Putin’s army.
The real war, sustained by NATO’s airlift, is being fought amid the mud, rubble and subfreezing temperatures by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s soldiers and volunteers. While the airlift is vital to sustain Ukrainian forces, allowing them to dramatically increase the cost of Russian occupation, NATO weapons and Ukrainian courage won’t halt the slow advance, particularly in the south, of coordinated Russian armor and mechanized infantry supported by massed long-range artillery and rocket fires.
The fundamental problem with President Biden’s Ukraine policy is that while he has repeatedly pledged to defend NATO territory, U.S. military deployments since the invasion, about 15,000 troops, many of them light infantry, are hopelessly insufficient in both numbers and capabilities to carry out that mission.
We hoped Mr. Putin wouldn’t invade Crimea. We hoped he wouldn’t invade the Donbas region. We hoped he wouldn’t launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Robust military power, not hope, must be basis for the administration’s Ukraine policy. Mr. Putin is now conducting air and missile attacks within 12 miles of the Polish border, within 60 miles of the Romanian border, and has threatened to expand the war beyond Ukraine’s borders. Much of Ukraine will soon be a war zone.
The time to begin deploying additional ground and air forces is now. Of what value is the American security commitment to the Moldovans, Romanians, Hungarians, Slovakians, Polish or the Baltic societies, all of them former Warsaw Pact nations, if our NATO allies find themselves alone, staring across their borders at massed Russian armor formations?
That grim scenario is at the heart of Mr. Putin’s Ukraine strategy. He is convinced that the United States will not directly oppose him. Over the past decade we withdrew from Iraq, failed to enforce redlines in Syria, did nothing when Mr. Putin invaded Crimea and the Donbas region, failed to respond when he placed Russian forces in Syria, abandoned the Kurds and, most recently, abandoned Afghanistan.
Mr. Putin’s deployment of air, ground and naval forces around Ukraine could have been accomplished in weeks. Those deployments were trial balloons. Mr. Putin was probing, looking for Western weakness or resolve — just as Vladimir Lenin said to do with a bayonet. He wanted to know if the United States would respond. A decade of foreign policy failures, these drawn out deployments, and Mr. Biden’s repeated declarations that the United States would not deploy forces to Ukraine told Putin that he had a green light to invade.
As Russian forces advance, an inadequate response by the U.S. will diminish the credibility of our security commitment. The civilian leaders of Eastern Europe, fearing this advance that observes no moral parameters in the weeks and months ahead, may come to believe, absent a robust U.S. and NATO military presence, that they have little choice but to accommodate Mr. Putin. His principal demand would be the expulsion of all NATO forces from their territories. According to former Russian foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, Mr. Putin’s overall objective is to reconstitute the Soviet empire.
Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once observed that when our security partners begin to doubt the American security commitment, they seek accommodation with our enemies. This process of accommodation, though rarely discussed, has already begun. Poland will provide MiG-29s, but only if routed through Germany. Hungary will allow the transit of weapons from other NATO countries through Hungary to Ukraine, but won’t transfer its own weapons. This maneuvering is an expression, and not without justification, of doubt in the U.S. security commitment.
The solution to this deteriorating situation is for the United States and all alliance members to reinforce NATO’s eastern flank through the immediate deployment of heavy brigade combat teams, air power and requisite support elements capable of generating the combat power Mr. Putin would respect and avoid. NATO was created to deter the Russian threat. That threat isn’t going away. These units, therefore, must be permanently stationed in Eastern Europe, from the Baltic States to the Black Sea in sufficient numbers to be fully credible.
Through these deployments, NATO will defend the alliance in its entirety, ending Mr. Putin’s dream of expelling NATO forces from Eastern Europe. A robust NATO presence on its eastern flank will confine Russia’s invasion to Ukraine — and position NATO forces should their deployment into Ukraine be required.
• Lindsey Neas is a former Army armor officer. He served for 15 years as a military aide to several members of the Senate and House Armed Services Committees.
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