The United States, NATO, and Russia
American Thinker - The United States, NATO, and Russia - May 22, 2016
... Will the next president agree with President George W. Bush who in June 2001 thought, after a “good talk” with the Russian leader that he had a good sense of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s soul?
The next U.S. president must also have a good sense of Putin’s body as well as of his soul. Russian leaders do tend to last. Vladimir Lenin, born in 1870 died in January 1924, is now officially 146 years old. His body is embalmed and well preserved with his red moustache and rests in a specially constructed mausoleum in Red Square in Moscow.
Putin may not live the 146 years of Lenin but he has been in power in one position or other for 16 years, acting in authoritarian fashion and limiting real dissent in Russia. He does not espouse the dogmatic Communist ideology of Lenin but his guiding principles are clear: to restore the importance and power of the Russian state, to use the Russian Orthodox Church as the basis of values, to reject any Western interference in Russian affairs....
Putin, with a relatively weak hand, had played a daring poker game. He misled the West by asserting that Russia was providing Syria with only primarily defensive weapons to repel anti-regime rebels, and it did supply these, including S-300 anti-aircraft air defense systems. But it also supplied fighter jets, MiG-29Ms that can attack ground forces, and has commercial interests in Syria, especially arms contracts.
It is of course Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its help for the separatists in Eastern Ukraine that led some in the west to believe that Russia was engaged in a plan of expansion. In a new novel 2017: War with Russia, General Sir Richard Shirreff, former Deputy Supreme Allied Commander of NATO in Europe, 2011-2014, suggests that a Russian attack on Eastern European nations, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, all NATO members, is a possibility. The West therefore should act to avert “potential catastrophe.” This is a chilling prospect because Russia has used nuclear thinking and capability in every aspect of their defense planning...
NATO was expanded in 2009 when Albania and Croatia became members.
It was surprising that on May 19, 2016, NATO invited the Baltic country of Montenegro, with a population of 680,000 and about the size of Connecticut, to participate in all NATO meetings as an observer. The question is immediate, is any further expansion of NATO helpful? Moreover, NATO is planning to deploy four combat battalions, each of about 1,000 troops, in Eastern Europe as a deterrent.
In response, Russia is deploying three military divisions along its western and southern borders, an activity that Secretary of Defense Ash Carter called “nuclear sabre rattling.”...
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/05/the_united_states_nato_and_russia.html
