All That Was Old Is New Again 1
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There is no magic; there is only the con.
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January 21, 2017 at 12:49 am
—>Decoded: The heck with NATO. The heck with the postwar global alliance led by America to deter foreign aggression.
Decoded: If a foreign power does something aggressive — if, for instance, Russia moves against the Baltic states, like Estonia — we won’t necessarily respond by honoring our NATO commitments.<—
There's a double con here or maybe just purposeful ignorance. NATO didn't push into old Great Patriotic War ground during the Cold War. When the Soviet Union fell a tacit pledge was made not to take advantage as victors. It's not in a treaty but you can find respectable historians as well as people like Gorbachev and Chomsky who talk about it. That promise wasn't honored.
I'll not go into detail but I'm sure I've read more than Dick Polman or most on the Red Army in WWII and what it went through in these buffer states at the hands of the Wehrmacht. It's not something Americans comprehend or know much detail, if any, about. There was a precedent set last week when Obama dispatched a US heavy armored brigade to Poland and the Baltics and it debarked in Bremerhaven, Germany. You want a move that pushes toward war, that's one. Russians see this as one thing, I bet, similar to what used to be called — "panzer group."
So if he/they/the opposition want to drag Trump over the coals on NATO, more solid ground might be trod if some time was spent looking at the bad faith and strategy that the old guard has been peddling for NATO.
But it's part and parcel of the universal condemnation. 24 hours ago or so 2 B2s were sent to strategically bomb a camp in Libya. That was all the way from Missouri and it was an Obama order. B2s were used to send a message about global strike at the expense of some nobody targets in a failed state. Who would global strike signaling be aimed at?