NATO allies lock in US support for stand-off with Russia
USA - Immediately after Donald Trump was elected, US diplomats urged Lithuania to rush through an agreement to keep American troops on its soil, reflecting alarm that the new, Russia-friendly US president might try to stop more deployments in Europe. The agreement was signed just a few days before Trump’s inauguration, according to a document from the Lithuanian defense ministry, and became the first step locking the new US president into a NATO strategy to deter Russia in Poland and the Baltics, following Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Crimea. European allies are growing confident that, with the arrival of US troops in Poland, plans ordered by Barack Obama will hold. They are reassured by Trump’s remarks to US forces in Florida this week, when he said: “We strongly support NATO.”
“When you put soldiers on the ground, tanks like this, that signifies a long-term commitment,” Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, the US army’s top commander in Europe, said at the snow-covered base in Zagan, Poland where thousands of US troops are arriving before fanning out across the region. “I am not hearing anything that would tell me otherwise,” Hodges said when asked whether Trump might scale back deployments. The president has described NATO as “obsolete” and has praised Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
But it will be hard politically for Trump to bring troops home “on the orders of Russia”, one senior alliance diplomat said. The US soldiers featured in a TV commercial seen by millions of Americans at the end of the Super Bowl on Sunday. Worried since Russia’s seizure of Crimea that Moscow could invade Poland or the Baltic states, the Western military alliance wants to bolster its eastern flank without provoking the Kremlin by stationing large forces permanently.
The troop build-up is NATO’s biggest in Europe since the end of the Cold War, using a web of small eastern outposts, forces on rotation, regular war games and warehoused US equipment ready for a rapid response force of up to 40,000 personnel. (Reuters.com)