WASHINGTON – For the first time since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the United States is contemplating a Russia that has used military force against a neighbor and wondering what, if anything, it must do to counter it.
In a world where U.S. military strategy has been focused since 9/11 on fighting terrorist groups and foreign insurgencies, the sudden Russian move into Georgia raises troubling questions for military thinkers, many of whom had hoped that tensions with Russia were a thing of the distant past.
The decision to include Patriot missiles and other weapons – which would be most useful in a fight with Russia – in a missile-defense treaty with Poland is one aspect of this new thinking.
But it also is symptomatic of how unprepared – or unwilling – the United States is to return to those days when, for 45 years, America was obsessed with the idea that the next conflict would be in central Europe.
The treaty, signed Wednesday in Warsaw by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, calls for the placement of 10 U.S. interceptor missiles just 115 miles from Russia's westernmost frontier. In addition, the United States would establish an American military base to support the Patriots, which can shoot down short-range missiles.
The United States also will upgrade Poland's air defenses and modernize its military under the strategic cooperation declaration.
But few analysts saw the Patriots as a real reaction to Russian aggression. Instead, they portrayed it as an effort to dress up an agreement to make it look like a response to events in Georgia.
"It's a baby step," said Charles A. Kupchan, a senior fellow for Europe Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations who is skeptical that the Russian move into Georgia portends a newly aggressive military posture from Moscow.
"At this point, it's not about a Russia that is bent on an imperial conquest," he said.
Pentagon officials have made it clear that they don't want a return to the days of the Cold War.
With the U.S. military tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan and its training and procurement emphasis now shifted to counterinsurgency, not conventional warfare, it's easy to understand why.
Which leaves some at the Pentagon fretting that since Iraq, the United States has focused too much of its training on counterinsurgency and is now caught off-guard by allies that need more conventional help.
Most Pentagon officials in the past week have been unwilling to say the United States must change direction again.
Kupchan says he's betting the change isn't necessary.
"Are NATO war planners again burning the midnight oil to draft plans for a potential conflict against Russia? My guess is no," Kupchan said. "Russia will not continue down this road."
Call Nancy Youssef, McClatchy Washington Bureau, (202) 383-6080.
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