Obama Just Made the Ultimate Commitment to Eastern Europe [View all]

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by DAVID FRUM

Presidents give a lot of speeches, and most of them don’t mean very much. They “urge,” they “call on,” and they “challenge”—and, for the most part, their messages bounce off their intended audiences. Congress doesn’t fund the program or balance the budget; the American people carry on wasting energy and dropping out of school. But there are occasions when presidential words are not mere puffs of breath and waves of sound—and today was one of those occasions.

Ever since Vladimir Putin launched his war on Ukraine, the question has been whether the United States would really act to defend its new NATO allies on Russia’s borders. During the Cold War, the United States stationed a powerful army in West Germany to put force behind its treaty guarantee of European security. Then the Cold War ended. NATO enlarged to include first Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic in 1999, then the Baltic republics, plus Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia in 2004, and most recently Albania and Croatia in 2009.

Partly for economic reasons, partly to appease the Kremlin, NATO did not garrison the new member states on Russia’s border. Polish officials would joke that the only uniformed American in their country was the defense attaché at the U.S. embassy, which was an exaggeration, but not by much. They had NATO’s word—America’s word—but not much more than that word. And all of them had to worry: Was that enough?

The worry has intensified since Barack Obama came to power. Eager to prove themselves loyal allies, the new NATO members had cooperated with the United States—and then some—in the first decade of the 2000s. They had sent troops to the Iraq War. They had allowed the CIA to hold and question detainees on their territory. They had accepted a U.S. missile-defense system—even as the U.S. insisted that the system was intended to protect only against Iranian missiles (which didn’t threaten them) and not against Russian missiles (which did).

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http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/09/obama-commitment-eastern-europe-russia-nato/379581/