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Always interesting and stimulating.

It's neither.

There is nothing so pathetic as a bunch of high living jackasses so out of shape a 3-year old girl could whip their sorry behinds, making threats against Moscow.

My, what trenchant analysis.

I don't know too many US Marines that have been whipped by three year old girls.

No one has made threats against Nazi Russia. In fact, they've spoken far too politely to the gang of thieves in the Kremlin.

Lets be clear that if tomorrow the Russians decided they wanted to take the Baltics, given six months prep time, they could take the three countries in 72-hours, and what is NATO going to do about it?

The Baltics have three light infantry brigades and a reserve brigade - total. This is a force even weaker than Georgia fielded. Where are the NATO troops to fight the Russians? The only ones with the guts to fight are the Americans, but where are the ground forces required to stop a Russian army of 3-4 divisions?

I imagine that the Poles and other eastern European members of NATO would be willing and capable in such a scenario.

I am not sure which particular brand of crack the author is smoking, but it must be potent stuff.

During the Cold War, we built a fair-sized West German army, stiffened its spine with 250,000 American troops who were combat ready, and made it plain that these were a mere trip-wire for nuclear war.

Even at that, the western alliance barely held together, the Dems weren’t particularly loyal to it nor were the western Europeans who were continually demonstrating for an end to our presence there.

Reagan managed to pull the rabbit out of the hat, but remember the Dems tried to throw him out of office, and the Euros were rioting against us all the while.

In Poland, the “western alliance” will be non-existent. Getting permission from German bases to deploy against a Russian attack may be problematic; they tried to stop us from supporting our Iraq and Afghan ventures from there a few years back. They are not particularly reliable partners and if Russia moves against Ukraine, they are not likely to want to be involved.

We can be trusted to back the easterners with certain kinds of support prior to a fight, but once the fight is on our role would no doubt be support only. We aren’t likely to send ground troops, and unless we have forward bases in Ukraine and Poland, which seems unlikely at this point, we aren’t even going to offer air support. We aren’t going to send our warthogs out to kill Russian tanks if they have to take off from German bases.

Which means Poland and Ukraine have to build their own tank killers. They have to build high-tech high-speed military forces capable of defeating an invading force several times larger. They need soldiers who know what they are about, which is probably not a problem in Poland but might be a problem in the Ukraine.

Most Euro armies are designed for use as extras for Hollywood movies and not much more. Poland, the Baltics, and Ukraine need to build their own alliance within an alliance and let everyone know that they will respond to any attack on the least among them. And they need to build the hair-trigger force capable of doing it. If Moscow can take them on separately, they are all done for already. They may as well surrender now.