"If we bring Ukraine into NATO, what do we do if Russified east Ukraine secedes and Russia sends troops to back the rebels? Do we send warships into Russia's bathtub, the Black Sea, and commit to fight as long as it takes to restore Ukraine's territorial integrity?"
Those are tough questions. The solution is not to cower in the bathtub as Pat suggests.
Good questions, but Pat asks them with the intent that we do nothing.
Its obvious to me that we can’t directly defend eastern Europe. But its just as obvious that if they are looking to defend themselves we can have a role in that. We aren’t going to base 250,000 American troops in Ukraine the way we did in West Germany, and we aren’t going to threaten nuclear war over them.
But we have every right to do business with them, and if they want to modernize and build an effective force, we can help them do that. Bringing them into NATO isn’t going to guarantee them the security that we offered Germany. Face it, the old NATO is dead.
If Ukraine and Poland and the Baltics want to defend themselves, they are going to have to build a military capable of doing the job against a superior force. That means high-tech, high-speed, a serious force that is designed to fight and not merely for internal crowd control. And they are going to have to form an alliance-within-an-alliance, that an attack on one is an attack on all. If they will do that, Russia might think twice. If they can’t or won’t do that, they will have to depend upon appeals to world opinion, and good luck with that.
We won’t put soldiers into that battleground. They’ll have to defend themselves. But between now and then we can help these countries that clearly want to be a part of the West. We shouldn’t be embarrassed of that role.