Quiet U.S. pullback in Eastern Europe sparks wider allied worries

As Estonia's Defence Minister Hanno Pevkur prepared to fly to the NATO summit in Ankara this month, he revealed to local journalists that several hundred U.S. troops deployed to his Baltic nation in the winter had quietly been withdrawn – with no clear sign of when or whether they might return.

At the Ankara gathering itself, delegates from the Baltic states and Poland proudly wore badges proclaiming themselves members of the "five percent club", the only nations in the NATO alliance to have already reached the spending target set at last year's meeting in The Hague – a status they had believed until recently would secure them lasting U.S. military backing.

Despite some of the most outspoken behaviour yet by U.S. President Donald Trump at a major international gathering, NATO officials including ‌Secretary General Mark Rutte claimed it as a victory, pointing to a string of new defence deals, increases in European spending and an "ironclad" commitment to mutual assistance.

However, many of those commitments – including a nine-nation defence bank led by Canada and a long-range strike missile consortium worth $50 billion and involving a dozen countries - will take years to deliver.

In public, even Trump-sceptic leaders such as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney praised the U.S. president for putting pressure on NATO members to increase their spending.

Meanwhile, what is actually happening on the ground this summer is that the U.S. has now pulled back its forces from some of the most vulnerable areas in Eastern Europe just as worries grow that a Kremlin increasingly publicly humiliated by Ukraine’s long-range drone and missile strikes deep into Russian territory might be tempted to lash out.

It’s not their ambition.

Moscow really doesn’t mind Europe bankrupting itself building up its defenses while accusing Europeans of “warmongering”, especially for doing it at the same time as backing Ukraine.

President Trump’s not helping. He’s telling Europe to hit the 5% knowing that Russian propaganda would go gangbusters on European “warmongering” and “Russophobia!” in response.

While pulling out, which suits Putin even more than it suits the USA.

Putin doesn’t fear EU NATO (he knows they’re deeply reluctant to attack Russia themselves and are far more focused on defensive assurance; that’s why the membership of Finland and Sweden doesn’t anger him).

But Moscow still fears the US in NATO. Because Putin still has peak Cold War paranoia.

He thinks that if he can’t hit EU NATO without hitting the USA, he cannot afford the consequences of the USA nuking back. Yes, it’s irrational. But. Putin’s been resistant to fifty years of political change on that front; he’s like the nutters who nearly triggered a nuclear exchange in 1983 over Able Archer despite the Soviet military already knowing it was just an exercise.

The song 99 Luftballons was a satire on the Politburo and Soviet paranoia of that time. Putin’s entire philosophy is party-like-its-1983. It’s why his pre invasion ultimatum to NATO demanded no NATO exercises on NATO soil without the prior permission of the Kremlin.

“The Kremlin isn’t going to do nothing. They can’t even take out Ukraine.”

That is a reasonable, rational thought. Unfortunately, dictators are not reasonable people. At least not the sort of reasonable we expect in our pluralistic culture. Putin is a high school bully who realizes if he backs down, he’ll look like a steak in front of a pack of starving wolves. He has no back down strategy. He has a double down strategy. Think Hitler’s attack at the Battle of The Bulge. It was a stupid move and nobody in the Allied command planned for it because it wasn’t “reasonable.” The plan floated and leaked on the Russian side is to seize territory in Latvia or Estonia and watch Article Five come to nothing followed by the collapse of NATO. That doesn’t sound reasonable unless failing to win means you actually die. Then, pretty much anything sounds “reasonable.”

Why indeed. All the way through the Cold War, the USSR had a border with NATO. And détente via the Helsinki Accords of 1975 ratified by 35 nations including the USSR, the USA, and all NATO allies.

The daftest part of it all is, the geographical border with the USA is so close that the whole “panic” about Poland possibly hosting NATO troops and missiles looks completely retarded. If the USA was going to nuke anything in Russia, it wouldn’t be launching from eastern Europe, would it?! Washington knows it, Europe knows it, the UK knows it, and Moscow knows it. We all know it.

This is the epitome of “vranyo” - Lavrov knows he and Putin keep lying about it, we all know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying, and still they lie. That’s not the problem. The problem is, for “diplomatic reasons”, instead of us calling their lies out for the utter rank bull that it quite obviously is, Western diplomats nod politely and move on. Silence implies agreement. This is a self-harming bad habit and we’ve got to stop doing it.

Putin himself said on countless occasions before 2008, not just internationally but on domestic television, that it was entirely up to Ukraine to decide if it wanted full NATO membership or not. Russia and Ukraine were both in the NATO Partnership for Peace at the time, and Ukraine never once suggested it was seeking membership. In fact, even in his first term, Putin showed more of an interest in Russia one day joining NATO, than Ukraine ever did - even under Poroshenko from 2014 to 2019.

There’s even one Presidential Q&A session in Russia around 2006-7 where Putin absolutely tore into a Duginist ultranationalist for suggesting Russia should be forcing its little Ukrainian brother into vassal status, reminding the audience that Ukraine has all the same rights as an independent nation as the RF does.

So, where does it really come from? Well... what changed Putin’s mind around the time that Ukraine found lots of oil offshore and started signing deals with European and American partners instead of signing deals with, shall we say, a demonstrably-more-bent-than-a-three-dollar-bill Russian oil and gas oligarchy AS WELL AS committing to anti-corruption measures as part of a roadmap to one day becoming an EU member state?

Who knows...

In the Belovezha Accords of 1991, the joint declaration of three founding Soviet Socialist Republics, they ensured the preamble (indeed, the very first full paragraph) made it crystal clear that the USSR’s entire “geopolitical reality” had “ceased to exist”.

What that meant was, nations of the former USSR and Warsaw Pact were acknowledged by the leaders of Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Khazakstan, and over time the other ex-USSR nations, as having “independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity” from each other, with the borders in 1991 fixed according to what had been agreed at Helsinki in 1975. And that included Crimea being inside Ukraine.

Basically, the whole NATO expansion thing is a red herring; it’s like Argentina’s regime in the early 80s desperately needing a win from somewhere and needed a boogeyman - and surely the fact that oil had been struck in the waters around the Falkland Islands just happened to be a massive coincidence.

Either Putin’s obsessions with Georgia and Ukraine were land/minerals grabs, or we need to read Dugin’s book (the Russian dime-store equivalent of Mein Kampf) as well as the Rio Novosti op-eds pre-2022, and get it into our heads, why do they keep telling the Russian people that (1) this is a Russian Empire Restoration Project and (2) they have no intention of stopping at Ukraine, at the same time as protesting that neither of these is true when they’re talking to Useful Idiots in the West.

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