Free Republic

Russian President Vladimir Putin has taken the Obama administration's idea of a "reset" in relations and turned it into a wedge, which experts say he's using to try to break the NATO alliance. It's no secret: Since Russia annexed Ukraine's Crimea in March 2014, the Kremlin has ramped up the pressure on NATO as well, especially in the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which used to be part of the Soviet Union. And alliance leaders have scrambled to find ways to react to the Kremlin's more aggressive posture and reassure members of its relevance to their security. But...

Vladimir Putin has proposed setting up a NATO-style joint task force of post-Soviet states to secure the borders of Central Asia amid fears of Taliban “spillover” from Afghanistan. A fresh sign of the Russian president’s new military assertiveness, the deployment raises the possibility of Russian and allied troops being deployed along Tajikistan’s 800-mile border with Afghanistan, and Moscow tightening its influence of governments in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. It comes a day after Barack Obama said American troops would stay in Afghanistan for at least two more years—itself a tacit admission that the Afghan government is unable to tackle the...