The timing here is beautiful. The exercises reportedly transpired during the 70th anniversary of the Russian invasion of Poland… also the same day that President Obama killed plans for Polish based missile defense.
Poland is scared, and for good reason. After decades of repressive Soviet occupation, the Poles invested everything in tightened defensive ties with NATO and the United States. Now the Russian Bear is once again pounding down their door, and — after Poland loyally committed whole battalions to both Afghanistan and Iraq — America is nowhere to be seen. This is how Putin operates. He messages with force. These exercises could have been held anywhere in Russia’s yawing territorial expanse. Poland was chosen with reason, as it serves as a bulwark of freedom and Western values in an area Russia still considers its own. It’s also a response to the recent Georgian-NATO war games that so infuriated Moscow. Obama must respond. His reset button silliness and his decision to axe missile defense has the Russians drooling at our weakness. We can’t afford to allow Putin to bully another ally, like Georgia, into submission — NATO is weak enough as it is. Now is the time to reaffirm our allegiance to our Polish friends, and nip Moscow’s neo-expansionism in the bud. Hold a large scale NATO exercise on Polish territory, move one of our Air Force bases into eastern Poland, up our naval activity in the Baltic Sea — anything that communicates to Putin that, despite recent fraying, we still take the NATO alliance seriously.
