President Joe Biden is “not weighing cuts” to the American troop presence in Europe, according to Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s team.
“I want to be crystal clear that that is not accurate,” a senior State Department official told reporters Friday in advance of a series of talks with Russia about the threat of intensified war in Ukraine. “We are tightly latched up with our NATO allies as we are addressing the crisis together. And I’m just going to reiterate that the principle here is ‘nothing about you, without you.’ And that is 150% true when we’re talking about force structure in Europe.”
Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman will lead a delegation to meet Russian officials Monday, followed by broader dialogues with NATO and the European allies in the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. The potential bargaining space has been unclear given the nature of Russia’s public demand that NATO “be rolled back” to its 1997 boundaries.
“We cannot end up in a situation where we have kind of second-class NATO members, where NATO as an alliance is not allowed to protect them in the same way as we protect other allies,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters Friday. “The United States has been very clear that there’ll be no decisions about European security, no discussions about European security, without the Europeans at the table.”
BLINKEN WARNS OF POSSIBLE RUSSIAN FALSE FLAG ATTACK AGAINST UKRAINE
Blinken and the foreign ministers of other NATO member states held a virtual meeting earlier Friday to discuss how the allies would approach the talks with Russia next week. In parallel, a report circulated that Biden’s team might use the forces deployed to eastern and central Europe after the 2014 invasion of Ukraine as bargaining chips in negotiations to avert the latest Russian threat.
That claim threatened to undermine the Biden administration’s pledge not to haggle with the Russians over the state of European security in private meetings that don’t include other European governments.
“The United States … is a member of NATO alliance, and part of that membership includes an Article 5 guarantee that all NATO members share with each other,” the senior State Department official said. “And the U.S. has been clear that any conversation about NATO force posture are conversations that we would have together with our allies. So, I just want to be very clear that it is not accurate that the U.S. administration is developing options for pulling back U.S. forces in eastern Europe.”
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Stoltenberg suggested that the talks with Russia might focus on more traditional arms control negotiations.
“I think it’s extremely important to distinguish between unilateral one-sided demands on NATO allies, which is actually what Russia has put forward, and balanced, verifiable arms control,” he told MSNBC’s Andrew Mitchell. “NATO believes that we need to engage in dialogue with Russia also on arms control. But that has to be balanced, reciprocal, and verifiable arms control in Europe.”
