And to repeat myself some more. You can have a Europe independent of the US, you can have a good relationship with Russia, you can have a functioning EU. You can't have all three. Your policy means much closer security ties between Poland and the US, probably including Polish pressure for a large scale US military presence, a significant growth in Polish euroskepticism - hamstringing EU integration, and poorer relations between Poland and Russia.
All policies have costs, and those costs may or may not be worth it. What worries me is that you and most of the others here who share your views seem unwilling to try to grapple with those costs and risks of your preferred policies in any sort of serious fashion.
So given your comment is right, the policy done by current old Europe's leaders maybe even the best we can get at all, and all the talk about dividing more agressive from the US is not doable in the real world..., because a functioning EU would be priority #1 on my list. Der Amerikaner ist die Orchidee unter den MenschenVolker Pispers
from a Polish perspective Russia has as much right to object to US bases or NATO membership as Poland does to tell Russia to shutdown it's own bases in Russia, or to draw down its military.
That assumes that Russia poses a credible threat to the security and/or legitimate interests of Poland and the Baltics. There is precious little evidence for this.
On the other hand, there is rather a lot of evidence that the US (and by extension NATO) poses a credible threat to legitimate Russian interests, including not having failed states in their immediate vicinity, and not having strategic weapons deployed less than a day's tank drive from Moscow.
If this analysis is wrong, then I'd like to see some evidence for that fact.
Other than that, I think that your analysis is generally sound, at least in the short term. I draw a rather different conclusion from it, though. Given that I don't consider Russia a credible threat to any EU country or to legitimate EU interests, I think that the EU can do without Polish and Baltic posturing. And if that means doing without Poland and the Baltics altogether, then that's just tough luck. We'll survive without them, but we won't survive without political independence from Washington and a functioning union.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
