英语论文网

As for America, new strategic guidance prepared for Barack Obama in early 2012 had complacently referred to “most European countries” as now being “producers of security rather than consumers of it”. It recommended taking advantage of a “strategic opportunity to rebalance the US military investment in Europe” towards Asia to meet the challenge of an assertive China. Re-energising an alliance that some in Washington believed was a relic of the cold war was low on the president's list of priorities.

All that has now changed. Ukraine is not a member of NATO (indeed, preventing it ever becoming one is a principal aim of Russian policy) and therefore does not enjoy the protection afforded by Article 5, the vow taken by every member to regard an attack on one as an attack on all. But Mr Putin's declaration of the right to take action wherever he believes the interests of Russian speakers are endangered directly threatens the Baltic states, which are members. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which joined NATO in 2004, were part of the Soviet Union until its dissolution in 1991 and all have ethnic Russian minorities. After the seizure of Crimea, Mr Putin's attempt to establish the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine as a Russian satrapy by fomenting and arming a separatist rebellion demonstrated the “hybrid warfare” techniques that the Kremlin might use to destabilise the Baltic.

The reaction to Mr Putin's aggression has so far been mostly economic, with sanctions successively tightened. But it was immediately clear to Mr Rasmussen and the alliance's leading military officer, the supreme allied commander in Europe (SACEUR), General Philip Breedlove of the US air force, that NATO would have to respond too. That meant providing immediate reassurance to the alliance's most vulnerable frontline states, while getting all 28 members to agree on the nature of the threat to Europe's security and the measures needed to counter it. It meant, above all, demonstrating that Article 5 remained the unshakable pillar of the alliance, at a time when doubts had been raised about whether, say, the Dutch or German governments would really send their troops to fight for Estonia or Romania.

Some of those measures have already been put in place. The air-policing operation over the Baltic states was quickly bolstered with additional jet fighters. Mr Obama visited Warsaw in June and announced a $1 billion package for stepped-up military exercises and training in eastern Europe, with additional rotations of American troops in the region (he will also make a symbolic stopover in Estonia before the summit). At about the same time, General Breedlove was asked by the North Atlantic Council, NATO's political decision-making body, to develop a credible deterrent to Russian adventurism that could be put into action after the summit.

A potential problem for Mr Rasmussen was that even after the seizure of Crimea, NATO's members had disagreed about the extent of the threat posed by Russia. Propaganda from Moscow about a spontaneous uprising that Russia only belatedly supported had seemed plausible to some; in Germany, history inclined many towards a policy of Russland verstehen—understanding, indeed sympathising with, Russia. Germany's chancellor, Ange本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。