Obama's new move: a tripwire in the east.

Wretchard over at the Belmont Club has put up another excellent post on Obama's new move in the game of chess set up by Vladimir Putin.

  "A Washington Post report that the US has decided to deploy ground forces to Poland, ostensibly to act as a tripwire to deter further Russian threats, raises some interesting issues.

Poland and the United States will announce next week the deployment of U.S. ground forces to Poland as part of an expansion of NATO presence in Central and Eastern Europe in response to events in Ukraine. That was the word from Poland’s defense minister, Tomasz Siemoniak, who visited The Post Friday after meeting with Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel at the Pentagon on 

Thursday.

Siemoniak said the decision has been made on a political level and that military planners are working out details. There will also be intensified cooperation in air defense, special forces, cyberdefense and other areas. Poland will play a leading regional role, “under U.S. patronage,” he said.

The first is why the story was leaked from a Polish source in an administration that almost always rushes to announce moves it wants to depict as decisive. It is almost as if Warsaw wanted to pre-empt Obama before he could have second thoughts.

The second issue is that Poland will be taking the lead “under US patronage”. Obama, as usual, will be leading from behind.  The Washington Post story quotes the Poles as confessing that “US patronage” will be a hollow unless America re-arms."

...

"Tripwire strategies have a long history in Democratic administrations. The interesting thing about tripwire strategies is that they are not seriously intended to prevent the enemy from advancing.  They are too small.

The purpose of a tripwire deployment is to make it impossible for Washington to retreat. Thus, a US brigade in Poland is not designed to keep Putin from moving forward. It’s designed to nail Obama to the ground, to keep him from running away."

...

  "In the short term however, and before Obama decides — if he ever does — on rebuilding forces, Putin has many options for mischief. The most obvious countermove is for Moscow to interrupt the northern supply route into Afghanistan. Or Putin might ask Syria and Iran to terminate their “negotiations” with president Obama. There’s a fourth option for mischief. Putin can declare himself threatened by the report of a US deployment so far east and move his actual border closer up to Poland itself by gobbling up more of Ukraine.

Odds are we are going to see some of those countermoves used against Obama.

The net effect will be to force Obama to do either do what Poland hopes — pivot to Europe — or clearly abandon it. Pivoting to Europe must leave the Pacific exposed. To cover all bases Obama will have to postpone his plan to fundamentally transform America into a welfare-type state and use that money to rebuild the military. Poland may be trying to hustle Obama into being decisive, but the president’s instincts have so far been against it. If there’s one thing Obama won’t do, it is stop the flow of goodies to his domestic constituencies. That is his power base and Obama may love domestic political power more than he loves Poland."

Needless to say, it's well worth reading it all.

Plus, the comments, as always, are trenchant.

A Blast From the Past had this to say:

  "A trip wire implies that there is something coming once the wire is tripped. What could the Russians do that would get a US response? Raping an American ambassador didn't get a rise out of Obama so kinetically neutralizing a US battalion is unlikely to matter. Even if Obama wanted to respond the question would be, with what?

When the Norks took the Pueblo we discovered that the only units ready to respond were Air Force planes on strip alert, and they all had nuclear weapons. With no other option but stand down or start WW-III we choose to let the ship get taken into Wonson harbor. Now under Obama we have neither a conventional nor a backing tactical nuclear option that could lead to escalation. The purpose of the tactical nukes were to provide a credible link between losing conventional forces and a full MAD strategic response. It wasn't that the tactical nukes were sure to decide the battlefield outcome and end the war, although as a war fighting option they raised the expected costs enough to help deterrence, it is that they made it more likely that a limited conventional assault by the Russians would escalate to a thermonuclear apocalypse. That increased the deterrence value of the Black Horse regiment standing tripwire duty at Fulda, and that, along with the investment in a Reforger capability, is what kept the peace. All those backing forces, nuclear and conventional, are now gone. Now if the Russians attack we either order our Boomers to launch 200 ICBMs, and does anybody believe that would happen?, or we do nothing.

The public does not get this. They think that sending a trip wire matters because they think that something is behind it. They assume that someplace we really still have all the forces we had 30 years ago. Maybe they are in a CMDF box with Obama's magic cash stash. If we still had the number of military forces we had before the Peace Dividend draw down base closing and domestic spending binge then credibility would still be a problem with Obama in charge, especially if Putin thinks that he has an agent in place, but knowledge that US forces could act independently, shoot the radio, would induce caution. If we had any other POTUS in place even with our shrunken force structure, and while some but not all of our units are new and improved quantity matters, then that might induce hesitation. Now we have the worst of both and the only constraint on Putin is his internal schedule."

Exactly correct.  If the commenters at the Belmont Club see this, so does Putin.

In addition, all this is happening as Putin observes the growing internal divisions here in the United States that have just been on display in Nevada. How credible is our President when at home he has polarized the country into two bickering political camps that barely speak to one another unless it's to insult and demonize? Indeed, in Nevada the people actually just picked up arms against their own "public servants," and bloodshed was only averted when the government itself backed down. How do you think Putin will interpret that? 

 When the crisis comes, where will Obama find the political capital to wage even a small war to protect eastern Europe or Japan or Taiwan?  It must be crystal clear to everyone that President Obama can not do the leading which would be necessary to unite the nation and command an army to protect our allies.  After all he didn't bother with congress or the UN when he and Hillary decided on their own to go to war to destroy the Khadafi regime in Libya, and he did nothing but puff when his allies the Muslim Brotherhood were deposed and jailed in Egypt.  Finally, as the last nail in the coffin of US credibility, he couldn't make the case to even the British that military action was needed in Syria.  Their government publicly rejected assisting in that adventure, very likely because they saw Obama's fecklessness in his prior efforts at "Smart Diplomacy," and had no desire to get their nation tangled up in another one of his foolish foreign enterprises.   

It's going to be an interesting three more years, and I sense that events are already accelerating well out his control and understanding.  Imagine the consternation and upheaval here at home if Europe, Asia, or both explode and Obama, as he is likely to do, immediately and obviously loses complete control.

Hold on tight, it's very likely to be a wild ride!