Great Power contentions

[spmetla]

Ukraine tensions: US boosts troops in Europe
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60234377

US President Joe Biden is to send extra troops to Europe this week amid continuing fears of a Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Pentagon says.

Some 2,000 troops will be sent from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to Poland and Germany, and a further 1,000 already in Germany will go to Romania.

Moscow denies planning to invade but has deployed an estimated 100,000 troops near Ukraine's borders.

It fiercely opposes Ukraine joining the Nato military alliance.

The tensions come eight years after Russia annexed Ukraine's southern Crimea peninsula and backed a bloody rebellion in the eastern Donbas region.

Moscow accuses the Ukrainian government of failing to implement the Minsk agreement - an international deal to restore peace to the east, where Russian-backed rebels control swathes of territory and at least 14,000 people have been killed since 2014.

Glad to see the US doing this, notable though that this is being done bilaterally between the US and Poland/Romania and not under the NATO C2 chain.
I hope that this will start the conversation within our Congress to go and restation a heavy BCT permanently again in Europe. The current deployment of paratroopers and Strykers are certainly not the type of capability that would make Putin worry about the US deploying into Ukraine as to do without multiple heavy BCTs would be stupid and this is clearly more about reassuring Poland and Romania. This crisis may also be useful for getting NATO contributions from some of the lagging member states as well as internal conversations about the future of NATO.

I just can't get over how the extraordinarily-consequential, costly, and unauthorized unilateral decision to do this (not that any available American president would), could, in theory, be legally upheld in Republican-ruled courts, but even the small-bore, legislatively-backed customarily preferential policies of the current executive just get casually struck down. It's annoying (with Korean intonation). Also ruinous to state and society, but there's a lot of insult in these injuries.

As I clarified in my edit, I wasn't wanting him to put divisions in Ukraine but neighboring NATO states. As for costly, if there permanent bases in Europe for these larger units it would be cheaper than our currently rotating brigades in for nine month tours to Europe. Permanent basing though is a straight up Congressional matter, the president can request and propose but Congress, specifically the Armed Services committees would have the final say in it.
As it is for temporary boosting of troops in an area I don't see what's illegal about it so long as Biden doesn't unilaterally start a war. The US did sign the Budapest Memorandum that would give casus-belli to intervene on behalf of Ukraine but the US isn't obligated to do so.

The memorandum has been invoked recently in response to some on the right, including Fox News host Tucker Carlson and some congressional Republicans, arguing that the United States effectively has no business taking sides between Ukraine and Russia. One popular Twitter thread responding to Carlson said the Budapest Memorandum amounted to the United States having agreed to serve as “the guarantors of Ukrainian security.” A bipartisan group of members of Congress last week wrote an op-ed stating that the memorandum assured the United States “would come to the aid of Ukraine in the event it was preyed upon.”

The reality is much murkier. The agreement is not an official treaty. It is neither legally binding nor does it carry an enforcement mechanism. And while it provides security assurances, they do not include specific promises with regard to a potential invasion.

The brief memorandum contained five points that the signatories — which also included Britain and Northern Ireland — said they would “reaffirm,” including:

“None of their weapons will ever be used against Ukraine except in self defense or otherwise in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.”
“To refrain from economic coercion” in accordance with other agreements.
And, perhaps most pertinent with regard to a potential U.S. response today:

“To seek immediate United Nations Security Council action to provide assistance to Ukraine … if Ukraine should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used.”
Indeed, the agreement was murky enough that, when it was announced in early 1994 but before Ukraine ratified it, there was plenty of confusion about just the kind of situation we now find ourselves in. U.S. officials often talked around the issue, but they also stated on multiple occasions that it wouldn’t mean the United States was suddenly entering into new and novel security commitments. (Hence, the repeated use of the word “reaffirm.”)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...ns-us-ukraine/

The vagueness of the treaty certainly hasn't helped resolved the last eight years of Russian occupation and intervention, guess that's what Ukraine gets for voluntarily giving up its nuclear arsenal, not a good example in the cause of non-proliferation.

Relatedly, reshuffling a major US OOB into Europe would probably no longer even be the deterrent it used to be considering that everyone knows that China is mightier than Russia and that the American military has its hands full with its West Pacific commitments.

Would reshuffling US Army units into Europe really affect America's West Pacific commitments? As I've argued on here I don't see many situations in which Heavy BCTs would be used against China, Korea yes, China not so much which would be 90% an air and sea campaign with likely only Marines and lighter US units put in Taiwan if that were somehow safe and prudent to do but certainly not to the level of retaking Taiwan.
Heavy BCTs in the US are hard to deploy as they have so much equipment to ship, strategically they are useless unless forward deployed or against an opponent that cannot stop the buildup of combat power over a period of months (ie Iraq in Desert Storm and OIF).
If the US does decide with more commitments to Europe, I hope this will be matched with further commitments by our larger NATO partners already there as they certainly have the ability to pony up for their own defense which is less the case for our allies in the West Pacific.

Edit: Also crazy to see the reaction to this on right-wing forums/etc is a mix of "why aren't we sending them to our border instead" and "why bother defending Europe." Both of which are just crazy, especially the first one, not sure why everyone on the right thinks that troops on the border is going to help much, how about reform immigration and more money for border patrol. As for the other aspect, the new isolationist slant of the right is mind-boggling to me, crazy how they don't see that we benefit from maintaining the current world order, expensive as it is.