Is this the right time to relieve the building pressure in the baltics?
http://warontherocks.com/2016/12/is-...n-the-baltics/
With relations between Russia and the United States and its NATO allies having reached the lowest point since the collapse of the Soviet Union, we should all be greatly concerned that both sides are fielding destabilizing weapons upgrades while also deploying their military forces in a more forward posture. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Baltic Sea region. It is here that one finds a major concentration of military power in a very small space fraught with historical tragedy and contemporary geopolitical angst. Both NATO and Russia have placed a very high strategic value on this region and have steadily raised the stakes involved, following a classic security dilemma script. Packing ever-larger amounts of increasingly sophisticated and lethal military hardware into a space this size under heightened political pressures leaves very little margin for error, for which the consequences might be catastrophic.
Whether the present situation constitutes a “new Cold War” or not, extant geopolitical tensions must certainly give one pause, assuming that the avoidance of actual conflict is a mutually agreeable goal. But some, including Mark Stout writing recently in War on the Rocks, posit a full-blown, “inadvertent” war between Russia and NATO as made more likely by the election of Donald Trump, owing to the latter’s “coziness with Russian President Vladimir Putin” and his apparent low regard for the NATO alliance in general. Sir Richard Shirreff, until 2014 Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe (making him the highest ranking European officer in the alliance), in a recent and widely reviewed book envisions a fictional war with Russia in 2017 made inevitable by naïve European politicians who impose severe cuts in their defense budgets and otherwise accommodate a predatory Russia.
These warnings miss the mark when it comes to what actually matters for minimizing the chance of fighting between the two sides: the urgent need to reverse the trend of rapidly increasing deployments, operational tempo, and exercises involving their respective military forces. With a new U.S. president suggesting a more conciliatory stance vis-à-vis Moscow taking office in one month, the time may be right for a proposal of ways to reduce the dangerous friction and the mutual perception (or misperception) of threat inherent in the present situation...