While we in Australia were focused on our national election, a historic Nato summit in Warsaw was going on (Editorial: The Nato summit has refreshed the alliance for troubled times, 11 July) that will impact on global security even more than the current China Sea tensions. Western leaders emphasised in their public rhetoric a balanced message of “deterrence and dialogue” with Putin’s “aggressive” Russia. But the reality is that they have just given weighty political endorsement to 4,000 Nato – mostly US – forces now being stationed in the Baltic states and Poland, including possibly in the highly dangerous Suwalki Gap, which separates the Kaliningrad enclave from mainland Russia.
This is to be a combat-ready force in constant training with local allies so as to be ready to move quickly from training to combat mode. Transparency measures are to be set in place to safeguard against war by accident. All this just 600km from Moscow.
We have not been in such a dangerous place since Europe 1913 or 1939. Nato commanders say this can be safely managed. But I have no confidence in this. Hostilities could begin by design or accident, or local provocation by warmongering idiots, that could quickly go nuclear. The west has truly sleepwalked into these new and unnecessary east-west dangers, supported by a false narrative of Russian aggression. The US, the UK and France are now hostage to their Polish and Baltic states’ Nato-allied governments – the maturity and judgment of whose leaders I have no great confidence in.
It is Obama’s, Cameron’s, Merkel’s and Hollande’s greatest foreign policy failure, to have allowed the world’s security to drift into this hair-trigger, tripwire situation.