Despite Afghan fiasco, US puts boots on the ground again in foreign lands – Times of India

WASHINGTON: US forces are once again heading for foreign shores, Washington rocked after a humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan just months later. US President Joe Biden on Wednesday approved the deployment of about 3,000 additional US troops to Eastern Europe amid continuing wrangling with Russia over Ukraine, whose borders the Pentagon says Moscow has prepared to invade former Soviet territory. Has gathered 100,000 soldiers.
US officials insisted that US troops were not being stationed in Ukraine, but would instead go to Poland and Romania to defend NATO’s eastern flank. Roughly 1000 personnel based in Germany would move to Romania, and another 2000 would depart shortly from the Fort Bragg military base in North Carolina. Of these, 1700 members of the 82nd Airborne Division will go to Poland and 300 members of the 18th Airborne Corps will go to Germany.
Officials said the moves are not permanent, defensive in nature, and that Washington is responding only to “current circumstances” while aiming to reassure NATO allies and meet US commitments to protect them. However, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said the newly deployed troops were going under bilateral arrangements with Germany, Poland and Romania, and they would remain under US control.
“I want to be very clear about something: these are not permanent steps … Also, these forces are not going to fight in Ukraine. They are going to ensure the strong defense of our NATO allies,” Kirby said. .
On a broader policy level, there are fears in the Biden administration that if the US does not appear militarily, it will encourage Russia to train its vision on other former Soviet republics and restructure USSR 2.0, which American analysts call lets see. As in Moscow’s endgame. Smaller NATO deployments are also expected in the Baltic republics that were part of the former Soviet republic and which Ukraine after Moscow expects to turn the heat on them.
The US deployment came after acrimonious exchanges from both sides about who was the aggressor in Eastern Europe, the ideological battleground during the Cold War.
Responding to Moscow’s allegation that the US was provoking Ukraine by trying to join NATO, White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki used metaphor to refute the allegation, alleging that it was Russian. The president is Vladimir Putin who has “invaded many countries over the years. Over the years.”
“When the fox is screaming from over the henhouse that it is afraid of the chickens, which is essentially what they are doing, that fear is not reported as a statement of fact. We know that in this case the fox is Who is it?” Said Saki.
Russia’s ambassador to the US, Anatoly Antonov, counterattacked that it was US intervention that brought “nothing but anarchy, instability and loss of life” to the world, while Washington’s call to “bring democracy to the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan”. bloody experiments”.
In Moscow, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov fired off counter-metaphors, comparing Russia not to a fox, but to a bear—”An animal that can’t climb a chicken coop’s roof if it wants to. It’s huge. And Strong enough to do that.”
More metaphors are emerging besides the rhetoric, with the bear going out to visit the panda over the weekend. Amid growing concern and apprehension in Washington over the Russia-China alliance, President Putin is scheduled to attend the opening of the Winter Olympics in Beijing on Friday, with a bilateral meeting with President Xi.