A Russian invasion of Estonia and-Latvia would be complete in as little as 36 hours, according to a study by the Rand Corporation for the Pentagon. Russian tanks would be rumbling through Tallinn and Riga before Nato could so much as convene an emergency meeting to invoke Article 5 of its charter for mutual defence. The Rand study showed that it would take more than a week for Nato to get its tanks to the Baltics from Germany in response. By then it would all be over.So Nato has decided to send four battalions of troops to the Baltics, including one from Britain — exactly the kind of reinforcement that General Shirreff wants. The Baltic states have welcomed this. [...]
James Carden, a former adviser to a US presidential commission on Russia, agrees. ‘We have a habit of leading on these people who are along the periphery of Russia. Do the Baltics really think that we’ll get into a nuclear exchange if Russia runs over their borders? We won’t. We’re not going to go to war for them. De Gaulle knew this as far back as the 1960s, that the US would not trade New York for Paris in a-nuclear war.’ But he doubted that Russia really-wanted the Baltics back: it was just sending a-message to the West. [...]
Putin, then, may have adopted Richard Nixon’s ‘madman theory’ — the attempt to scare a potential enemy into thinking you might just go to war, might even drop the big one, if pushed. Others in the Russian federation are playing their part — it sometimes seems as if the whole country has been gripped by world war three hysteria. The state-controlled TV channel NTV took its cameras into a nuclear bunker, telling-viewers: ‘Everyone should know where the nearest bomb shelter is.’ The chairman of the Duma’s defence committee even appeared on television in his old uniform as commander of the country’s airborne troops and promised to fly to the US on a military-transport plane if ordered to by President Putin. ‘We need to stop apologising to the Westerners,’ he said.
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