WASHINGTON — For the first time since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the United States is contemplating a Russia that has used military force against a neighbor and wondering what, if anything, it must do to counter it.
In a world where U.S. military strategy has been focused since Sept. 11 on fighting terrorist groups and foreign insurgencies, the sudden Russian move into Georgia raises troubling questions for military thinkers, many of whom had hoped that tensions with Russia were a thing of the distant past.
The decision Tuesday to include in a missile-defense treaty with Poland Patriot missiles and other weapons that would be most useful in a fight with Russia, is one aspect of this new thinking.
But it is also symptomatic of how unprepared — or unwilling — the U.S. is to return to those days when, for 45 years, America was obsessed with the idea that the next conflict would be in central Europe.
But few analysts saw Tuesday’s deal with Poland as a real reaction to Russian aggression. Instead they portrayed it as an effort to dress up an agreement to make it look like a response to events in Georgia.
“It’s a baby step,” said Charles A. Kupchan, a senior fellow for Europe Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations who is skeptical that the Russian move into Georgia portends a newly aggressive military posture from Moscow.
“At this point, it’s not about a Russia that is bent on an imperial conquest,” he said.
Pentagon officials have made it clear that they don’t want a return to the days of the Cold War. They’ve resisted White House calls to send naval forces to the Black Sea in response to Russia’s invasion of Georgia and have opted instead for a daily flight of humanitarian aid to the Georgian capital.
With the U.S. military tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan and its training and procurement emphasis now shifted to counterinsurgency, not conventional warfare, it’s easy to understand why.
“Have we gone too far the other way?” one military commander asked this week.
Most Pentagon officials in the past week have been unwilling to say the U.S. must change direction again.
Kupchan says he’s betting the change isn’t necessary.
The U.S. agreed to put Patriot missiles in Poland “because it needed to send a message,” Kupchan said.
“Are NATO war planners again burning the midnight oil to draft plans for a potential conflict against Russia? My guess is no,” he said. “Russia will not continue down this road.”
