Effing idiots, the lot of them.
In reality, NATO is no threat to Russia. Indeed, NATO could be an ally of Russia should the Russians realize China is the true threat to Russian territorial integrity. But instead, Russia alienates the West to gnaw on scraps of empire in South Ossetia.
Still, if you grant the lunatics in Moscow at least internal logic from their paranoid fantasies, it makes sense to split American away from European NATO countries. Steyn described them well:
America garrisons not distant ramshackle colonies but its wealthiest allies – Germany and Japan – to the point where almost every other western nation now budgets for an ever more minimal, perfunctory military, entirely confident that US defense welfare is a permanent feature of life. Troops from India, the dominions and the colonies provided a third of Britain’s military manpower in the First World War, and half in the Second. By comparison, America heads a military alliance of non-military allies in which it expends vast amounts of diplomatic energy trying to persuade the world’s richest countries to cough up a token detachment of non-combat troops to man the photocopier back at barracks while the Third Infantry Division slogs up into the mountains to do all the fighting.
This is the reality of NATO, with few exceptions. And even those countries with capabile troops have too few to make much of a difference. But Russia seems focused on destroying an alliance with no interest in attacking Russia and no capability to do so even in the face of Russia's rotting army and air force.
At what point do the Russians realize they're being idiots?
