A Washington, DC-based foreign policy think tank has called for the NATO alliance to bolster its deployment to Romania, arguing Russia's expanding Black Sea fleet and fortifying of Crimea poses a threat to Ukraine, the Balkans and the Mediterranean region beyond.
In a May 26 paper titled “One Flank, One Threat, One Presence: A Strategy for NATO's Eastern Flank,” academics from the hawkish Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) think tank in Washington, DC, advocate for upgrading NATO's presence in Romania from a “tailored Forward Presence” to the stronger “Enhanced Forward Presence” (EFP) deployments in the Baltic States and Poland.
Stars and Stripes notes that Hodges was “a lead architect” of the EFP policy that led to significant expansion of NATO forces stationed in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland after Crimea seceded from Ukraine and rejoined Russia by popular referendum in 2014 amid a Russophobic push by the Western-backed nationalist junta that had recently seized power in Kiev.
The think tank presents NATO as the defender of small nations and a victim of Russian “aggression,” presenting a falsified version of history in which the Soviet Union was not promised that the anti-Soviet NATO alliance would not expand eastward after the end of the Warsaw Pact alliance formed to counter it, and in which NATO's “eastern flank” is not, in large part, quite literally the…
