Washington’s relations with Russia have been deteriorating for years, but new U.S. actions could make matters considerably worse. One major source of irritation for the Kremlin has been NATO’s military exercises in countries on Russia’s border. Those war games have proliferated since the onset of the Ukraine crisis in 2014, when the United States and European Union countries helped demonstrators oust Ukraine’s elected, pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, and Russia responded by annexing Crimea.
Russian anger also has been directed at “rotational” U.S. military deployments in NATO’s easternmost members. Those supposedly temporary assignments of American units have become nearly continuous. Now there are indications that the Trump administration may dispense entirely with the diplomatic fiction that sequential rotational deployments do not constitute a permanent U.S. military presence.
During a state visit to Washington in mid-September, Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda, promised to provide $2 billion toward construction costs if the United States built a military base in his country. In a transparent appeal to the U.S. president’s notorious vanity, Duda even offered to name the base “Fort Trump.” Poland “is willing to make a very major contribution to the United States to come in and have a presence in Poland,” Trump said in the Oval Office. “If they’re willing to do that, it’s something we will certainly talk about.” He added that the United States would take Duda’s proposal “very seriously.”
Read more at https://www.cato.org/blog/fort-trump-mounting-us-tensions-russia
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