[…] The permanent basing of the US Army’s 5th Corps headquarters in Poznan, Poland, is an important part of the shift, along with the positioning of rotational troops in the Baltic states and Romania. The US has also concluded a series of bilateral Defence Cooperation Agreements with frontline states, allowing it to establish a number of support facilities in each country next to national airfields, naval bases, infrastructure and other military assets. The sites are largely under US jurisdiction: by ceding sovereignty, the host nations leave it to the US to the determine their specific configurations and roles. These arrangements are outside NATO, and parts of US global military planning.
The strategic nuclear forces of the Alliance, and particularly those of the US, are said to be the supreme guarantee of its security. The British forces, which explicitly contribute to the defence of NATO, and the French ones which are independent but not uncoordinated and always had a European dimension, add complexity to Russia’s decision-making. […]
The crisis of the 1980s led the International Commission on Security and Disarmament (the Palme Commission, after the late Swedish Prime Minister who chaired it) to introduce the concept of Common Security. It said that in the nuclear age, security is not something you can build on your own by unilateral rearmament. It is something you have to build together with you adversary, through measures that are advantageous to both. Today, we are further away from that kind of thinking than at any time since the beginning of arms control sixty years ago, but the concept has it right, so we must hold on to it. Läs artikel