Opinion | We must act appropriately on Ukraine - The Washington Post

Robert Kagan’s excellent Feb. 22 Tuesday Opinion essay, “What we can expect after Putin’s conquest of Ukraine,” was prescient. The single most important action that the United States could take now is to announce a new status of forces agreement and permanent base in Poland, as well as a new U.S.-led base in a Baltic state most suited to housing U.S. forces. The size and complement of any permanent force in these locations are less important than the meaningful commitment to a long-term U.S. and NATO permanent presence in Eastern Europe.

Germany might have outgrown large U.S. permanent bases, but our forces would be greeted with open arms along the eastern flank of NATO. The idea of having no permanent forces along that critical frontier is no longer a negotiating chip that can be offered to Russia to de-escalate conflict in the region or appease Russian President Vladimir Putin’s xenophobic demands, now or in the future.

This relatively small but symbolic investment would provide a direct military response to Moscow, without taking our eyes off the strategic importance of the Indo-Pacific region and China.

Jeremy Greenwood, Washington

The writer is a foreign policy federal executive fellow at the Brookings Institution in the Strobe Talbott Center on Security, Strategy and Technology.

What does it mean to be an American? Whose liberty is worth protecting with your life? Only your own life? Only American lives? Ukrainian lives? Where does one draw the line between those whose liberty Americans will physically defend and those lives we won’t, and why?

On Jan. 20, 1961, President John F. Kennedy made these promises during his inaugural address: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty. … To those peoples in the huts and villages across the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required — not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.”

Being willing to keep those American promises at any cost defined what was “American” (to me) in the 1960s.

On Feb. 24, without provocation, Russia invaded Ukraine, a sovereign nation seeking liberty from despotism.

If defending liberty at home and abroad, at any cost, is still an American obligation, then actively defending Ukrainians’ liberty, with American troops on the ground in Ukraine, is an American obligation.

Greg Gianas, Redmond, Wash.

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