Thursday, December 9, 2021

Be For Something. This Memo Devoted To Three Prominent Issues.

Note to Georgia's Republican Candidates: Be for Something in 2022

Jackie Gingrich Cushman
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This memo is predominantly devoted to three issues:

A) What happens if Roe vs Wade is overturned.

B) How twelve major American cities are being run/destroyed by Democrat Mayors who have embraced progressive thinking
 
C) An up date on random thoughts about how Biden is resolving issues that confront him.
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A) If Roe Vs. Wade is overruled I believe it will be a momentous action because it returns, to the states, some of their rights which can also lead to a return of many of the personal freedoms we citizens allowed to be taken from us or sadly chose unthinkingly to abdicate.

Obviously, any change in "established" law can cause angst and result in a period of rancor and adjustment. We witnessed this when segregation was outlawed and we endured an extended period of civil right restoration regarding race matters.

In regard to abortion, I believe a woman has a right to her own body but I also believe the government (read tax payer) should not be economically responsible for the cost of whatever decision she makes about whether to have a child or not. There are methods to prevent pregnancies. They are cheap, available and work.

I grew up in an America where people were responsible for their own behaviour and thus enjoyed freedom. As government began to establish markers and intrude in the arena of human behaviour, citizens began to lose their precious freedom(s.) If I were a teacher and wanted the freedom to hug a student for something they did I was free to do so as long as my behaviour was deemed appropriate. Today, I cannot touch that student. That is the sad loss of two freedoms. Mine to be free to hug and the student's opportunity to receive the hug. A small amoebic act which has grown to monstrous size and become highly controversial and divisive.

Society should not be responsible for citizens who have accidents because they drive under the influence, engage in drug usage and become dependent, tragic as that may be. Those are predominantly personal choices people make because they are free to choose. The cost to society, for poor choices, is enormous but if you want more of something just pay for it and it will grow and eventually overwhelm as is beginning to happen regarding the consequences of drug use and citizens being responsible for the acts of others who are irresponsible. etc.

If a person gambles should the government (tax payer) be responsible for their debts? Progressives believe I should pay for one's student loans. Is the basis for this progressivity based on the benefit society receives from another human being educated? If it is that is sheer stupidity and, I daresay, any other basis would also rest on sheer stupidity but this is where liberals want to take us.

Returning rights to states, where government has no constitutional right, should eventually go a long way toward restoring individual rights and freedoms. States lost many of their rights because they chose not to embrace associated/requisite responsibilities. Consequently, they eventually lost both as the federal government usurped and intruded and, thus,  'we the people' lost many of our freedoms
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If the Supreme Court Overturns Roe vs Wade
Yes, the end of Roe would disrupt U.S. politics and the idea that no liberal policy can ever change.
By Daniel Henninger 

Wonder Land: The end of Roe would erode the foundations not just of abortion, but of an entire philosophy of American governance born 50 years ago with Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society." Image: Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images

Historians of our era will forever try to pinpoint the event that caused Americans to reduce their politics to a constant lunge at one another’s throats. Always in the running for that catastrophe is the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision establishing a constitutional right to abortion. This country’s politics will stay polarized until the broad consequences of the Roe decision are resolved.

Abortion returned to the fighting cage last week when the court heard oral arguments in the Dobbs case from Mississippi, which passed a law prohibiting abortion after 15 weeks.

At the center of this case sits the possibility that the court will overturn Roe and shift U.S. policy on abortion back to the 50 states. Instead of one law on abortion, there would be many, some no doubt incorporating what medicine has learned about pregnancy in half a century. Preventing that from happening is the touchstone of Democratic politics.

When Donald Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett to the court, their confirmations became a struggle tied to whether they would overturn Roe. But let us not delude ourselves that the Mississippi Dobbs case is only about abortion. The stakes are bigger than abortion.

Roe was decided in 1973, in the shadow of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and the passage of the 1960s civil-rights laws. However distant in memory for most Americans, for liberals what happened then informs every policy initiative they attempt today, including Joe Biden’s Build Back Better bill.

From the liberal point of view, these long-ago events, which were enabled by all three branches of the federal government, settled once and for all the question of where the balance of this country’s political and moral authority rested—in Washington.

Justice Elena Kagan described the reality simply in the Dobbs oral arguments: “There’s been 50 years of water under the bridge.”

If in its decision next summer the Supreme Court sends the setting of abortion policy back to the states, it could put in motion a process of rethinking this 50-year relationship between federal authority and the states.

Overturning Roe would erode the foundations not only of abortion but of an entire philosophy of American governance. Liberals abhor federalism. They don’t trust the states on abortion, voting or anything else. What they trust and want is single-authority government.

During the Dobbs arguments, U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar called abortion a “fundamental right” of women. Overturning Roe would put back into debate whether the states should be responsible not only for this “fundamental right” but also—to pick a few subjects at random—for vaccination mandates, school curriculums, laws relating to gender identity, daycare and climate mandates on the use of energy.

Progressives always hit the ramparts over Roe v. Wade because they recognize the larger threat its disappearance poses to the well-established hierarchy of political authority in the U.S.

President Biden’s greatest utility now may be that he so frequently lets the cat out of the bag. Mr. Biden justifies his multitrillion-dollar proposals for new federal entitlements, climate rules and federal taxes by saying they address the “worst economy since the Depression.”

When Americans were in the last real depression, they were content to let themselves be ordered around by Franklin Roosevelt and Washington. This time, as opinion polls attest, they are less eager to abide the vast, federalized blueprint that Mr. Biden and the Democrats are drawing up for them.

Progressives are in a panic because Build Back Better may not pass by Christmas, or ever, forestalling what could cement forever the primacy of central authority that was put in motion by the New Deal and accelerated by the Great Society and Roe v. Wade.

Addressing abortion in the Dobbs oral arguments, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said that Roe created an “entrenched set of expectations in our society that this is what the court decided, this is what we will follow.” She aptly summarized the liberal idea of how the U.S. works: If a liberal idea, policy or law remains in place long enough, “we will follow.”

In other words, nothing can change. But when nothing can be changed or challenged, when the passage of time alone means a public policy is “entrenched,” polarization is inevitable.

It’s a good question whether Washington’s ability to legislate has become hopeless with respect to these claims for an immutable political reality—in part because of gerrymandered House seats but more importantly because the permanent bureaucracies are by now well left of center and determined to obstruct change.

Would a Supreme Court decision sending abortion policy back to the states disrupt American politics? Yes, though its effect on abortion itself would likely be less than the apocalypse the left purports. The greater good would come from using the country’s longest political war to prove to the American people that change is possible, if not in Washington, then in the states where they choose to live.
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B)  The current progressive thesis being experimented with and used to run cities by liberal Democrat Mayors and City Commissioners, in order to make towns and cities safer, more tranquil and livable, is reduce the number of police and put restrictions on the remaining ones employed.  At the same time allow radical district attorneys to decide which laws to enforce and eliminate bail. 

Where this insanity has been tried, the opposite naturally has occurred.  By signaling to criminals they are free to roam, to break laws and the police will stand down is an invitation to commit anarchy. It is like believing you should convince someone 1 and 1 is 3.  Oh, by the way, even that lunacy is being tried and implemented.

Recently, the District Attorney in Los Angeles, I believe, referred to the Chief of Police as a pig. The same District Attorney decided criminals did not have to obey certain laws and if arrested were free to return to the streets because that D.S chose not to demand bail. Why?  Because he did not believe in such. This D.A completely disregarded the legislature is responsible for laws and citizens vote to elect these legislators.

Kamala Harris recently cast the deciding vote allowing for the appointment of  a radical black woman to become the  Federal District Attorney in a certain region of the State of New York. This Assistant Attorney believed she had the authority to disregard certain laws because she concluded white police were racially insensitive to the rights of black citizens among other bizarre reasons.  Yes, the race card is in every deck these days and Democrats have become the dealers.

Meanwhile, smash and grab has become today's new successful crime and is occurring in cities controlled by liberal Democrats where reduced policing and restraints on their ability to react is in vogue. If you cannot get reparations passed just steal that Vuitton becomes the new law and ,while you are at it, pick up a few diamond baubles as you exit through a smashed door.

The increase in such criminal behaviour has resulted in an escalation of murders and most harshly
 impacts the lower socio-economic level of our nation's citizenry. Oh, but we are told how liberals care so much for this segment of society.

There are twelve major cities in America controlled by Democrats who believe defunding police, disregarding legislated laws is the route to go and will bring tranquility and a better life to their citizens.
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Yes, the Crime Wave Is as Bad as You Think
Progressives gaslight the public by claiming things used to be worse.
By Rafael A. Mangual


The U.S. experienced its largest-ever single year homicide spike in 2020, and crime now polls as one of the top voter concerns. This has many criminal-justice-reform advocates and their media allies scrambling to convince Americans that things aren’t really so bad, no matter what the data say.

At CNN, data journalist Priya Krishnakumar explains “how crime stats lie” by pointing out that 2020’s murder rate was “40% below what it was in the 1980s and 1990s.” The Brennan Center for Justice acknowledges that the homicide trend is “frightening” but insists that murders “have stayed far below their peaks” in earlier decades. In a “fact check” of “the ‘crime wave’ narrative police are pushing,” the Guardian reminds readers that “even after an estimated 25% single-year increase in homicides” in 2020, “Americans overall are much less likely to be killed today than they were in the 1990s, and the homicide rate across big cities is still close to half what it was a quarter century ago.”

True enough: The national murder rate was significantly higher in the 1980s and early ’90s. But the national murder rate reflects an aggregation of all the country’s homicides measured against the national population. When it comes to the recent upticks in killings, this talking point ignores two important realities.

First, we don’t live in the aggregate. The majority of Americans spend their lives in the communities where they live and, if they commute, where they work. Given how hyperconcentrated serious violent crime is—and, therefore, how widely the homicide rate can vary from one neighborhood to the next—the national homicide rate doesn’t provide most Americans with a sense of the dangers they face. A handful of extremely safe Illinois suburbs may counterbalance Chicago’s contribution to the national murder rate, but that’s little consolation to those who live in the South Side war zones.

Second, the claim that crime isn’t as bad as it was in the 1990s is no longer true for a long list of American cities, many of which have either surpassed or are currently flirting with that decade’s homicide tallies. Philadelphia just shattered its all-time annual homicide record with a full month remaining in 2021, as have Louisville, Ky.; Indianapolis; Columbus, Ohio; Austin, Texas; Tucson, Ariz.; St. Paul, Minn.; Portland, Ore.; Albuquerque, N.M.; and Fayetteville, N.C. Other cities, like Cincinnati; Trenton, N.J.; Memphis, Tenn.; Milwaukee; Kansas City, Mo.; Jacksonville, Fla.; Denver; Cleveland; Jackson, Miss.; Wichita, Kan.; Greensboro, N.C.; Lansing, Mich.; and Colorado Springs, Colo., saw their highest homicide tallies since 1990 last year.

Other cities flirting with their previous records include Shreveport, La.; Baltimore; Minneapolis; Rochester, N.Y.; and Tulsa, Okla. St. Louis didn’t surpass its highest tally in 2020, but owing to population decline it did set a new record homicide rate. Chicago, Seattle and Fort Worth, Texas, would all have to go back 25 years to see homicide tallies comparable to what they’re seeing now.

Shushing skeptics by pointing out that things aren’t as bad in the aggregate as they were 30 years ago invites an obvious question: So what?

Mr. Mangual is a senior fellow and head of research for the Manhattan Institute’s Policing and Public Safety Initiative and author of “Criminal (In)Justice: What the Push for Mass-Decarceration and Depolicing Gets Wrong, and Who It Hurts Most,” forthcoming in July 2022.
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The Predictable Consequences of ‘Defund the Police’
It took a spate of murders for the mayor of Oakland, Calif., to abandon the destructive slogan.
By Jason L. Riley 

After a weekend in which three people were killed in Oakland, Calif., including a 1-year-old hit by a stray bullet while sleeping in the back seat of his mother’s car, Mayor Libby Schaaf finally reversed herself on defunding the police and pledged to hire more cops. But what took her so long?

Murder rose by nearly 30% last year, and Americans have been making it as clear as can be that they want more and better policing. The incoming mayors of Atlanta, New York and Seattle ran campaigns that prioritized public safety. A ballot initiative in Minneapolis that would have dismantled the police department was defeated soundly, and some of the strongest opposition came from low-income black communities. “Black lives need to be valued not just when unjustly taken by the police, but when we are alive and demanding our right to be heard, to breathe, to live in safe neighborhoods and to enjoy the full benefits of our status as American citizens,” explained a civil-rights activist from Minneapolis in a New York Times op-ed.

We are reminded almost weekly of the tragic failure of bail reform and other soft-on-crime initiatives that have frustrated the efforts of police, prosecutors and judges to keep suspects with long criminal records off the streets. The man charged with driving his SUV through a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wis., last month, killing six, had been released five days earlier on $1,000 bail in another violent felony case. The man charged last week in the fatal shooting of a music producer’s 81-year-old wife in her Beverly Hills, Calif., home is a career criminal who was out on parole. The suspect in the stabbing death of a Columbia University graduate student last week is a convicted felon and gang member who has been arrested 11 times since 2012, according to the New York Post.

Carjackings have become so commonplace in Washington that the local ABC affiliate is now offering viewers tips on how to protect themselves. Chicago and California have effectively decriminalized retail theft by raising the threshold for felony shoplifting. The result has been a rise in smash-and-grab robberies and store closures. There were 11 such incidents in and around Los Angeles between Nov. 18 and 28 alone, resulting in nearly $340,000 worth of stolen goods. Although 14 people were arrested, “all of the suspects taken into custody are now out of custody,” Michel Moore, the city’s police chief, told reporters. His hands are tied by a “zero bail” policy for misdemeanors and low-level felonies that is meant to reduce overcrowding in Los Angeles County jails.

Sadly, the streets aren’t the only places that have become more dangerous of late. The progressive war on law enforcement has also affected school safety. Following the death of George Floyd and subsequent nationwide protests, school districts from Minneapolis to Denver and Portland, Ore., moved to reduce or sever ties with police. In New York, where school safety officers are being phased out, 38 weapons were recovered over a three-day period from a high-school campus in Brooklyn earlier this month. The Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s largest after New York, voted in February to pare down the number of school police officers by about 40%. In the aftermath, Larry Sand reports in City Journal, “108 assaults took place between August and October of this year, with 16 students requiring hospitalization. Police sources add that 44 weapons were recovered, including five handguns and 32 knives.”

Teachers who are constantly dealing with disruptive students can’t teach. And students who are worried about getting beat up can’t focus on learning. A disregard for safety exacerbates the racial achievement gap in school just as surely at it hampers upward mobility outside the classroom. If liberals such as Ms. Schaaf have finally realized the foolishness of putting their social-justice activism ahead of basic public safety, bully for them. But it shouldn’t have taken the senseless death of a toddler to change the mayor’s mind.

Thanks to the left’s indulgence of Black Lives Matter activism, cities are having trouble retaining and recruiting cops. Early retirements have increased, and the job has become more dangerous. Attacks on police officers have risen, and the FBI reports that the number of police officers killed in the line of duty between January and September was up by more than 50% over the same period in 2020. By pretending that the police are a bigger threat to society than the criminals, progressive policies are making the country demonstrably less safe than it’s been in decades. Hopefully, more liberals will pay a political price for what they’ve unleashed. Until then, we’ll all be paying.

WSJ Opinion: Rising Crime and the Progressive Drive For Bail Reform
The Waukesha rampage suspect was released from prison on "inappropriately low" bail, which should start a debate about progressive reforms that have had the effect of letting many felons back on the street to commit more crimes. Image: Getty Images/Zuma Press
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C)  An up date on random thoughts about how Biden is resolving the issues that confront him.

This is much easier to understand than the above because Biden has a history of being consistently wrong.  I am only repeating what a former Secretary of State, I believe, had to say.  

When it comes to an assortment of decisions that went astray I will remind you of these and how they were resolved:

1) Stop American energy production because of "Greeness," then ask OPEC to produce more and blame the energy companies for the resulting inflation.

2)  Seek legislation that runs into the trillions of dollars and tell the voters there is no cost.

3)  Criticize everything your predecessor accomplished that was favorable and, where you can get away with it, take credit as if you did it and  get the mass media to concur.

4) Repeat lies and claims often enough so they become accepted facts and again resort to the mass media for help in convincing the public.

5) Focus on social engineering and word play and impose it on the military while bungling the Afghanistan withdrawal.  No punishment for those involved because it was you who made the decision and who disregarded whatever warnings you were given. Then, call it a success and look at your watch while the military victims are brought home in caskets.

6) Ignore the crime taking over America as well as the efforts by radical groups, like BLM, to indoctrinate children believing America is structurally and systematically a racist society. When confronted by the facts blame it on COVID.

7) Allow our borders to be penetrated by hordes of illegal immigrants who are untested for Covid and impose/mandate health restrictions on America's legal citizens requiring that you will not of illegals.

Offload a visit to observe the problem you have allowed to balloon to your Vice President who has also yet to visit the area.

8)  Overseas reap the consequences of poor judgement by reminding  Europeans of their failed responsibilities.

These failed responsibilities were used by you to criticize your predecessor for being too American First,. You accused Trump as too harsh, caused our allies to flinch at the unbridled accusations regarding funding NATO and was racially insensitive and xenophilic.

9)  Campaigned on being better at solving the COVID pandemic and instituted Executive Orders which caused more pain, suffering and higher death rates.

10)  Denies inflation is because of his actions and refers to the economy as producing jobs when his own administration paid people not to work causing wages to escalate.

11)  Seeks infrastructure legislation that shames Johnson's expenditures on " The War on Poverty" by characterizing increased welfare initiatives as "Building Back America." 

12)  Biden obviously has mental deficiencies and displays them at virtually every public appearance. He is deemed a weak leader by our adversaries. He levies penalties that make them laugh, ie. not allowing some political elites to go to the Chinese Olympics, removing sanctions in order to get Iran to come to the negotiating table knowing full well they cannot be trusted while concurrently  moving forward on their nuclear ambitions etc.  

I could enumerate half a dozen other diplomatic initiatives which are contrary to logic and effective policy. 

In summation, there are few, if any, instances of significant importance that an objective person can enumerate that demonstrates Democrats officials are engaged in running 12 important cities in support/furtherance of law and order and a president capable of carrying out his oath of office.
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The Saudis are running out of ammo to defend against the Houthis.
By The Editorial Board 

Bernard Lewis, the late, great scholar of the Middle East, once quipped to us that while it is dangerous to be America’s enemy, it can be fatal to be its friend. We wonder if that’s how the Saudis feel as they plead for America for help as it runs out of ammunition to defend against the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen.

The Journal broke the news this week that the Saudis are short of interceptors against the missile and drone attacks on its territory that are coming from the Houthis. The two have been fighting a war in Yemen for seven years, and in one of its first acts this year the Biden Administration cut off arms to the Saudis for the war in Yemen.

The U.S. intended this as an olive branch to the Houthis to negotiate an end to the war. Instead they’ve escalated, multiplying their cross-border attacks into Saudi territory from Yemen. The Houthis are supplied in large part by Iran, which sees no need to stop when its proxies are winning. The drones and missiles aren’t well targeted and sometimes hit civilian targets if they aren’t intercepted. There are more than 70,000 Americans in the Kingdom who could become victims.


The spectacle here is of an ally pleading for defensive ammunition from the same U.S. that is trying to reassure Ukraine and Taiwan that America will stand by them in conflicts with Russia or China. The Biden Administration is also trying to persuade Iran that it will face serious, unspecified consequences if it keeps pursuing a nuclear bomb. President Biden tried to do the same on Tuesday in a video call with Russian President Vladimir Putin regarding Ukraine. But an ally that won’t supply its friends with more Patriot anti-missile interceptors simply isn’t credible with these determined adversaries.


The Saudis aren’t always attractive friends, and they have fought the Yemen war in often brutal fashion, though less so with the help of U.S. trainers during the Trump years. But in the Saudis’ neighborhood, the military choices can be existential.

In better news, the U.S. Senate voted Tuesday not to block Mr. Biden’s proposal to sell $650 million in weapons to the Saudis. That sale includes 280 air-to-air missiles, but that shouldn’t preclude filling the Saudis’ additional need for more interceptors against Houthi missiles and drones.

The Senate vote was 30-67 against the resolution by Sens. Rand Paul, Mike Lee and Bernie Sanders, who seem to think the world will be a kinder, gentler place if the U.S. abandons its friends in a fight. The truth is that it’s sure to get worse, and in very bloody ways, if the U.S. won’t even supply its friends with the ammunition to defend themselves.
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Deter Russia by Arming NATO Allies
Moscow is challenging Europe’s postwar security system, and not only by threatening Ukraine.
By William Schneider Jr.

This week’s virtual summit between President Biden and Vladimir Putin took place in an environment of diplomatic coercion, with Russian troops massing on the border with Ukraine. So far, the punitive actions at which the White House has hinted are insufficient to deter the Kremlin from further aggression. How did we arrive at a point where the U.S.-led security system, which has protected Europe for more than 70 years, appears to be tottering in the face of Russian saber-rattling?

The post-Cold War expansion of the European security system, built on the foundation established by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, was a welcome and widely anticipated development. The smaller states of Central and Eastern Europe knew from bitter experience that collective security within the trans-Atlantic alliance was the only viable 21st-century alternative to the calamities of the previous century.

As NATO added members, the Cold War pattern of military deployments along what had been the border between East and West Germany didn’t change. During the Cold War, the world’s most powerful military forces were concentrated at the Fulda Gap, the lowland corridor that was the shortest distance between East Germany and the Rhine River and therefore the likeliest location of a Soviet tank invasion of West Germany.

In 1997 NATO indicated it wouldn’t place “substantial combat forces” in the territory of new members. But this expectation was conditioned on Russian respect for the independence and territorial integrity of the 14 other states created by the Soviet Union’s collapse. Mr. Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 abrogated both the multilateral 1994 Budapest Memorandum and the bilateral 1997 Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership between the Russian Federation and Ukraine.

An aggressive and opportunistic Russia is now attempting to exploit NATO’s diminished deterrent capacity. Moscow has intensified its influence and espionage operations and weaponized its energy supply role, particularly against Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine.

The immediate target for Russia’s de facto annexation is Belarus, whose current antagonistic attitude toward NATO is born more of necessity than desire. With human-rights concerns complicating the possibility of better relations with the West, Minsk has turned toward Moscow. For more than two decades, Russia negotiated various measures to establish a “union state” with Belarus. In September 2021, Russia conducted its quadrennial joint Zapad military exercise with Belarus. Accelerating the establishment of a joint military doctrine, the “Union State” was institutionalized in an agreement Nov. 4.

Russia accelerated the establishment of a new military unit in Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave this summer, the 18th Motorized Rifle Division and associated Russian and Belarus air defense units based in Belarus and Kaliningrad. These units would be crucial to breaching the Suwalki Gap in Poland between Lithuania and Belarus, allowing Russian forces to detach the three Baltic states from the rest of NATO.

This approach closely parallels Moscow’s military strategy during both the Cold War and post-Cold War periods. During the Cold War, Soviet forces were positioned to strike at NATO forces through the Fulda Gap by pouring a half a million troops into West Germany reinforced by more than two million reserve forces from the Western Military Districts of the former U.S.S.R.—into Central and Western Europe—to divide NATO in half.

With NATO forces hundreds of miles from the border of the former Soviet Union, Russia has a profound military incentive to upend the post-Cold War status quo and re-establish its military dominance of the region. Its plans are well advanced. Russia’s dominance of Belarus is in its final stages as it escalates pressure on the remaining former Soviet states in Europe that are not part of NATO—Moldova and Ukraine.

NATO’s eight frontline states—from the Baltic to the Black Sea—are now at risk to Russian military power as was Western Europe to Soviet military power in the Cold War. Given these circumstances, what can be done to restore deterrence in Europe?

To begin with, NATO’s forward perimeter needs to adapt to Russian belligerence. The frontline states, especially Poland and the Black Sea littoral states of Romania and Bulgaria, must be protected and will need a modern surveillance and reconnaissance system linked to an integrated command-and-control network.

Additionally, NATO should initiate the Article 4 process in the NATO Treaty to restore deterrence and stabilize the border region. This would establish a consultative process whenever “the territorial integrity, political independence, or security” of any member state is threatened.

Finally, NATO should provide the frontline states with modern military capabilities. This modernization needs to go beyond Poland’s acquisition of F-35 aircraft and M1 Abrams tanks. NATO frontline allies need to be integrated into an effective deterrent.

The future of the postwar security system could be at risk. The U.S. must act urgently to protect the states on the front line and restore deterrence in Europe.

Mr. Schneider is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. He served as an undersecretary of state (1982-86) and chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board (2001-09).
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