Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks during a ceremony to present the highest state awards at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia February 2, 2022. Sputnik/Sergey Karpuhin/Pool via REUTERS ATTENTION EDITORS - THIS IMAGE WAS PROVIDED BY A THIRD PARTY.

February 22, 2022

Putin has changed the world — and the US must adapt or lose

Frederick W. Kagan
Originally published in The Hill

Vladimir Putin has fundamentally altered the world as we have known it since the end of the Cold War.

The post-Cold War order was built on the absence of a meaningful Russian conventional military threat. U.S. military posture, NATO military spending and deployments, war plans, and national security strategies have assumed away the risk of large-scale conventional conflict in Europe for three decades.

The many thousands of Russian tanks around and moving into Ukraine today have crushed that assumption under their treads. The U.S. and NATO must rethink their national security strategies, defense budgets and deployments from the ground up and for the long term. 

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