Today Ukraine, Tomorrow Estonia?

Carnegie’s Judy Dempsey says the West could lose on three different fronts against Vladimir Putin’s Russia:

First, there is a conflict over the sovereignty of Ukraine, which has been compromised by Russian military support for rebels in the east of the country and by the Kremlin’s annexation of Crimea.

Second, Russia and the West are engaged in a communications war that the EU is unlikely to win unless there is a sea change in confronting Russian President Vladimir Putin’s well-oiled machinery of propaganda.

And third, the security of the Baltic states is at stake. There, EU and NATO leaders are still unprepared to deal with any trouble that Russia could engineer.

Mostly, the West just doesn’t have the will to put up much real resistance. Do you honestly think the political machine which planted the War on Women meme during a GOP primary debate a year before the election doesn’t have the means to deal with Putin’s crude media antics? Or that the NATO air forces couldn’t wipe out any armored column they were told to? Or that we couldn’t simply buy out Russia, with an economy smaller than Brazil’s and just as fragile?

Yes here we are, just 25 years after the Soviet Union called it quits and allowed the Warsaw Pact to dissolve, that NATO risks being blown apart by Russian adventurism.

Just a few years ago it was impossible to imagine such a thing.