President Joe Biden has a lot to brag about as he returns from the NATO summit in Vilnius
The Pentagon announcement of the 3,000 troop reserve call-up follows a pledge by NATO allies to have a total of 300,000 soldiers ready for rapid deployment within 30 days. This, rather than the squabble over the timing of Ukrainian NATO membership should have been the headline out of the summit in Lithuania. This is the first time in decades that the 31 nations belonging to NATO have made a similar commitment involving force readiness across the entire membership. The commitment by all member states of NATO to a Europe-wide ready reaction force is what accounts for the use of the term war footing to describe what is going on not only in Europe but here at home.
The one thing the D.C. pundits did get right about the NATO summit this week is the complete unity of the alliance. It isn’t unprecedented, but it is at least very unusual for 31 sovereign nations to come to an agreement over a three-day period about anything as extraordinary as the commitment to make their military forces ready to deploy on a moment’s notice within 30 days of the summit. Not only will this commitment cost NATO states a lot of money, it will probably necessitate at least some of them calling up their military reserves, much as President Biden did on Thursday. NATO states have already spent serious amounts of money sending arms and other military equipment to Ukraine, and the alliance doubled down on that commitment this week.
Also on Thursday, the U.S. House of Representatives shot down two looney tunes proposed amendments to the Defense bill from arch-conservative Republicans: One was a proposal by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia that the U.S. pull out of NATO completely.