Biden pledges to beef up US military presence in Europe

US President Joe Biden opened his three-day visit to a NATO summit on Tuesday by pledging to beef up the American military presence in Europe as he denounced Russia’s Vladimir Putin for trying to “wipe out” Ukrainian culture in the ongoing war in eastern Europe.

Biden, in talks with Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, detailed plans to increase the number of Navy destroyers based in Rota, Spain, from four to six. Biden said the move was one of multiple announcements that he and NATO allies would make to help bolster the alliance in the region during the summit.

Biden arrived in Spain for the NATO summit amid an intense barrage of Russian fire across Ukraine— including a horrific missile attack on a shopping mall in Kyiv on Monday— and growing weariness over the grinding war that is battering the global economy.

“Sometimes I think Putin’s objective is just to literally change the entire culture— wipe out the culture of Ukraine (with) the kinds of actions he’s taking,” Biden said after meeting with Sanchez.

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said the Rota move “will help increase the United States and NATO’s maritime presence”. He said that Biden would announce additional moves on Wednesday.

Biden is looking to use this week’s NATO summit to shore up allies amid signs of fractures in the western alliance. After heaping an avalanche of sanctions on the Russian economy and funnelling billions of dollars of weaponry into the Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression, NATO partners are showing signs of strain as the cost of energy and other essential goods has skyrocketed.

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As the US president departed for the NATO meeting from German Alps, where he first met this week with leaders of the Group of Seven, French President Emmanuel Macron said that the prices are putting European economies in “untenable” situation. Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who addressed the G-7 on Monday, has openly worried that the West has become fatigued by the cost of the war.

To be certain, the US has already been building up its presence since shortly before the Ukraine war, adding about 20,000 troops to the 80,000 who were previously in Europe. And the US has signalled that the Russia-Ukraine war will have reverberations on its and NATO allies’ defence posture for years to come.

The US and Spain, in a joint statement following the Biden-Sanchez meeting, said the war “fundamentally altered the global strategic environment” and that the “aggression constitutes the most direct threat to transatlantic security and global stability since the end of the Cold War.”

Sullivan suggested that other moves Biden is set to announce will involve positioning “additional forces on the eastern flank” of NATO “in a steady state”. He declined to say if some US forces that serve in NATO’s eastern flank on a rotational basis would become permanent.

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