Berlin: The United States should consider sending thousands more US troops, along with NATO forces, to Eastern Europe to match the strength Russian President Vladimir Putin is amassing in the region, Republican presidential hopeful Jeb Bush said today.
Capping the two-day German leg of a European trip aimed at bolstering the former Florida governor's foreign policy credentials, Bush said Putin is "a bully" who can only be contained by a show of robust force.
"I'm not talking about being bellicose, but saying, here are the consequences of your actions," Bush told reporters before departing his Berlin hotel for a meeting with the German foreign minister.
"And that would deter the kind of bad outcome that we don't want to see."
Bush said in a speech to a prominent European economic conference in Berlin yesterday that US President Barack Obama's administration had rightly has sent American forces to train along the border of Poland and the Baltic nations, which border Russia.
The deployment, on a rotating basis, is a response to Russian-backed separatists who have taken over a large segment of Ukraine, a former Soviet republic.
Troops from several nations, including the US, Canada and others, are part of the temporary force, which also includes hundreds of armored personnel carriers and tanks.
But leaders in Estonia, which Bush will visit on Friday, along with fellow Baltic nations Lithuania and Latvia, have asked the US to send more and more permanent US forces to the region.
Bush said the US and the NATO military alliance ought to consider matching Russian forces, performing exercises on the opposite side of the border.
The US needs "to be consistently clear" that NATO rules requiring the defense of fellow treaty nations be strictly upheld. He credited Obama with reiterating that point at the recently Group of Seven conference in Germany.
"They're deploying tens of thousands of people in the region, I mean, literally next door to our allies and our response is far less meaningful," Bush told reporters, referring to Russian moves in the region.
"From the outside, without having any kind of classified information, it appears we could have a more robust presence."
When asked if he would support basing US troops permanently along the Russian border, Bush said, "I don't know."
"I'm here to listen and learn and get a better sense of all this. I don't come to offer five-point plans," he said. Bush also stopped short of calling for a US naval presence in the area, though Great Britain has recently deployed a warship to the region.
