What with all the air being sucked up by the Rise and Fall of Donald Trump, we have been distracted from the Cat and Mouse game between Russia and the United State in Europe. Trump's current hope, seemingly supporting Russian President Putin, is that NATO wraps itself up and goes home. There are many facets to the cat and mouse game: Ukraine, Crimea and sanctions against Russia; Russian maneuvers in the Baltics, Sweden, etc.; Polish hysteria and Baltic angst about Russia that have brought an increase of U.S. troops and promises of more.

Paul Pillar at LobeLog points out the opaque nature of these troop deployments. "Understanding and justifying the strategy are all the more important in that there are costs.... Some of those costs involve relations with Russia. The Russians have a strong case in complaining that such a deployment violates understandings reached with them as the Cold War was ending....The understandings were further codified a few years later in a joint statement by NATO and Russia. The U.S. administration seems to be dancing around the issue of permanent deployments in Eastern Europe by using what technically are temporary rotations of troops." 

No surpise that the Russians are being equally opaque. The Northern route for ME migrants last summer was through Norway on bicycles. More recently it has been through Finalnd in rattle-trap cars abandoned on the the border when the migrants claim asylum. The shift from Norway to Finland and its recent decline in Finland has spooked the Finns and the EU:  "The intrigue flows from a growing suspicion in the West that Russia is stoking and exploiting Europe’s migrant crisis to extract concessions, or perhaps crack the European unity over economic sanctions imposed against Moscow for its actions in Ukraine. Only one of the European Union’s 28 member states needs to break ranks for a regime of credit and other restrictions to collapse."  New York Times

Who is the cat? Who is the mouse? Who is Tom? Who is Jerry?