“Nobody really expects a military conflict,” you claim in your article about America, NATO, and Eastern Europe (“Disquiet on the Eastern Front,” November 28, 2009). Yet, a couple of paragraphs earlier you mention “a recent big Russian military exercise, which officials say culminated in a dummy nuclear attack on Poland.” If nobody in the region really expects a military conflict with Russia, they surely expect its continuing threats. Eastern Europeans are therefore ill at ease with Barack Obama’s appeasement of their eastern neighbor. Western Europeans are quite insensitive to all this, for they have little direct experience of Russia’s threatening behavior in what it perceives as its own sphere of influence. Given Obama’s proclivities, the rift between the two Europes is likely to keep widening. And Russia is likely to keep exploiting it as best they can. Russians can tell a sitting duck when they see one.