"Czech, Poland, Slovakia, Romania, Hungary, the Baltics…, East Europe that lies on the line between the North Sea and the Black Sea — these are the places that always see the worst of trans-European war. This is such a significant and well defined trend in history that there is a name for the place: The Intermarum.

A few years ago Czech, Hungary and Poland broke with European defense policy (a worthless concept unless an American general or President is doing the talking) and formed their own for-real military alliance called the Visegard Group. While European NATO members argue about who is going to pay for what during a projected training exercise the East Europeans are sending their tiny military forces out to the training range on their own. So the Intermarum has now organized itself into a tiny military alliance that isn’t about building bigger and nicer offices for itself in Belgium every year on American tax money. Compared to the last seven decades of abject military complacency and external domination this is quite a break from the status quo.

When France or Germany invades Russia or Russia invades anywhere in Europe, they march through Poland and Czech and have to deploy mountain troops to Slovakia, Czech and Hungary and at least fight a blocking action in Romania. These countries have no direct input on the reasons France or Germany and Russia might be at war, but they are the battlegrounds where the blood is actually spilt and fighting is heaviest. This is, of course, devastating since the combined might of two modern armies always clashes right there in Eastern Europe. The speedbumps always see the worst wear.

[..] East Europe was pulverized in 1938 and remained a impact zone (literally — as in bullets, shells and bombs impacting it) for seven more years until 1945, at which point the Russian reaction to German invasion was a counter-invasion of Germany, which meant invading back across East Europe on its way to Germany. East Europe got screwed. Twice. The place was completely devastated and much of it actually flattened.

After all that East Europe didn’t get straightened out for 60 more years because the Soviets needed East Europe as a buffer zone against the American military in Europe. They didn’t have any need to improve the area, of course, they just needed to hold it for use as a surrogate battlefield in the event of WWIII, because battlegrounds are horrible places and they would much prefer the horrors occur there than in Russia itself.

Considering how geography forces those historical realities on the Intermarum countries it is easy to see why the Euroskeptic, anti-collectivist, pro-American Constitutionalism part of Europe happens to be East Europe. [..]

There really isn’t any separation between politics, economics and war from a geopolitical perspective and the East Europeans are worried that the American system, which has enabled the European system to exist for the last two generations, is on its way toward a type of dysfunction which will require the Americans to withdraw their concrete forms of attention from European affairs due to lack of resources and/or political bandwidth. We would withhold our attention and resources the same way the vascular system withholds blood from the extremities when threatened or ill.

An American decline, the definite separation of French and German interest from the made-up concept of “the European interest” and the resurgence of Russia is alarming to the Czechs and especially the Poles for reasons that people not familiar with history, geopolitics and the logistics of war do not understand."