Alleged INF Treaty Violation: U.S. Demands NATO Action on Russian Missiles

By Matthias Gebauer, Christoph Schult and Klaus Wiegrefe, spiegel.de; see also.

image from article

The U.S. believes Russia is secretly developing nuclear-capable, medium-range missiles in violation of the INF Treaty. Washington has now upped the pressure on NATO to formulate a response - and a new arms race could be the result.

Excerpt:

For some time, Washington has believed that Russia is in violation of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF Treaty), which bans medium-range nuclear missiles. With the help of satellite imagery, the U.S. believes it is able for the first time to prove that Moscow has developed a new ground-launched, nuclear-capable cruise missile known as the SSC-8. ...

The American Enterprise Institute, a neoconservative think tank, has already demanded that the U.S. government intensify its "public diplomacy." It is important to highlight "Russian exercises, threats and violations of the INF Treat, [sic]" the institute argues, in order to "generate the political and public support" necessary to support rearmament with cruise missiles.

But why would allies trust the erratic Trump with nuclear weapons in Europe? Even fellow Republican Tom Corker fears the U.S. president could start a third world war. ...

The Russians and the Americans are in the process of undermining the disarmament successes of the 1980s, Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel said this week at a foreign policy event in Berlin. He warned against a "Cold War 2.0". "We could be facing the immediate danger of another, perhaps even nuclear, arms race," he said.

Other allies, particularly the Baltic States, do not share these concerns. Russia's sabotage of the INF Treaty is regarded as a "serious challenged posed by the Russian Federation to security on the European continent," said Karoblis, the Lithuanian defense minister. It is a challenge, he says, "which NATO will have to address through diplomatic and military measures."

And with that, the Russian president would seem to have achieved one of his most important goals: dividing NATO.