Welcome to Cold War II. Vladimir Putin, also known as the man whom Donald Trump trusts more than his own intelligence services, has ratcheted up the threat of new high-tech missiles, promising new weapons that are faster and more evasive than anything now in service. And now that both the U.S. and Russia have cast off the three-decades-old agreement on the deployment of intermediate-range nuclear weapons, Russia is free to menace Europe with its new low-flying hypersonic missiles that are much more difficult to block with any existing, or contemplated, defense system.
To counter the Russian deployment, the United States would need to find places for its next generation of missiles, yet to be constructed, somewhere in Europe. Except there are two problems. First, as the New York Times reported, Mike Pence was just sent home from Europe with a big “No, thank you” to any suggestion that Donald Trump’s America knows anything about its defense. In fact, Trump’s approach to Europe has been so off-putting that it’s gone beyond just threatening the integrity of alliances that have held since World War II. Trump has actually managed to encourage such staunchly Western governments as Germany to “flirt” with Russia. With polls showing that Germans now trust Vladimir Putin more than they doTrump, the danger isn’t just that Trump will wreck NATO; it’s that he’ll flip it.
The second problem is what Putin says he will do if the U.S. does try to deploy new missiles to someone willing to take them. As Bloomberg reports, Putin states that he’ll target the host countries and aim additional nukes at the United States, saying, “Russia will be forced to produce and deploy weapons that can be used not only against the territories from which we face this direct threat but also those where the decision is made to use these missiles.”
One of the primary reasons that the intermediate-range treaty was created in the first place was because these were felt to be among the classes of weapons most likely to be used. They can strike beyond the range of most conventional forces and be used to target those forces at their bases in preparation for a military advance. After decades in which both the number of nuclear weapons and the threat of their use have decreased, both now seem to be on the rise.
The threat to U.S. targets from these new weapons is likely the least worrisome aspect. Missiles with the range to target locations in the U.S., especially the kind of “command and control” locations that Putin threatened in his speech, are more likely to be ballistic in nature rather than the new generation of super-quick cruise weapons. But Russia might be able to target more such weapons toward the U.S. by replacing older weapons targeted at Europe with the newer missiles.
And it’s not hard to see why Europe might regard the bigger threat to be not Putin’s maneuvering on the border, but the statements coming from Trump and Pence. Europe has seen Trump walk away from the Paris Agreement, crumple the INF nuclear agreement, and break U.S. commitments by leaving the Iraq nuclear treaty without cause. Putin is a villain, but they understand his motives. Trump … is unreliable. And that’s worse, as Times columnist Roger Cohen notes.
Pence went on the attack. He inflicted on the audience an extraordinary exercise in obsequiousness, arrogance and mawkishness: obsequiousness toward President Trump, whose name seemed to appear in every other sentence as some God-given fount of wisdom; arrogance toward the Europeans who were admonished, as vassals, to tear up the multilateral Iran nuclear deal, which is enshrined through a United Nations resolution in international law; and mawkishness over a visit to Auschwitz last week that was used to convey a message to Europeans that if they did not obey American orders on Iran they are de facto anti-Semites.
To say that Pence made the Europeans angry doesn’t hit the mark. He made them disgusted. His remarks were such that it doesn’t seem unreasonable that a few countries might allow missiles on their soil after all—just not from the United States.