Trump Announces the US Is Leaving a Treaty Russia Is Violating and You Can Guess What Happened
Posted at 1:06 pm on October 21, 2018 by streiff Back in 1987, when the Cold War was in full bloom, President Ronald Reagan and General Secretary of the Soviet communist party, Mikhail Gorbachev, negotiated a treaty that essentially banned intermediate range nuclear (INF) forces. Like so many treaties the Soviet Union entered into, they were able to lock in a parity that they were about to lose. The United States was deploying a new series of nuclear capable weapons, specifically the Pershing II and the Ground Launched Cruise Missile (GLCM) that threatened to make all of the Warsaw Pact and most of the Western USSR vulnerable to strikes by nuclear weapons without necessarily triggering an exchange of ICBMs. The resulting treaty eliminated all nuclear weapons with a range between 500 and 5500 kilometers.
Once the Soviet Union imploded, for reasons that have never been clear to me, the United States substituted Russia for the USSR and continued to be bound by the treaty. This, in my view, was just one of the silly decisions made by G. H. W. Bush who didn’t want to give the impression that the US was actually happy to see the Soviet Union melt down. Suffice it to say, the treaty has not served our purposes since about 1989. China, which is not a signatory, is developing intermediate range nuclear weapons and the Russians have been busily engaged in violating the treaty. In 2014, the situation deteriorated to the point where the Obama administration, ever supine to all Russian provocations, declared that the Russians were in violation. In 2017, Secretary of Defense James Mattis told NATO leaders that the US had identified two operational Russian units equipped with a banned weapon and that if NATO couldn’t agree to a unified position, then the US would go it alone.
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https://www.redstate.com/streiff/2018/10/21/trump-announces-us-leaving-treaty-russia-violating-can-guess-happened/
