As the saying goes, “the more things change, the more they stay the same”, and it’s obvious that the US is trying to repeat its “Star Wars” strategy from the Old Cold War against Russia in the New Cold War in order to get it to spend itself into oblivion like the Soviet Union did, but this time it won’t succeed.
The Trump Administration’s withdrawal from the INF Treaty caused many observers to predict a New Arms Race, with some worrying that Russia might not be able to keep up and could instead go the way that its Soviet predecessor did by ultimately disintegrating as a result of the centrifugal forces that this might unleash at home.
Trump even said in his State of the Union speech a few days after the US’ withdrawal from the INF Treaty that “we will outspend and out-innovate all others by far”, following remarks about how the “United States is developing a state-of-the-art missile defense system”. Taken together with his much-touted “Space Force”, it’s clear to see that 45th President is following in the footsteps of the 40th one by rehashing the “Star Wars” script to combine the New Arms Race with a New Space Race, all of which is part of the US’ unipolar desire to maintain its military supremacy across the globe. There is a way to avoid all of this, Trump made it seem, by suggesting that “Perhaps we can negotiate a different agreement, adding China and others.”
That proposal is sound in principle but impossible in practice because it’s extremely unlikely that China or any other country will voluntarily agree to decommission an entire class of missiles that in all probability form the bulk of their arsenals, seeing as how most states have a national security need to deploy assets with a range of between 500-5500 kilometers like those explicitly banned by the INF. Without these missiles, rival pairs of countries such as Israel and Iran, Saudi Arabia and Iran, Pakistan and India, India and China, and China and Japan wouldn’t be able to maintain any credible deterrence against one another, therefore making this idea unrealistic.
Trump (or whoever contributed to writing his speech) is obviously aware of this but probably only said what he did for the purpose of portraying the US as a “peacemaking nation” (insincerely) “extending an olive branch” to the international community. From the looks of it, the US made its mind up long ago to commence an interconnected arms and space race to accompany the ongoing New Cold War, but instead of being interpreted as initiated from a position of strength, it was actually undertaken from a position of relative weakness, or at the very least, not from the US’ previously domineering military position. This is due entirely to Russia’s hypersonic missile technology that Putin unveiled to the world last March.
Accepting that Russia’s intelligence services are among the best in the world, Moscow probably realized what Washington was up to long before the US made its moves public, which would explain why Russia secretly spent years perfecting its now-public hypersonic missile program.
These warhead-delivery vehicles are capable of avoiding all missile defense shields and therefore rendering them strategically obsolete, which Russia wanted to do not for any aggressive purposes like the Western Mainstream Media pretends that it has in mind, but for defensive ones inspired entirely by Moscow’s intent to restore strategic parity with the US after Washington upset the erstwhile balance between the two former superpowers in the early 2000s by unilaterally pulling out of the AMB Treaty.
At the time, the Bush Administration wanted to neutralize Russia’s nuclear second-strike deterrent in order to place it in a position of nuclear blackmail so that the US can eventually force its only nuclear rival into eternal submission.
Russia’s response to this threat was to invest heavily in hypersonic missile technology, which the US is reacting to by upping the stakes and all but declaring a new arms race in space, hoping that this will prompt the usually cool-headed Putin to panic and spend his country into bankruptcy. That won’t happen, however, since Russia’s hypersonic missiles give the country the opportunity to massively reinvest funds from the military-industrial complex into the newly unveiled “Great Society” program of nationwide socio-economic development.
Putin’s ultimate legacy to his people will be to make Russia one of the most comprehensively competitive countries in the world by the end of his fourth and final term in office in 2024, to which his administration is focusing on 12 interconnected spheres of national development that altogether aim to achieve this ambitious task.
Russia’s nuclear second-strike capabilities are second to none, but its socio-economic indicators are trailing behind its peers, hence the urgency with which Putin is prioritizing the “Great Society” and why Trump hopes that he’ll be distracted with “Star Wars 2.0” so that he fails in his historic mission. That’s not going to happen though, but there’s no telling whether the US’ other rivals might bite the bait instead.
DISCLAIMER: The author writes for this publication in a private capacity which is unrepresentative of anyone or any organization except for his own personal views. Nothing written by the author should ever be conflated with the editorial views or official positions of any other media outlet or institution.
