Timothy Wright & Douglas Barrie
The rhetoric was as predictable as the analogy was inaccurate. Russian President Vladimir Putin was quick to draw a comparison between Berlin and Washington’s July 2024 agreement to deploy US conventionally armed surface-to-surface missiles with 500 kilometre-plus ranges to Germany to NATO’s 1979 decision to deploy nuclear-armed ballistic and cruise missiles on the continent. Echoing the language of the Soviet leadership of the early 1980s, Putin warned on 28 July that the United States’ deployment would place key Russian military installations at increased risk of attack and reduce the flight and detection time in which Moscow could respond. Russia, he said, would respond in kind if the US went ahead with the deployment.
The scheduled deployment follows Russia’s development and deployment of a long-range ground-launched cruise missile (GLCM), in violation of its arms-control commitments, and its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Russia’s threatened response has raised concerns among sections of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrat Party (SPD). Some have criticised the deployment agreement as being destabilising, insufficiently scrutinised and decoupled from the SPD’s deep-seated commitment to disarmament. However, other SPD policymakers, including Scholz and Defence Minister Boris Pistorius, have rejected such thinking, citing Russia’s continued war of aggression against Ukraine and stressing the need for Germany and NATO to close capability gaps. More broadly, so long as Moscow continues to link arms-control discussions to its war against Ukraine, it is unlikely that any arms-control overtures will yield positive results. Instead, improvements in NATO’s long-range conventional capabilities may deter further aggressive actions by Russia in a way that ultimately benefits regional stability.
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