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This is bad, and since many of you are asking me what I think, I'll tell you. Lots of blame to go around, but once again, the Trump administration figured out the worst way to do something that needed a response. /1
The Obama administration knew this was going on, and because it was occupied elsewhere - *cough* Iran deal *cough* - it kicked this can down the road, probably on the assumption that Hillary Clinton would be president and could pick up the issue and deal with it. Mistake. /2
The Russians have been playing cute with this issue, because they're not really trying to renuclearize Europe; they'd prefer for us to stay in INF while they make conduct weapons tests that are really meant to intimidate the Europeans and put distance between the US and NATO. /3
Nothing Russia is doing changes the strategic balance. Putin was, and is, testing out his ability to engage in some quiet nuclear blackmail.And Trump just helped him out with this dumb move because NATO doesn't want to re-nuclearize Europe (because they're not crazy). /4
Instead of just dumping the treaty, the U.S. and NATO should have gotten completely on the same page about a common Russia policy, including *conventional* reinforcement of NATO, hard push-back in Ukraine, a reaffirmation of Article V, a public case about Russian cheating. /5
Instead, we're getting out so that we can get into an arms race with both Russia and China, which is something the "let's plan out limited nuclear war" guys have been lusting for since the end of the Cold War. This is classic military-industrial complex stuff at work here. /6
Worst yet, Trump's guys want to cover the theater-range nuclear capability with nukes on submarines - as though the enemy will double-check to make sure a submarine missile launch falls under "theater" rather than "strategic" attack. This flunks Nuke Strategy 101 in every way. /7
In short, we're dumping INF because of crazy stuff *we* want to do, including in Asia, rather than anything the Russians are doing. We could have mounted a better, integrated, US-led NATO response, but we didn't want to, so now we've given Putin a gift, again. /8
