I’ve been reading this article and I think it misses the point in several ways.

First of all, INF treaty is completely obsolete today: you don’t need ground based intermediary-ranged rockets to threaten targets in Europe. The Russians demonstrated how they can easily do it from the Caspian lake ships, they can do it with the Baltic fleet as well as the flying platforms. So threat level doesn’t necessarily increase with the same weapons mounted on stationary ground launchers.

Second, the weapons themselves don’t define the threat level. The political situation does. So essentially the American program of demonizing, threatening and encircling Russia is what’s increasing the threat level.

Third, and most important, this doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with Europe, it might all be about arming Taiwan with rockets that can reach mainland China with nukes. This way America can create a scenario where it can wipe out China while not using its own ICBMs and risking retaliation in kind. Of course, it would be really crazy to expect China not to retaliate against the actual culprit, but everything America does lately is just that kind of crazy. They piss on people and don’t even have the decency to say it’s raining.

Fourth, if it comes to the point where Europe is threatened by the intermediary nuclear-tipped rockets, it means it’s global nuclear war, and Europe is fucked however you look at it, so again this doesn’t increase the threat level.

Fifth, the intermediary-ranged nukes were never about threatening Europe, they were about shortening the reaction times in a first-strike scenario against Russia. Europe was never a target, it was a missile launching platform pointed at Moscow. So if you want to kill Russia in such a way that it can’t retaliate, you first surround it with anti-missile defenses, so that you can shoot down anything they retaliate with, and then you bring in the short reaction time weapons, such as the nuclear-tipped stealthy cruise missiles which aim at the Russian command posts and nuclear sites. That’s what the Americans seem to be doing, which means they are confident they can take out Russian submarines as well. It is my opinion that they, as always, missed several crucial things that will bite them, but they themselves always act as if nothing can go wrong. They are practically cornering the market of baseless overconfidence at the moment. Almost everything they do is more harmful to them than it is to the intended target, and yet they do it, again and again.