They are very destabilising to MAD, which is exactly why Reagan kicked off star wars.
But the reality is technology advances, and the treaty’s have to keep pace with that. No ones really worried about it for a while, because no one currently anticipates a meaningful risk of conflict.
They will manage it through the usual military diplomacy.
We should deal in facts, and the obvious fact is that the deployment has been leaked to the press by intelligence in order to exert pressure on Trump regarding Russia.
Selective leak, one sided article, cue outrage. It’s very cynical and transparent.
Eh… Russia is a different animal about these things. The world nearly ended for no reason back in the 80’s because Reagan underestimated/misunderstood that aspect of the Russian psyche.
They see ABM systems as a direct threat to their existence and always have. They’re extremely paranoid about being attacked without warning, and not without good reason. They also tend to not trust treaties about these things, again not without good reason.
That is one not unreasonable version of events. Another is that it’s not cynical and the IC actually is worried about an arms race. There are a lot of different ways these things can happen.
True, but reconstruction of Europe following WWII had heavy American influence for a reason. I’d rather pay more than out “fair” share of NATO costs, whatever that means, than send another 435,000 American troops to their death because we felt some countries weren’t being fair.
Eh, you can argue this, but only if you accept our premise that the Europeans faced an existential threat from the USSR, and our carrying the defense burden freed them up to prosper. Many Europeans certainly did not see it that way, though many did. Even if that view was accurate, we gained a whole lot by having a stable, prosperous Europe. The social democracies they formed after WWII proved pretty impervious to the more insidious forms of Communist subversion; it was hard to sell a society of Ladas to people driving Mercedes.
Even accepting it’s a subsidy of the welfare system, ca. 1% of GDP is hardly going to make or break them, considering total government spending is between 40% and 60% most places in Europe. It’s not peanuts, for sure, but it’s not much of a subsidy of other government spending either. And it’s not like the US wouldn’t be spending a lot of this money anyway - it has lots of strategic objectives (not to mention parochial pork objectives) that have nothing to do with NATO.
The U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the United States has observed what appeared to be Russian special operations forces and drones at Sidi Barrani, about 60 miles (100 km) from the Egypt-Libya border.
Egyptian security sources offered more detail, describing a 22-member Russian special forces unit, but declined to discuss its mission. They added that Russia also used another Egyptian base farther east in Marsa Matrouh in early February.
[…]
Russia’s Izvestia newspaper said in October that Moscow was in talks to open or lease an airbase in Egypt. Egypt’s state-owned Al Ahram newspaper, however, quoted the presidential spokesman as saying Egypt would not allow foreign bases.
The Egyptian sources said there was no official agreement on the Russian use of Egyptian bases. There were, however, intensive consultations over the situation in Libya.
Egypt is worried about chaos spreading from its western neighbor and it has hosted a flurry of diplomatic meetings between leaders of the east and west in recent months.
