After ripping up of INF treaty
Pentagon escalating buildup on Russia’s borders
By
Bill Van Auken
9 March 2019
The Pentagon’s top military commander in Europe told the Senate Armed Services Committee Tuesday that more US troops and more warships must be deployed to the continent to counter what he described as Moscow’s “malign influence” and Russian threats to “the United States’ vital national interests.”
The testimony by Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, the head of EUROCOM and NATO’s supreme allied commander, came just one day after Russia formally withdrew from the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), following the Trump administration’s unilateral abrogation of the landmark nuclear accord last month.
The scrapping of the treaty heralds a resurgence of a nuclear arms race on a scale not seen since the height of the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union, threatening humanity with a global conflagration.
Scaparrotti laid out the Pentagon’s agenda of an escalation of the confrontation with Russia, presenting the country as a dangerous aggressor that must be stopped militarily.
“Russia is a long-term, strategic competitor that wants to advance its own objectives at the expense of US prosperity and security and that sees the United States and the NATO Alliance as the principal threat to its geopolitical ambitions,” he told the Senate panel. “In pursuit of its objectives, Moscow seeks to assert its influence over nations along its periphery, undermine NATO solidarity, and fracture the rules-based international order.”
The general’s narrative turned reality on its head. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States and NATO, in violation of an agreement reached between Washington and the Moscow Stalinist…