"We are going to terminate the agreement and then we are going to develop the weapons" unless Russia and China agree to a new deal, Trump said on Saturday. Although Trump claims that Russia has violated the deal, he provided no evidence of that claim during his Saturday announcement.
Trump made the announcement following a campaign stop in Elko, Nevada, just one day after the Guardian reported that National Security Adviser John Bolton was pushing the president to leave the treaty.
Russia has repeatedly said it will keep strictly observing the INF treaty as long as the US does. However, Russian President Vladimir Putin stated in October 2017 that any withdrawal from Washington would see an "immediate and mirror-like" response from Moscow.
Meanwhile the White House administration, which is pursuing a quite aggressive nuclear arsenal modernization strategy, has already authorized plans to develop a medium-range missile outlined in the Trump administration's Nuclear Posture Review. Speaking on Saturday, the President said the US will "have to develop those weapons," also drawing Beijing into the nuclear brawl.
"Unless Russia comes to us and China comes to us and they all come to us and they say, 'Let's all of us get smart and let's none of us develop those weapons,'" Trump said, "but if Russia's doing it and if China's doing it and we're adhering to the agreement, that's unacceptable. So we have a tremendous amount of money to play with our military."
While the Kremlin has yet to offer an official reaction to Trump's bold move, Russian lawmakers and a Foreign Ministry source condemned the US intention to jeopardize global security and draw Russia into a new arms race.
"This decision is in line with the US course to quit international agreements, which... make the concept of its own 'exclusivity' vulnerable," a source in the Foreign Ministry told Sputnik, explaining that Moscow is not surprised by the White House decision to scrap the nuclear deal. "The main motive is the dream of a unipolar world. Will that come true? No."
Russian lawmakers, meanwhile, stressed that Trump aims to drag the US into a new arms race with Russia. "It is obvious that the United States has no evidence proving Russia's violations of the treaty's provisions," a member of the Russian parliament's upper house's defense committee, Frants Klintsevich, told Sputnik. The United States "wants to drag us, like the Soviet Union, into an arms race. It will not succeed."
"The US is returning the world to the Cold War," Senator Aleksey Pushkov wrote on Twitter. "Russia will not allow nuclear superiority over itself. Only this can prevent possible nuclear aggression."
Over the course of my eighty-four years, some years in the Army, some first hand experience related to the Jewish operation from the earlier days to the present, deep understanding of the blind Jewish psychopathic determination and intention to cheat lie murder and annihilate any one and anything in their way. The Palestinians have been slaughtered and utterly dispossessed, and now the Jews and the "paid" Jewish supporters have a plan to finish them off entirely. My sense and reasoning tells me that it is all or nothing for the Palestinians now. We have seen Middle East migrant flows succeed; we can see it succeeding in Latin America; The Palestinian cause is the mightiest justified cause since the Exodus; time has demonstrated that no one is prepared to give them back their Palestine, where does that leave us?; there is only one possible answer, The Palestinians MUST return in large numbers and TAKE IT BACK. YES SOME WILL DIE, BUT THEY ARE DYING ANYWAY, AND NOT GETTING ANYTHING BACK FOR THEIR MARTYRS, WHAT PRAY, IS THE DIFFERENCE? Further, I would give my life for their cause, if called upon. The Palestinians have the "right", they must be the ones to go back and demand its restitution. Amen.