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Ismaele's avatar

Regarding Trump unilaterally removing the Outlaw US Empire from NATO, I would like to remind everyone that one year ago the Congress approved a bill barring any president to do that without approval from the Senate or an Act of Congress: https://thehill.com/homenews/4360407-congress-approves-bill-barring-president-withdrawing-nato/

Regarding NATO's rollback to its 1997 condition/deployment, Article 4 of the Russian proposal is not asking for a "de iure" rollback (i.e. countries that became NATO members giving up their membership), but "de facto" is asking for exactly that (i.e. giving up their NATO infrastructure and deployments).

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Humwawa's avatar

Thanks Karl, for brining up this topic.

I have wondered about how a peace deal for Ukraine would tie in with a revival of arms control talks, which are, after all, in the interest of both sides.

Putin's declaration that the Oreshnik will go into production appears to contradict Lavrov's claim that Russia keeps to its unilateral moratorium on intermediate range missiles. A US intermediate range launcher may have been brought into Denmark for maneuvers earlier this year, but claiming that Nato has began deploying intermediate range missiles is stretching it a bit. The decision to deploy Tomahawks, SM-6 and/or Dark Eagle (IF operational) by 2026 isn't final in my view. A lot of things can happen until then.

Putin has talked about a Eurasian Security Architecture, but that's probably even harder to achieve than a revival of the European Security Architecture, and without the US, it probably wouldn't make much sense.

Anyways, I don't see Trump getting into the nitty-gritty of arms talks, which since the 1980s have become infinitely more complicated, with the cancellation of the ABM, INF and OpenSkies Treaties and the appearance of new types of weapons such as low-yield nukes, hypersonic missiles, AI and the like.

The 1997 Russia-Nato Founding Act is a bit vague on what can and cannot be done in the new members. There is talk about not stationing US nukes, but to apply this to the land-based Aegis ABMs in Rumania and Poland is subject to interpretation.

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