William Perry Is Wrong.

Former US Defense Secretary William Perry, understandably, is upset with INF Treaty being officially dead. And reacting  to its death he noted:

The U.S. withdrawal from the INF Treaty today deals a great blow to nuclear arms control and global security, we are sleepwalking into a new arms race.

It is an honorable position, but Perry is wrong--we are NOT sleepwalking into a new arms race, we are already in it and the United States finds itself in a very unusual position--it needs to catch up with Russia, and, to a degree, China. I will omit here, not for once articulated rationales' behind the US withdrawal from INF Treaty, but US needs to "close the gap" as fast as it can. The American move was predicted long time ago and it is to develop a newer iteration of a good ol' Pershing (aka Euromissile) and load as many whatever will be deemed needed (Tomahawks most likely) into the Aegis-ashore installations in Europe, among few other things, measures that is.

The Pentagon announced that the US intends to develop conventional ground-based missiles previously banned under the INF arms control treaty, on the very day it expired following Washington’s unilateral exit."Now that we have withdrawn, the Department of Defense will fully pursue the development of these ground-launched conventional missiles,” a Pentagon spokesman said in an emailed statement on Friday.

Pay attention to this "conventional" qualifier. Sure. Conventional it is, wink-wink. Of course, DJT thinks that he may convince, by killing arms control treaties, China to join the party--wrong thinking. In general, I begin to suspect that Trump and his "team" are secret admirers of Pushkin who wrote to Vyazemski that "long ago the main slogan for every Russian person is the worse the better." Wait a minute... Could it be that Bolton is an admirer of Pushkin? Or maybe even...Russia. That should raise the suspicion among Washington D.C. commissars and American Chekists--could it be that in destroying arms control regime DJT, Bolton and others are acting in accordance to...Russian slogan. In fact, they are acting as...Russians who love this the "worse the better" principle! 

Indeed:

WTF is going on?

So, Russiagate, after all, could have been based on real facts of Russian meddling into American democracy by forcing Russian agents DJT (Colonel Trampov), John Bolton (Major Ivan Boltov) and others to implement the evil Russian concept of making shit so bad, that it may become really good, after all. Especially for military contractors. Damn you, Pushkin... Oh, wait. This whole thing needs to be thought over (this weekend)--there are so many signs that Russians as early as 1824, through Pushkin and, later, Dostoevsky, implanted this devastating idea that "worse is better" into American mind and in doing so convinced the United States to become non-agreement capable, ungovernable and utterly bankrupt, including running itself into the ground by trying to win an arms race in which there is only one competitor--the United States which races against itself in whatever little time is left for it to pretend itself scary. This is the situation which needs not Pushkin, though, but likely Gogol or Kafka to describe a full surrealism of contemporary American thinking, which is, indeed, the worse it becomes, the better it is seen for what it is.