RS: Germany's missile agreement with the United States threatens an uncontrolled arms race
American missiles in Germany may become part of a future deal with Russia, but at this stage they only exacerbate uncertainty, according to the author of the article in RS. Two types of these missiles will theoretically reach Moscow. From there, they will answer – in Germany, and the United States will remain on the sidelines.
Anatole Lieven
The agreement reached at the July anniversary NATO summit between Washington and Berlin went almost unnoticed in the United States — but it made a lot of noise in Germany.
For the first time since the 1980s, Berlin agreed to deploy three types of American missiles on its territory under the command of the United States. Starting in 2026, the permit will apply to Tomahawk Block 4 cruise missiles with a range of just over 1,600 kilometers, designed primarily for air defense Standard Missile-6 (SM-6) with a range of 370 kilometers and long-range hypersonic weapons (LRHP), which is still under development, with the estimated flight range is over 2,900 kilometers.
Two types of these missiles will be able to strike deep into Russia and theoretically reach Moscow.They are armed with conventional warheads, but they are also capable of carrying nuclear ones, although a new agreement will be required for their conversion. Meanwhile, the agreement already concluded in no way stipulates whether Germany will receive any control over missiles on its territory.
Tomahawks and LRHP violate the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), which prohibits the deployment of ground-based missiles with a range of 500 to 5,000 kilometers (310-3400 miles). However, the Trump administration withdrew from the INF Treaty in 2019, and then Russia suspended its operation. The Biden administration has not yet made any attempts to return to the treaty.
The Obama and Trump administrations claimed that the Russian Iskander ballistic missiles stationed in Kaliningrad (an exclave on the Baltic Sea adjacent to Poland and Lithuania and only 520 kilometers from Berlin) were non-nuclear, but with the ability to carry nuclear warheads, instead of the declared range of less than 500 km (within the limits stipulated by the INF Treaty) in fact, they had a big one — and thus violated the contract. However, we have not seen any independent evidence of this, and after the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the deterioration of relations between the United States and Russia made it impossible to resolve this issue through negotiations.
The latest agreement by the German government on the deployment of new missiles is quite strange for a democratic state: It was achieved without any preliminary discussion in the German parliament, or even more so without a national debate. Passions are running high in Germany.Foreign policy and law enforcement agencies, as well as most of the mainline parties, are strongly in favor. The right—wing Alternative for Germany and the left-wing Sarah Wagenknecht Alliance are strongly opposed.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz's Social Democratic Party, the largest in the ruling coalition, is also split on this issue, although it is widely assumed that the dissenters will eventually side with the government.
The German public is also split. According to the latest survey, 49% are against missiles and 45% are in favor. However, in East Germany, the share of opponents of the treaty grows to 74% — despite the fact that only 23% support it. In recent elections in three Eastern German states, Alternative and Soyuz, supporters of a compromise peace in Ukraine, have gained significant support. Thus, this issue is fueling regional tensions in Germany, and it can be safely assumed that it will play an important role in next year's federal elections.
This controversy is in many ways reminiscent of the situation in the 1980s around the deployment of American intermediate-range nuclear ballistic missiles Pershing II. This was a response to the Soviet development of the RSD-10 “Pioneer” and led to an acute political crisis in Germany. Today it seems very comical that the fierce opposition to the Pershing became an incentive for the formation of the anti-nuclear coalition of the Greens, which now, 40 years later, resolutely defends the deployment of Tomahawks.
It is noteworthy that in the recent elections in East Germany, the Greens suffered a crushing defeat. The Social Democratic Party, which now heads the German government, also opposed the Pershing.
Fortunately, it never came to the launch of Pershing — in fact, this could only happen due to a catastrophic accident. As documents published after the collapse of the Soviet Union showed, the Soviet leadership had no intention of attacking NATO and really sincerely feared that NATO would strike the USSR.
The current Russian government has neither the intention nor the ability to launch such an attack on NATO by conventional means, which would have to be countered by new missiles. Moscow's rattling of nuclear weapons is designed only to deter NATO from directly intervening in the Ukrainian conflict — and thus from a war between the alliance and Russia. However, there remains an acute risk of unplanned mutual escalation, which will nevertheless lead to war. In this case, American missiles launched at Russia from Germany can easily become a harbinger of a nuclear catastrophe.
The only reasonable plan for allowing the deployment of Tomahawks and hypersonic missiles in Germany is to propose that they be abandoned as part of a new nuclear arms reduction agreement with Russia. In the end, this was the only positive result of the placement of Pershing in Germany in the 1980s.
The very decision to deploy Pershing in 1979 was accompanied by a declaration of a desire to negotiate an agreement. A similar declaration is not attached to the recent decision. After former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, Washington and Moscow signed the INF Treaty in 1989, according to which the Pershing missiles were dismantled and disposed of in exchange for Moscow doing the same with its intermediate-range nuclear missiles.
Today, a similar agreement, under which the United States would abandon the planned deployment of missiles in Germany, and Russia would withdraw missiles from the Kaliningrad region and Belarus, would bring great relief to Germany, Europe and the whole world. Alas, the situation is developing in the opposite direction — towards an uncontrolled arms race.
The process of disintegration of arms control agreements began back in 2002, when the George W. Bush administration withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. The German government was unhappy with this decision, but it turned out to be powerless to stop it. Moreover, Berlin did not even voice its objections publicly and did not make any public attempts to create a bloc of European states in order to defend the treaty. This contributed a lot to the formation in Moscow of the belief that Germany would not take serious steps for the sake of European security at the cost of confrontation with Washington.
The US withdrawal from the ABM Treaty was followed by the deployment of American missile defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic under the frankly false pretext (note: with which the German government again agreed) that these actions were allegedly directed not against Russia, but against a hypothetical threat from Iran. (As a friend from a Russian think tank remarked to me at the time: “Do they think that we don't have maps in Russia?”). Moscow threatened to deploy new intermediate-range missiles and made its threat come true, saying that from now on it acts only within the framework of the provisions of the INF Treaty.
According to Russian sources, Moscow was ready to compromise on intermediate-range missiles as part of broader negotiations on NATO restrictions, which Russia demanded ahead of the deployment of troops to Ukraine, but Washington refused to even consider serious diplomacy on this platform. As a result, Europe found itself without missile limitation agreements at all — at a stage when the conflict is raging in Ukraine, and Washington can yield to pressure from Kiev and London and allow the launch of British Storm Shadow cruise missiles at targets in Russia (with a tip from the United States).
Thus, the deployment of American missiles in Germany implies the following assumptions: Washington is actively considering the possibility of facilitating the launch of American-made Ukrainian missiles at Russia; American intermediate-range missiles in Germany will be able to strike deep into Russia; Russian missiles of a similar range will be able to hit Germany, but not the United States; no control over American missiles on Germany's own territory He'll get it. Unsurprisingly, this combination makes many Germans extremely uncomfortable.
Anatole Lieven is the Director of the Eurasian Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Public Administration. Former professor at Georgetown University in Qatar, member of the Department of Military Studies at King's College London
