Euromissiles: Act II

You said "brain death"?

“Ladies and gentlemen, President Putin!” With this embarrassing slip, President Biden, intending to introduce Zelensky, opened the NATO 75th anniversary summit in Washington. Thus, his frail health became the central topic of what was supposed to be the grand strategic meeting of the West against the Russian-Chinese alliance. Better yet: two hours later in Doral, Florida, his rival Trump had this to say about the Alliance in front of his laughing supporters: “I had no idea what NATO was before I was elected. But it didn’t take me long to figure out they weren’t paying. We were paying! We were almost entirely paying for NATO and that’s not fair!”

With such leadership, it’s hardly surprising that the summit failed to clarify the West’s strategy on Ukraine. Despite Zelensky’s insistence, the door to the Alliance remains closed to him, even though Kyiv’s march towards NATO is now deemed “irreversible.” The ambitious multi-year military aid program worth more than $108 billion proposed by Secretary General Stoltenberg was rejected by the allies, who preferred to commit to an aid package three times smaller for one year. As for the bilateral defense agreements signed with Ukraine (including by France), none of them foresee sending forces on the ground in case of aggression. The dilemma remains the same: how to prevent Ukraine’s defeat while Western aid cannot continue indefinitely, the reconquest of territories occupied by the Russians is out of reach, but the ever-increasing Western involvement (use of Western missiles to strike Russian territory daily, upcoming arrival of F-16s) increases the risk of escalation?

In this context, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan took advantage of the summit to announce the deployment of new medium-range missiles in Germany, presented as “a defensive capability, like all those we have deployed over the past decades.” Indeed: here come the Euromissiles again! And a major crisis that marked the end of the Cold War years between 1979 and 1987. To respond to the deployment of nuclear ground-to-ground missiles capable of reaching all of Western Europe—the infamous SS-20—one remembers that the allies responded in 1979 with the plan to deploy Tomahawk cruise missiles and Pershing II ballistic missiles... leading hundreds of thousands of Germans to the streets chanting “better red than dead.” This lasted for four years...

It wasn’t until the arrival of Gorbachev that the 1987 INF agreement was reached, which led to the elimination of all American and Soviet missiles with ranges of 500 to 5000 km from the European continent. Except that Russia has since deployed SSC-8 missiles considered to violate the agreement, prompting Trump to end it in 2019... Since then, the Tomahawks have been modernized and are back, along with, according to the Pentagon, brand new Typhoon launchers, new SM-6 ground-to-ground missiles, to be complemented from 2026 by a new generation of medium-range hypersonic missiles... The matter is obviously very poorly received in Moscow, which announces a “thoughtful, effective and coordinated” response, but also within the SPD and the German left, who again fear seeing Germany turned into a “battlefield.”

In 1987, Gorbachev and Reagan managed to resolve the Euromissile crisis by preparing for the end of the Cold War. In 2024, Act II of the Euromissile war adds to the outright war...

Pierre Lellouche

Column VA, 14/7/24