Western powers are “not returning to the Cold War” despite renewed military threats from Russia, a top NATO diplomat emphasized one day after Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed to have developed an “invincible” nuclear weapons system.
“We are trying to be judicious about deterring and defending at this moment in history, but not returning to the Cold War,” NATO Deputy Secretary General Rose Gottemoeller said during a town hall in Greece. “I think it’s very important to focus on the differences with the Cold War.”
Gottemoeller noted that the U.S. military presence in Europe has plunged from 400,000 troops at the height of the Cold War to its current maximum of 62,000.
“Deterrence and defense is really important and we must have strong capabilities in that regard,” she said. “We need to continue a strong dialogue in order to have the ability to enhance predictability, to enhance mutual confidence over time, and to deal with incidents. Heaven forbid, we don’t want an accident or an incident — for example flying over the black sea or in the Baltic Sea — we don’t want that to turn into a crisis.”
Putin rattled Western observers with a confrontational address to the Russian legislature, in which he claimed victory in a contest for nuclear superiority over American missile defenses. He argued that the new missiles were made necessary by the U.S. withdrawal from a treaty that limited the number of ballistic missile defense systems.
“Under this treaty, the parties had the right to deploy ballistic missile defense systems only in one of its regions,” Putin said during the speech. “The limited number of ballistic missile defense systems made the potential aggressor vulnerable to a response strike.”
The Trump administration has already said it would make sure its military capabilities remain ahead of Russia, but has not indicated any other steps to ramp up confrontation with Russia.
“U.S. defense capabilities are and will remain second to none,” State Department spokeswomen Heather Nauert told reporters during Thursday’s briefing. “We’re moving forward to modernize our nuclear arsenal and ensure that our capabilities remain unmatched.”
U.S. policymakers have made various efforts to expand missile defenses in Europe in the last decade, citing the threat of attack from Iran. More recently, North Korea has tested a ballistic missile capable of striking the United States, part of a nuclear weapons threat that prompted the Trump administration to expand defenses in South Korea and the Western U.S.
But she also emphasized that Russia’s military aggression has raised the stakes in Eastern Europe.
“NATO faces the most serious challenges to our collective defense in a generation,” she said. “We are working hard to ensure deterrence and defense, because of those actions in 2014 when Russia seized Crimea and began to destabilize the Donbass [in eastern Ukraine].”
