Does the West want to start arms race in Europe?

About a month ago, NATO tested first-strike capabilities of using mobile radar in Turkey. Why would a defensive system need to test offensive capabilities? We have the cyber warfare center. You said it also can be used as an offensive tool by the US. We have hypersonic missile tests and the Prompt Global Strike system. I think these are pretty good reasons for the Russian Federation to be worried, to put it mildly, as to the intentions of the West. Why would the West want to start an arms race in Europe? Why would this be profitable? Why not include Russia as part of the sectoral approach system? It’s probably a rhetorical question but can you touch upon it?

There is no rational answer to it, certainly not a persuasive from the point of view of the West. For example, as you mentioned, Russia is far from simply arbitrarily and firmly opposing the creation of a unilateral US interceptor missile system in Europe.  The entire western flank of Russia is affected by this of course– from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. Russia went out of its way. Russian political leadership went out of its way to be accommodating to offer, for example, the Gabala radar site in Azerbaijan it maintains in conjunction with NATO. It offered this sectoral approach where Russia would cover part of affected area and NATO the other and so forth, the integration and communication. But we know that several things have occurred this week, and so far this month – the advanced hypersonic weapon test earlier this month, the statement by Sergei Serdyukov, the Defense Minister of Russia the day before Medvedev’s statement, stating that Russian Air Defense is now to be equipped to protect Russian nuclear strategic capability in the European part of the Russian Federation, but also that the US announced – and was soon followed by 14 NATO allies – that they are effectively pulling out of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, blaming Russia for it, of course, for it, because Russia suspended its activities with the CFE, as it’s known, in 2007 – but did so because the US and its NATO allies refused to ratify amendments to the treaty. The US has used the presence of a comparatively small contingent of Russian peace-keepers in Transdnester and, before Mikhail Saakashvili launched an assault against South Ossetia and began the 5-day war with Russia in August of 2008, the existence at that time of, again, a small contingent of Russian peace keepers in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, using that as an excuse for basically suspending, for not ratifying, amendments to the CFE Treaty. And we have, as you know, President Medvedev’s statement on Wednesday, the fact that Russia may be compelled to suspend its activities in or withdraw from the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START). This is a very momentous week in terms of security in Russia and the fear of not only a new arms race, a new missiles race but something perhaps even more ominous than that. What we are looking at is a brinksmanship, lawlessness – I don’t know what other words to use to describe it – very bold and threatening actions by the US and its NATO partners to move missiles up to Russia’s borders, in the case of Poland, which joins Kaliningrad, and perhaps Aegis-class warship equipped with Standard Missile-3 interceptors in the Baltic Sea off the coast of Russia and, of course, the 24 Standard Missile-3 land based missiles that are going to be placed in Romania, directly across the Black Sea from Russia. I believe that President Medvedev mentioned precisely that – on our borders and in waters bordering Russia and so forth. What we are seeing is an almost calculated provocation, as I would characterize it. That’s the best interpretation. The worst is that the US and NATO are building up the military capability of neutralizing Russia’s strategic deterrent capability in the west and the south of the country. And I suspect that, having a military budget of some $730 billion, which is constant dollars, World War II level the highest since 1945, I’m reminded of the old expression that the abuse of power inevitably results in the power to abuse. As long as the US has built itself into, in Obama’s terms, “the world’s sole military superpower,” it feels it’s going to operate with impunity.

Would you say it’s time for the world to be very concerned here?

It’s way past time to be very concerned. I don’t know if it occurred at this year’s General Assembly Session at the UN but I know that, in preceding years, Russia and China jointly went to the General Assembly and introduced resolutions, talking about yet another threat, which is the militarization of space by the US. This is the ultimate part of the so-called global missile shield. So there will be a space component to this in addition to land, air and sea-based interceptor missiles and components. So the world has sounded alarm, at least major nations have. But I would like to see both the Security Council and the General Assembly convene on emergency session, to be honest about it, to demand that this rampant militarization of world stop. Two years ago, The Financial Times talked about $123 billion arms package for Saudi Arabia and three of its Persian Gulf allies with the US. The Saudi component of that is estimated at $60-67 billion, which is a single largest bilateral military deal in human history. We’ve seen incomparable deals with countries like Canada, Australia, Japan. You don’t build up this kind of military capability, unless, at the very least, you are going to use it to blackmail somebody. We recall that on Wednesday president Medvedev statements were very tempered. He was mentioning certain contingency plans that would only be put into operation if the US didn’t eventually heed the plea by Russia to notify it of its missile deployment plans and not pose a threat, or a potential threat, to Russian strategic interests and so forth. This wasn’t a threat. This was rather stating that Russia would be compelled to introduce certain defensive measures if the US and NATO continued to turn a deaf ear to Russia’s offers of cooperation but also to the expression of its concern. One major Russian official – that may have been Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, I’m not sure – says the US claims to be defending its own territory by building up a missile defense system but that missile defense system is encroaching on Russian borders.