The White House
confirmed in a press release Wednesday that the US Army's Multi-Domain Task Force in Germany is planning to deploy long-range offensive missiles in the Central European country as little as a year-and-a-half from now.
"Exercising these advanced capabilities will demonstrate the United States' commitment to NATO and its contributions to European integrated deterrence," the release stated.
Moscow has already vowed to respond.
"The nature of our reaction will be determined in a calm, professional manner. The military have already begun working on the issue. We will, of course, analyze which specific systems will be discussed...We will determine a military response to this new threat," Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov
told reporters Thursday.
"I think it's an unfortunate development," Michael Maloof, a former senior security policy analyst at the Office of the Secretary of Defense, told Sputnik. "Number one, it's truly escalatory."
"I would imagine the Europeans themselves would be extraordinarily uncomfortable with this because it puts them directly in the bullseye in response from Russia," Maloof explained.
With this step, NATO has demonstrated conclusively that it's no longer the 'defensive alliance' it touts itself to be, according to the observer.
"NATO has clearly now become an offensive alliance. I think this is worrying more and more people, and it makes it a much more dangerous world," the observer added, recalling that the US decision in 2019 to walk out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia, which made Wednesday's announcement on the missile deployments in Germany possible, "makes things even more dangerous," potentially turning a hot war with Moscow into a self-fulfilling inevitability.
The former Pentagon analyst doesn’t rule out that the Biden administration’s escalatory behavior may constitute a “death rattle of the West against the East,” and a “last-ditch effort to try and bolster and show ‘strength’ at a time when they’re failing" amid the continuing process of the formation of a multipolar world order.
Maloof expects Russia to respond to NATO's latest provocation by moving its hypersonic missile systems closer to Europe, positioning them to "knock out" the "launch pads" of any offensive US systems in the event of an escalation.
