With the corpse of INF Treaty with Russia barely cold, the Pentagon is now publicly admitting that they will soon begin construction of a missile that it has been researching since 2017 that falls outside of the treaty’s limits.

This seems to indicate that Washington used the unproved accusations against Russia that it was violating the treaty as well as complaints about China (which was never a party to the treaty) as pretexts to abrogate it in order to pursue its own desire to create weapons outside of the treaty’s parameters.

On March 11th The Hill reported:

The Pentagon will start work on making parts for ground-launched cruise missile systems that would fall within the limits of a treaty President Trump suspended compliance with last month, a spokeswoman said Monday.

The Pentagon “will commence fabrication activities on components to support developmental testing of these systems – activities that until February 2 would have been inconsistent with our obligations under the treaty,” Lt. Col. Michelle Baldanza said in a statement.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Neocons and members of the national security state have been trashing agreements that they see as preventing them from doing whatever they want since the Bush II administration with its unilateral abrogation of the ABM Treaty. Hyper-neocon John Bolton was no doubt influential in this decision.

But a public admission like this with its implications seems pretty brazen, especially this soon.

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Democratic presidential hopeful Tulsi Gabbard spoke to a standing room only crowd last Saturday morning at USF. Her speech followed by a short Q&A is below. The part of the speech covering foreign policy, including the new Cold War and arms race, starts at approximately 13 minutes in. Watch and decide what you think of Tulsi’s comments.

If you’d like Tulsi Gabbard to be able to bring a substantive discussion of foreign policy to the Democratic Party debates in June, make a small donation to her campaign so she can meet the 65,000 donors threshold.