Putin isn't stupid! He has every reason to maintain the status quo with the US and Europe, since Russia is getting rich with oil prices and his party is running the whole show right down to the ground.

Now he's upsetting the whole apple cart of treaties, and ratcheting up nuclear rhetoric with a dangerously unstable lame duck President in the US.

Why?

Putin isn't stupid!

He follows the ABM tests just as carefully as anyone else who takes a little interest in the subject, and it doesn't take much interest or intelligence to notice that they just don't work. The latest failure is described in a link in the diary.

 So it doesn't make sense to believe that the ABM's in Poland are generating so much static. The other option is the AESA X-band radar in the Czech Republic, with it's vastly enhanced ability to jam Russian installations.

Radar jamming has been progressing rapidly for the last twenty years, even in trivial applications like jamming police radar for dedicated traffic speeders, and that's what Putin means when he talks about the technological equivalent of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Putin isn't stupid! Arbatov isn't stupid! Neither one of those guys has any conceivable reason to rattle the nerves of the generals who control the Russian nuclear arsenal, not to mention lower level commanders who have more operational control than their counterparts in the US.

(I only posted on European Tribune out of admiration for Jerome, and the rest of it is just a sad joke.)