Russian President Vladimir Putin has announced that the country will pull back from the New START treaty with the United States. The treaty reduces and limits each country’s nuclear weapons. In response to the announcement, Florida Rep. Cory Mills (R) recently discussed the threat that China and Russia pose regarding nuclear weapons on the Fox Business channel.
During his annual address to Russia, President Putin made the announcement, saying "in this regard, I am forced to announce today that Russia is suspending its participation in the strategic offensive arms treaty."
The announcement has sent shockwaves, inciting discussions about the threat Russia poses, and in an exclusive interview with The Floridian, Rep. Mills shared his thoughts on the development.
“This is why President Trump got us out of the INF treaty (Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty). We realized it’s a failed strategy. We realized that a lot of our adversaries are still continuing to have nuclear buildup. We realized that China, as an example, is probably at the highest rate of military buildup that the world has ever seen. The only thing that would be close or reminiscent would be the United States around World War II," Mills expressed, adding that the United States is "being outpaced economically, we’re being outpaced militarily whether that be by individual nations like Russia.
Mills further explained that the announcement is important "because they’re essentially saying that they’re going to continue doing nuclear buildup, but at the same time, even if we were to sign this, they would likely have done that anyway."
"We have, as an example, two deepwater dry docks that we can build our cargo ships and our carriers and things like that. China’s outpaced us. They now have fifty, so we’re falling behind so much from an economic, from a resource perspective, from a military-industrial buildup, from just the whole gambit," he warned, commenting that countries in NATO need to step up to apply pressure to Russia and that the responsibility should not fall on the United States.
Speaking of NATO, Mills said that the intergovernmental military alliance needed to step up and do what it had agreed to do.
"They need to pay their 2%. They need to realize that the reason why NATO was created in 1949 was to ensure peace in Europe after World War II and that was to stop aggressors, which was the Soviet Union at the time, and it’s really at their doorstep moreso than it is ours, so America shouldn’t be shouldering the brunt of this. This should really be something that Germany… Poland and all the NATO Based countries there in Europe should be stepping up to try and help," added Mills.
