Given his governing style, it is perfectly possible that US President Donald Trump was indifferent to the Russian reaction when he announced the suspension of America’s participation in the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. Had Moscow insisted that it remained committed to this key step in the ending of the Cold War, Trump would doubtless have mocked them and repeated widely-supported claims that the Russians have been cheating on treaty terms for at least a decade. Washington served notice six months ago that it believed Moscow was in breach of the INF. The Europeans in NATO also claimed that the Russians had actually moved some of these banned missiles close to its western borders.

Even though Trump doesn’t do “subtle”, there might have been a plan for the White House to announce that it would return and abide by the terms of the treaty, which bans the use of short and medium-range missiles, if Moscow could demonstrate it was not welching on the deal. In the event, however, Vladimir Putin sidestepped what might have been such awkward questions by very quickly following Trump’s lead and also suspending Russia’s INF participation.

Now both countries are back in the short and medium-range missile business with ranges of between 500 and 5,500km. It must be assumed that even if the Americans abided by the ban on the weapons themselves, they continued high-level research into both the warheads and the rocketry that would deliver them. This is all the more likely since the INF has probably actually outlived its usefulness. This is because in 1987, China was a mere blip on the nuclear horizon. More than 32 years on, Beijing has developed a full range of nuclear missiles, including the very two types that Russia and the United States agreed to abandon. Russia is currently friendly to China. Thus it can deploy any short and intermediate-range nuclear missiles to its western and southern flanks, where they could operate as an old Cold War-style deterrent to outside attack.

The question strategic analysts are now asking is how much has changed since the end of the 40-year nuclear confrontation between Washington and Moscow. The Soviet Union collapsed in part because its dysfunctional economy could simply not afford the expense of staying in the nuclear arms race and matching the United States dollar for dollar, missile for missile and warhead for warhead. Is Putin’s Russia, with its substantially increased income from oil and gas sales, now in a position to outspend America? It is probably not simply a matter of having the funds. It is the domestic economic impact that the huge new expenditures involve.

The United States finally recovered from disasters of the 1930s Great Depression thanks to its involvement in the Second World War. What the post-war President Dwight Eisenhower characterized as “the military-industrial complex” has assumed a dominant economic role, vacuuming up trillions of dollars of taxpayers’ money. But these earnings are recycled efficiently back into the economy through workers’ salaries, payments to sub-contractors and state and federal taxes. War has created benign US economic activity.

However, can Russia’s still disorganized and stretched economy which angers more and more citizens now cope with a challenge which its Soviet predecessor ultimately flunked by putting guns before butter?