As tensions mount on Ukraine’s borders, it’s time to understand what led to the INF Treaty’s demise

The escalating hostilities between the Russian Federation and Ukraine have forced many analysts to reconsider the future of the European security environment. Europe’s threat landscape has changed dramatically in the last decade. Arms control has crumbled, while an increasingly aggressive Russia has developed sizeable territorial ambitions and a prodigious appetite for risk.

These developments have resurrected nightmares of nuclear warfighting long considered a relic of the Cold War. Among the most daunting developments in any future effort to rebuild the shattered regional security environment is the demise of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which prohibited a class of weapons considered to be highly destabilizing. Now shorn of all but the most basic arms control treaties, the continent is dotted with an unprecedented array of precision missiles while confrontation looms in the east.