NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL A RESET: Pentagon begins research on missile banned by arms treaty with Russia: report.

“The idea here is we need to send a message to the Russians that they will pay a military price for violation of this treaty,” one U.S. official told the newspaper. “We are posturing ourselves to live in a post-INF world … if that is the world the Russians want.”

The 1987 INF Treaty was a landmark deal between the U.S. and then-Soviet Union that banned ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers.

The United States has repeatedly accused Russia of violating the treaty, including by deploying a nuclear-tipped cruise missile.

The goal of the United States’s recent research is not to end the treaty, but rather to show Russia what type of U.S. arsenal it could be facing if the pact were to end, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Good.

The Pershing II missile scared the crap out of the Soviets, and its deployment in Europe — over strong protests (financed in part by Moscow) from the Left — helped set the stage the INF Treaty and for victory in the Cold War.

If the Russians want to copy from the Soviet playbook, well, we can copy from Reagan’s.