Perspective v. Salient: Function is the Key When it Comes to Missile Defense
By Dylan Matthews
Reading Michael Cowett’s attack on the Obama administration for scaling back its missile defense plans in the Czech Republic and Poland, one would think that the Czechs and Poles had somehow been terribly wronged. “Obama’s missile defense plans severely undermine the security of our Eastern European allies,” Cowett wrote, “whose governments have long been planning on this American aid that will now come in diminished form at best.”
If this is the case, someone seems to have forgotten to tell Prague and Warsaw. “Canceling the radar by no means jeopardizes the security of the Czech Republic as the country is safely entrenched in NATO,” Czech Foreign Minister Jan Kohout told the Wall Street Journal when the decision was announced in September. His Polish counterpart, Radoslaw Sikorski, also expressed his comfort with the decision. This reaction makes sense given the opinions of the ministers’ constituents. The Czech public’s opposition to the shield hovered around eighty percent for years before Obama’s decision. The margins in Poland were closer, but still showed at least a plurality opposing the shield. One doubts that The Salient knows what’s good for the Czechs and Poles better than the Czechs and Poles themselves.
It’s worth considering as well from what these Bush-era shields were meant to defend Eastern Europe. As former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice explained it, the shields were meant to defend against long-range missiles from North Korea and Iran. There are so many things wrong with the logic that motivated the shields that is hard to know where to start criticism. For one thing, neither North Korea nor Iran currently possess any missiles with the ability to hit Poland or the Czech Republic. North Korea’s Taepodong-2 missiles could theoretically carry a load 9,000 kilometers, enough to hit either Prague or Warsaw, but the Taepodong-2 has never been successfully tested and disintegrated after 40 seconds on its single launch attempt. While information is sketchy, even the most alarming estimates suggest that Iran’s medium-range ballistic missiles have a maximum range of 2,500 kilometers, not enough to reach either Poland or the Czech Republic.
Even if Iran were to develop successfully a medium-range missile with the capability to hit Poland or the Czech Republic, the Bush-proposed shields would be useless. As James Lindsay of the Council on Foreign Relations explained, the shields only defend against long-range missiles–though even there they are untested–and are useless against medium and short-range ones. If Iran really wanted to obliterate Polish or Czech cities, it could just use shorter-range missiles, against which the Bush defense shield would be useless. This raises the most obvious objection to this rationale for the shield. Why would Iran or North Korea ever want to attack Poland or the Czech Republic? Perhaps Kim Jong-Il harbors some little-known hatred of the Poles, but this seems like a stretch.
To his credit, Cowett admits the real reason the Bush administration was interested in the missile shield: to defend against Russia, the only country in the region to have both a substantial missile arsenal and a less than warm relationship with Poland and the Czech Republic. Of course, it’s still hard to see why the shield is useful in defending against this vague Russian threat. After all, the US military’s ground-based missile defense system is completely unproven and has a decidedly spotty track record even under the completely unrealistic, easier-than-real-life drills the military has conducted to date. The efficacy of the missile systems is further called into question when one considers that if Russia were to launch loaded missiles, it would surely be smart enough to launch warhead-less dummy missiles alongside them. As the Nobel Laureate in physics Steven Weinberg has explained, these dummies would be nearly impossible to tell from loaded missiles, and unless the missile defense system were able to down every single dummy and real missile, the defense would fail.
So if missile defense is such a complete failure, why do conservatives like Cowett insist that Obama preserve it? For Cowett, the issue appears to be less whether such a system would actually increase the security of Americans, Poles, or Czechs, and more the degree to which it irritates the Russians. According to Cowett, Obama is repeating a “praise-thy-foes-and-punish-thy-friends strategy” that Jimmy Carter apparently originated – a curious claim to make about a president who secured peace for our ally Israel with its largest neighbor. In any case, Cowett argues that however sensible giving up the missile defense system may be, to do so unfairly rewards a “foe,” namely Russia, at the (debatable) expense of our “friends” Poland and the Czech Republic, and without any gain to the United States.
First of all, Cowett is simply wrong when he writes that dismantling the missile defense system did not yield any Russian concessions. Soon after Obama’s announcement that the shield would be canceled, the Russians announced that they planned to support new UN Security Council sanctions against Iran and to increase inspection of nuclear exports. The New York Times reported that this action was quid pro quo for the shield cancellation. Given how much more helpful combating the Iranian nuclear program and internationally transported nuclear material is to the security of America and its allies than a useless missile defense system, this seems like an eminently sensible trade.
More importantly, however, this dated Manichean “friend or foe” worldview is completely detached from America’s real security concerns. Some of Cowett’s narrative is simply false. The Carter administration did not, as Cowett writes, support the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. It supported ousting the brutal dictator Anastasio Somoza, to be sure, but it had a decidedly icy relationship with the Sandinistas and certainly did not support them.
More to the point, international politics is not a spoils system. One should not send “friends” useless weapons systems just to thank them for being good buddies, or needlessly antagonize important nations, like Russia, because of a Cold War-era notion that they are our “foe” and should not be “appeased.” Scrapping the multi-billion dollar failure that was the Polish/Czech missile defense system resulted in a concrete increase in American security, through Russia’s UN action, and saved taxpayer money.